We see what we see, but nothing more. There is nothing so
universally intelligible as truth. It has a thousand meanings, and
suggests a thousand more."
He turned over the wooden thing.
"Though a man should carve it into matter with the least possible
manipulative skill, it will yet find interpreters. It is the soul that
looks out with burning eyes through the most gross fleshly filament.
Whosoever should portray truly the life and death of a little flower--its
birth, sucking in of nourishment, reproduction of its kind, withering and
vanishing--would have shaped a symbol of all existence. All true facts of
nature or the mind are related. Your little carving represents some mental
facts as they really are, therefore fifty different true stories might be
read from it. What your work wants is not truth, but beauty of external
form, the other half of art." He leaned almost gently toward the boy.
"Skill may come in time, but you will have to work hard. The love of
beauty and the desire for it must be born in a man; the skill to reproduce
it he must make. He must work hard."
"All my life I have longed to see you," the boy said.
The stranger broke off the end of his cigar, and lit it. The boy lifted
the heavy wood from the stranger's knee and drew yet nearer him. In the
dog-like manner of his drawing near there was something superbly
ridiculous, unless one chanced to view it in another light.
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