.. Not an ambitious note, but still he sings!"
And my friend proceeded heartlessly: "'Skimpole' would have made a
perfect Villager!"
It is hard to answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm
poetry. Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the
languages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need an interpreter and
the post is not a sinecure.
I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on these Villagers whom I
love and whom I know to be as alien to the average metropolitan
consciousness and perception as though they were aboriginal
representatives of interior and unexplored China. They are perhaps
chiefly strange because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity.
The artistic instinct, or impulse, is not particularly rare. Many
persons have a real love for beautiful things, even a real aptitude
for designing or reproducing them. The creative instinct is something
vastly different. Creative artists,--great painters or sculptors,
great illustrators, and wizards in pencil and pen and charcoal
effects,--must be both born and made; and there are, the gods know,
few enough of them, all told! Until comparatively recent times,
everyone gifted with the blessing of an artistic sense turned it into
a curse by trying to paint, draw or model, while the world yawned,
laughed, turned away in disgust; and the real artists flung up their
hands to heaven and cried: "What next?"
But lately,--in many places, but preeminently in Greenwich
Village,--these folk who love art, but can't achieve great art
expression, have evolved a new sort of art life.
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