Do you understand now that all my intelligence rejects is in immediate
relation to all my heart aspires to, and that the spectacle of human
blunders and human vileness is an equally powerful motive for action in
the exercise of art with springs of tranquil contemplation that I have
felt within me since I was a child?
We have come far, I hope, from the shadowy foliage crowning the humble
roof of the primitive human dwelling, far from the warbling of the birds
that brood among the branches; far from all these tender things. We left
them, notwithstanding, the other day; and even if we had stayed, do you
think we should have continued to enjoy them?
Believe me, everything comes from the universal; we must embrace to give
life.
Whatever interest one may get from material offered by a period,
religion, manners, history, &c., in representing a particular type, it
will avail nothing without an understanding of the universal agency of
atmosphere, that modelling of infinity; it shall come to pass that a
stone fence, about which the air seems to move and breathe, shall be, in
a museum, a grander conception than any ambitious work which lacks this
universal element and expresses only something personal. All the
personal and particular majesty of a portrait of Louis XIV. by Lebrun or
by Rigaud shall be as nothing beside the simplicity of a tuft of grass
shining clear in a gleam of sunlight.
_Rousseau._