=The Ideal.=--This is the reason that a still-life painting is as interesting to a painter as a subject which to another finds its great interest in the telling of a story. To the painter the story, or the objects which tell it, are of minor importance. That the picture is beautiful in color is what moves him. As composition and color the thing is an admirable piece of æsthetic thinking and æsthetic expression, and so gives him a purely æsthetic delight; and the technical process is secondary with him, interesting only because he is a technician. The representation of the objects incidental to the subject is as incidental to his interest, as it is to the picture considered as an æsthetic thought.
This is what the layman finds it so impossible to take into his mental consciousness. And it is probable that many painters do not so distinguish their artistic point of view from their human point of view. But consciously or unconsciously the painter does think in these terms of color, line, and mass when he is working out his picture; and whether he admits it to himself or not, these characteristics are the great influencing facts in his judgment of pictures, as well as in the growth and permanency of his own fame. That is why a great popular reputation dies so rapidly in many instances. The æsthetic qualities of the man's work are the only ones which can insure a permanent reputation for that work; for the art of painting is fundamentally æsthetic, and nothing external to that can give it an artistic value. Without that its popularity and fame are only matters of accidental coincidence with popular taste.
If a painter is really great in the power of conception and of expression of any of the great æsthetic elements, his work will be permanently great. It will be acknowledged to be so by the consensus of the world's opinion in the long run; nothing else can make it so, and nothing but obliteration can prevent it.
I am explicit in stating these ideas, not because I expect that you will learn from this book to be a great master of the æsthetic, but because I am assured that you can never be a painter unless you understand a painter's true problems. You must be able to know a good picture in order to make a good picture, and however little you try for, your work will be the better for having a painter's way of looking at a painter's work. The technical problems are the control of the materials of expression. The painter must have that control. The student's business is to attain that control, and then he has the means to convey his ideas. But those ideas, if he be a true painter, are not ideas of history or of fiction, but ideas of line and mass and color, and of their combinations.