great the picture will rock and sway together, carrying the artist and after him the looker with it, catching up with the soul of the thing and marching on together.
DON’T CULTIVATE PARSONS out of their pulpits. They are very disappointing. Let them step up in the pulpit and stay stepped up. It is best for them and you and ideals. I asked one to supper tonightand to see my pictures after. He enjoyed his supper enormously and the pictures not at all. I had hoped he would see a little in them. Down came my hopes, bang! smash! The further back to my old canvases I got the better he liked them, just skin-deep pictures, full of pettiness and detail. “There’s such lots in them,” he would say, “so much detail.” That pleased him while the struggle for bigness, simplicity, spirit, passed clean over his head, only meaning bareness, lack of interest to him. “I don’t want to see any more,” he said at last (I had only brought out about one dozen) and, pointing to my totem mother, “I’d hate to dream of her.” Oh, those that gab about beauty and can’t see it! Another can be ungodly and all that is bad, and yet beauty can just hoist him up easy as a steam winch. We are queer. “To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for travelling souls.” * If the terminus of all roads is God, what matter which road we take? But hail your fellow travellers from a distance. Don’t try to catch up and keep step. Yell cheerio across the fields, but stick to your own particular path, be it paved or grassed, or just plain old dirt. It’s your path and suits your make of boots.
OCTOBER 17TH
The mountain is finished, and the Brackendale landscape and the tree with moving background will be coffined tomorrow and away. They ought not to go out as pictures, finished. I feel them incomplete studies, just learners not showers. Will I ever paint a shower, forgetting the paint and remembering the glory? I will not berate them. I have wrestled with them honestly, now I put them from me and push on to the next, carrying with me some
* Walt Whitman.
bit of knowledge and growth acquired through them — on, up! Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness! I want to see and feel and expand, little book, you holder of my secrets.
OCTOBER 18TH
I gave a birthday dinner party. Of the four guests one was a vegetarian, one a diabetic, one treating for biliousness, and the remaining one a straightforward eater. I cooked all afternoon to pacify the vagaries of each and it was a good supper but I hated food-stuffs as I dished up the messes. We three old sisters make much of our birthdays, meeting at one or the other of our houses, exchanging visits and gifts and sitting round fires to talk. Alice starts in October, Lizzie follows in November and I end up in December. Only three of us left. We are particularly free of outer relatives, cousins and things. Alice usually carts along a mob of other people’s offsprings, her boarders, and Woo and the dogs and Susie join the circle if the party is at my house. They have inaudibly accepted Susie now. That is, they don’t hysteric when she cavorts round under their chairs.
I’M GOING TO CHICAGO to see the art exhibition first and foremost and the Fair incidentally. Both Lawren and Bess have written of it and say it’s grand and I’m wriggling with thrills. The art of all ages collected together, the old thoughts and the new thoughts hobnobbing on the walls, saying to each other, “We are all akin and not so different either.” I wonder what they will do to me. I hope they’ll speak plain, the old ones and the clever ones and the holy ones. As always, I go alone. Funny, it seems it must always be so.I’d love an understanding companion. Otherwise I’d sooner be alone. It teaches one things. The girls are quite keen and enthusiastic over my going and the railway fares are ridiculously
DON’T CULTIVATE PARSONS out of their pulpits. They are very disappointing. Let them step up in the pulpit and stay stepped up. It is best for them and you and ideals. I asked one to supper tonightand to see my pictures after. He enjoyed his supper enormously and the pictures not at all. I had hoped he would see a little in them. Down came my hopes, bang! smash! The further back to my old canvases I got the better he liked them, just skin-deep pictures, full of pettiness and detail. “There’s such lots in them,” he would say, “so much detail.” That pleased him while the struggle for bigness, simplicity, spirit, passed clean over his head, only meaning bareness, lack of interest to him. “I don’t want to see any more,” he said at last (I had only brought out about one dozen) and, pointing to my totem mother, “I’d hate to dream of her.” Oh, those that gab about beauty and can’t see it! Another can be ungodly and all that is bad, and yet beauty can just hoist him up easy as a steam winch. We are queer. “To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for travelling souls.” * If the terminus of all roads is God, what matter which road we take? But hail your fellow travellers from a distance. Don’t try to catch up and keep step. Yell cheerio across the fields, but stick to your own particular path, be it paved or grassed, or just plain old dirt. It’s your path and suits your make of boots.
OCTOBER 17TH
The mountain is finished, and the Brackendale landscape and the tree with moving background will be coffined tomorrow and away. They ought not to go out as pictures, finished. I feel them incomplete studies, just learners not showers. Will I ever paint a shower, forgetting the paint and remembering the glory? I will not berate them. I have wrestled with them honestly, now I put them from me and push on to the next, carrying with me some
* Walt Whitman.
bit of knowledge and growth acquired through them — on, up! Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness! I want to see and feel and expand, little book, you holder of my secrets.
OCTOBER 18TH
I gave a birthday dinner party. Of the four guests one was a vegetarian, one a diabetic, one treating for biliousness, and the remaining one a straightforward eater. I cooked all afternoon to pacify the vagaries of each and it was a good supper but I hated food-stuffs as I dished up the messes. We three old sisters make much of our birthdays, meeting at one or the other of our houses, exchanging visits and gifts and sitting round fires to talk. Alice starts in October, Lizzie follows in November and I end up in December. Only three of us left. We are particularly free of outer relatives, cousins and things. Alice usually carts along a mob of other people’s offsprings, her boarders, and Woo and the dogs and Susie join the circle if the party is at my house. They have inaudibly accepted Susie now. That is, they don’t hysteric when she cavorts round under their chairs.
I’M GOING TO CHICAGO to see the art exhibition first and foremost and the Fair incidentally. Both Lawren and Bess have written of it and say it’s grand and I’m wriggling with thrills. The art of all ages collected together, the old thoughts and the new thoughts hobnobbing on the walls, saying to each other, “We are all akin and not so different either.” I wonder what they will do to me. I hope they’ll speak plain, the old ones and the clever ones and the holy ones. As always, I go alone. Funny, it seems it must always be so.I’d love an understanding companion. Otherwise I’d sooner be alone. It teaches one things. The girls are quite keen and enthusiastic over my going and the railway fares are ridiculously
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