Workers of the two classes are one in waiting for definite outside impulses before they take up their brush, whatever differences there may be in their depth and in the manner they treat their subjects. But in my case, the subject I wished to treat was not so clearly defined. I roused my senses to the highest pitch of wakefulness; but I looked in vain for a shape, colour, shade, and lines thick and thin, in the objects without me, to suit my fancy. My feelings had not come from without; but even if they had, I could not raise my finger and point at their cause as such distinctly, as they formed no definite object of perception. All that there were, were only feelings, and the question was how those feelings might be depicted to make a picture, nay how I might give them expression so that others might, by looking at my production, feel as I was feeling as nearly as possible.
An ordinary picture requires no feeling, but only the object to reproduce. A picture of a higher order necessitates there existing the object and feeling; one of the class still higher has nothing for its life but feelings, and an object that will fit in with such feelings must be caught to make a picture. But such an object is not easily forthcoming, and even if it came, it would be no easy work to arrange it appropriately. Even if arranged successfully, its presentation would take such a form as would sometimes make it appear totally different from anything in nature, so much so that it would make no picture at all for ordinary people. The artist himself would not recognise that his production represented anything in existence, but that his was only an attempt to convey, however fractionally, his feelings at the very moment when his fancy was aroused. He would consider it a most creditable achievement if he, after scouring the length and breadth of the country, with not a moment of forgetfulness, comes suddenly, at the cross roads upon his lost child and folds it in his arms, not giving time even for lightning to flash, saying, “Why you were here, my child.” But that is where the rub comes in. If I can only work out this tone, I shall not care what others may say of my picture. I shall, with the least concern, let them say it is not a picture at all. If my combination of colours, gave expression to my feelings even in part; if the straight and curve of the lines spoke for a fraction of this spirit; if the general disposition of the picture conveyed any of the superprosaic thoughts, I shall not mind if the thing to assume a shape in the picture should happen to be a horse, or a cow or something neither a horse nor a cow. No, I shall not mind; but the trouble was nothing would come forth to fit my fancy. I laid my sketch book open on my desk and looked down upon it until my eyes almost fell through it. It was useless.
I laid my pencil aside and thought; thought it was a mistake, to begin with, that I should have tried to make a picture of abstract feelings. Men are not so different from one another and there must have been some who have had the same touch of thought as I have and must have tried to perpetuate such feelings by some means or other. By what means I wondered.
Music! The word flashed across my mind. Yes, music must be the voice of nature, born under such necessity, under such circumstances. It occurred, for the first time, to me, then, that music is something that must be listened to and that must be learned. Unfortunately, I am a perfect stranger to music.
I wondered next if my fancy would not make poetry, and ventured to step into the third dominion. In my memory, it was an individual named Lessing, who arguing that the province of poetry are events that occur conditioned on the passing of time, established the fundamental principle that poetry and painting are not one but two different arts. Seen in this light, poetry seems to give little promise of making anything out of the situation of things, to which I have been struggling to give expression. The physical condition of my feeling of joy may have in it the element of time, but does not consist of an event that progressively developed in the flow of time. My joy is joyous not because No. 1 goes away and No. 2 comes in its place, and not because No. 3 is born as No. 2 vanishes. I am joyful because my joy is felt deeply and retained from the beginning. Say this in an everyday language, and there will be no need of making a factor of time. Poetry, like painting, will come of things arranged separately. Only what scene and sentiment to bring into the poetry, to portray this expansive and abandoned condition is the question. Poetry should be forthcoming, in spite of Lessing, so soon as these factors are caught. Homer and Virgil may be let alone. If poetry be fit to give voice to a mood, that mood may be painted in words without being under time restrictions and unaided by an event that progresses in an orderly manner, as long as the simple spatial requirements of painting are fulfilled.
The point of my pencil began to move slowly, very slowly at first, then with more speed on my sketch book and in half an hour I got these lines:
“Spring two or three months old,
Sadness is long as sweet young plants.
Flowers fall on the empty garden,
In the soulless hall lies a plain harp.
Immobile the spider in its maze hangs
Winding travels blue smoke up the bamboo beams.”
Reading the six lines over, I
