A Cathedral Singer | Page 2

is the fee, then, that is
needed, the model's wage; she has felt the common lash of the poor.
Plainly here is some one who has stepped down from her place in life,
who has descended far below her inclinations, to raise a small sum of
money. Why she does so is of course her own sacred and delicate affair.
But the spirit in which she does this becomes our affair, because it
becomes a matter of expression with her. This self-sacrifice, this ordeal
which she voluntarily undergoes to gain her end, shows in her face; and
if while she poses, you should be fortunate enough to see this look
along with other fine things, great things, it will be your aim to transfer
them all to your canvases--if you can."
He smiled at them with a kind of fostering challenge to their
over-confident impulses and immature art. But he had not yet fully
brought out what he had in mind about the mysterious stranger and he
continued:
"We teachers of art schools in engaging models have to take from
human material as we find it. The best we find is seldom or never what
we would prefer. If I, for instance, could have my choice, my students
would never be allowed to work from a model who repelled the student
or left the student indifferent. No students of mine, if I could have my

way, should ever paint from a model that failed to call forth the finest
feelings. Otherwise, how can your best emotions have full play in your
work; and unless your best emotions enter into your work, what will
your work be worth? For if you have never before understood the truth,
try to realize it now: that you will succeed in painting only through the
best that is in you; just as only the best in you will ever carry you
triumphantly to the end of any practical human road that is worth the
travel; just as you will reach all life's best goals only through your best.
And in painting remember that the best is never in the eye, for the eye
can only perceive, the eye can only direct; and the best is never in the
hand, for the hand can only measure, the hand can only move. In
painting the best comes from emotion. A human being may lack eyes
and be none the poorer in character; a human being may lack hands and
be none the poorer in character; but whenever in life a person lacks any
great emotion, that person is the poorer in everything. And so in
painting you can fail after the eye has gained all necessary knowledge,
you can fail after your hand has received all necessary training, either
because nature has denied you the foundations of great feeling, or
because, having these foundations, you have failed to make them the
foundations of your work.
"But among a hundred models there might not be one to arouse such
emotion. Actually in the world, among the thousands of people we
know, how few stir in us our best, force us to our best! It is the rarest
experience of our lifetimes that we meet a man or a woman who
literally drives us to the realization of what we really are and can really
do when we do our best. What we all most need in our careers is the
one who can liberate within us that lifelong prisoner whose doom it is
to remain a captive until another sets it free--our best. For we can never
set our best free by our own hands; that must always be done by
another."
They were listening to him with a startled recognition of their inmost
selves. He went on to drive home his point about the stranger:
"I am going to introduce to you, then, a model who beyond all the
others you have worked with will liberate in you your finer selves. It is

a rare opportunity. Do not thank me. I did not find her. Life's storms
have blown her violently against the walls of the art school; we must
see to it at least that she be not further bruised while it becomes her
shelter, her refuge. Who she is, what her life has been, where she comes
from, how she happens to arrive here--these are privacies into which of
course we do not intrude. Immediately behind herself she drops a
curtain of silence which shuts away every such sign of her past. But
there are other signs of that past which she cannot hide and which it is
our privilege, our duty, the province of our art, to read. They are written
on her face, on her hands, on her bearing; they are written all over
her--the