Style, in his view, unless it is something
wholly uncharacterizable, is a vague and impalpable spirit breathing
through the work of some strongly marked individuality, or else it is
formalism. He delights in the fantasticality of the Gothic. The west
facade of Rouen inspires him more than all the formulae of Palladian
proportions. He detests systematization. He reads Shakespeare, Schiller,
Dante almost exclusively. He sees visions and dreams dreams. The awful
in the natural forces, moral and material, seems his element. He
believes in freedom, in the absolute emancipation of every faculty. As
for study, study nature. If then you fail in restraint and measure you
are a "mediocre artist," whom no artificial system devised to secure
measure and restraint could have rescued from essential insignificance.
No poet or landscape painter ever delighted more in the infinitely
varied suggestiveness and exuberance of nature, or ever felt the
formality of much that passes for art as more chill and drear. Hence in
all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering
sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous
acquaintance with his material.
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