he world, to crown the work.

XXI.

The art decorator is a type of all art workmen. See him
about to manipulate a plastic ornament on the wall. The
plaster resembles his idea; its plastic qualities his
sentiment, or emotion; the style of ornament into which it
is to be moulded resembles his imagination, and the power of
the artist to successfully and triumphantly embody in the
finished ornament the living, breathing idea that fills him
is his manipulative skill. Any work of art, if perfect in
itself, still remains unfinished until the world comes along
and applauds.

XXII.

The age wants the artist. It wants imagination, originality,
inspiration, ideality. It requires fertile, dreaming souls,
to create ideal breadth.

It requires an earthly Nirvana wherein one may escape a
selfish, barbarous, pitiless world. There is a great dearth
of the coinage of the soul. We want artists to explain the
souls of things, not their mechanical construction, but the
unseen secret of their purposes, their unspeakable
existence. We want heart-expanding triumphs to counteract
the withering influences of life. If a soul is entranced
with man or nature, we also want to feel his fascination, to
be penetrated with his rapture.

* * * * *

The megaphone ceased its musical vociferation, which formed a
spiritual exercise for the souls assembled before us. I felt entranced
and lifted up to a plane of splendid life hitherto unknown in my
experience. I began to understand that art, after all, is the one
thing in our terrestrial life worth striving for, in fact our only
possession. For is it not the transmission of the soul to outer
matter, whose savagery may be thus charmed and subdued to become a
satisfactory spiritual environment?

Following the procession of artists came beautiful, wondrously-arrayed
dancers, whose evolutions made the brain dizzy with delight. Fair
priests and priestesses of art formed upon the floor of the palace
decorative arabesques of scrolls and interlacements of living bodies,
the color of their garments mingling in perfectly harmonious hues,
beautiful beyond comparison. Their ceaseless evolutions were made to
the measure of perfect music. Panels and bands of living decorations
were framed and transformed like the magical changes of the
ka