e become settings for the reading of the
"Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles
chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic
accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so
dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left
open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and
possess the requisite instincts for poetry.

The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince
one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion
even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and
women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and
painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his
conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence.
He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They
are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes,
intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the
sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for
union with the universal soul in things.

It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and
that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for
conviction in powerful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who
are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the
chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura,"
dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only
typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the
world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy.
Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the
essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like
Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of
the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They
merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic
world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This
work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies
feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them
actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is
nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It
is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently
contrived purpose