Audiences; a few suggestions to those who look and listen

Preface

THE purpose of this little book is, I trust, sufficiently clear from the beginning. The thoughts all cluster about the two words " seeing" and " hearing." The ambition to be a good listener and seer is avowedly prevalent enough, but the methods of attaining these accomplishments are precarious almost beyond hope.

When one talks with men and women who have had exceptional artistic advantages, and who are considered by their neighbors to be good amateurs as well as connoisseurs in this or that art, and when one discovers to his sorrow that they have actually no conception of the scope and real intent of the art to which they have devoted much time and more money, onP f ee i s keenly the need of simplicity, — the i. ..ed ot going; back from our histories to our alphabet.

vi

PREFACE

When one talks with artists — men of worth and attainment in their several arts — and finds that they are ignorant of the accomplishments of their j fellow-artists working along other lines, and when they say that the thought that "all the arts are essentially one in purpose" is absolutely new to them, one wonders what they have been doing all their years, and feels again this need of going back from our histories to our alphabet.

To know what pictures are good, what are bad ; what music is good, what demoralizing; which statues and buildings to approve; what poetry to hold to, — these are accomplishments which mark the man or the woman of culture.

F. P. H.

Chicago, July, 1896.

Contents

Page

Audiences . . . n

The Language of Form 2j

II

The sea it was level as seas of light,

As still as the light ere a hand was laid

To the making of lands, or the seas were made.

'T was fond as a bride on her bridal night

When a great love swells in her soul like a sea,

And makes her but less than divinity.

'T was night, — The soul of the day, I wis :

A woman's face hiding from her first kiss.

III

'T was night in Venice. On o'er the tide — These boats they are narrow as they can be, These crafts they are narrow enough, and we, To balance the boat, sat side by side — Out under the arch of the Bridge of Sighs, On under the arch of the star-sown skies : We two were together on the Adrian Sea, — The one fair woman of the world to me.