of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute
spiritual harmony.

He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that Albert Ryder is
a painter for those with a fine comprehension of the imagination.
Precisely as Redon is an artist for artists, though not always their
artist in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct for
legend, for transformation. Painters like Davies, Redon, Rops, Moreau,
and the other mystical natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of
their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the
foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the
imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense
of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of
Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created
by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a
kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illumined fact.

Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction--that seems to be the
purpose of the work of Arthur B. Davies. It is so much outside the
realm of scientific esthetics as hardly to have been more than
overheard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of the axiom that
"all art aspires to the condition of music." I could almost hear
Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it.
They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are
illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are
windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be
reconciled to the doom of isolation.

With the arrival of Cubism into the modern esthetic scene, there
appeared a change in the manner of creation, though the same methods
of invention remained chiefly without change. The result seems more
in the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a perhaps more acutely
realized sense of opposites, than in the former mode. They register
less completely, it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden
in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies is the art of a
melodious curved line. Therefore the sudden angularity is abrupt to an
appreciative eye.

It is the poetry of Arthur B. Davies that comes to the fore in one's
appreciation. He has the almost impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and
the music of motion is crystallized in his imagination to a masterful
degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator appointed by the
states of his soul to