legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of
lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely
into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection.
They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their
artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created for the
purpose of transportation.

From the earlier days in that underground gallery on Fifth Avenue near
Twenty-seventh Street to the present time, there has been a constantly
flowing production of lyrical simplicity and purification. One can
never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of Cezanne, where
the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially
in Cezanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from
painting other than that of painting for itself. With Cezanne it was
problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality. With
Davies you are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life he
is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of
problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have
lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of
looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world--a world of
Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially
an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature,
things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic
existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. Arthur
B. Davies is a lyric poet with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the
smile of a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of green
moon whispers and of shadowed movement. Imagination illuminating the
moment of fancy with rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean
mystery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You have in these
pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic
certainty. They are _chansons sans paroles_, sung to the syrinx in
Sicilian glades.

I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of
classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You
could just as well hear Glueck as Keats; you could just as well see the
world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old
altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West
become columns of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains and
lakes of the West hav