The friendship of art - 1904 Author:Bliss Carman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " To be even an outskirter in art leaves a fine stamp on a man's countenance." I had forgotten the quotation, if I ever knew it, until a friend recalled it recen... more »tly in a letter. But it expresses well the position of so many, does it not? And that single word contains a power of suggestion. To be an outskirter. That is itself the very embodiment of the artistic aspiration and temper. For the artist, I dare fancy, is never desirous of being wholly absorbed; he dreads being committed past recall to any creed or course; he dwells at the static centre of opposing forces, and sails leisurely in the eddies of the storm; his supreme fear is the loss of his independence and his power of detachment. Show me a man who cannot make up his mind, and I will introduce you to a friend of mine who has the first rudiments of the artist about him. Like many sayings, this is not wholly true; for if a man really cannot ever make up his mind after deliberation, if he can make no choice between better and worse in aesthetic matters; if he has no taste to guide him, no instinct for beauty; if he remains for ever undecided, he is no artist at all. Such an unfortunate is only fitted to be a critic, or a professor, or a politician, or something of that sort; he can never hope to be a poet, or a carpenter, or a doer of things. I mean that one must have the habit of detachment, with the power of selection. To keep your mind already made up is to be dull and fossiliferous; not to be able to make it up at all is to be watery and supine. These are the two types, each worse than the other. From the former came bigotry, bastinado, and all manner of bumptious cruelty and hate that can make this paradisal earth a Gehenna;from the latter came the sloven, the sentimentalist, and the tramp, that forceless contingent ...« less