"Certainly," said the stranger, "the whole of the story is not written
here, but it is suggested. And the attribute of all true art, the highest
and the lowest, is this--that it rays more than it says, and takes you away
from itself. It is a little door that opens into an infinite hall where
you may find what you please. Men, thinking to detract, say: 'People read
more in this or that work of genius than was ever written in it,' not
perceiving that they pay the highest compliment. If we pick up the finger
and nail of a real man, we can decipher a whole story--could almost
reconstruct the creature again, from head to foot. But half the body of a
Mumboo-jumbow idol leaves us utterly in the dark as to what the rest was
like. We see what we see, but nothing more. There is nothing so
universally intelligible as truth. It has a thousand meanings, and
suggests a thousand more."

He turned over the wooden thing.

"Though a man should carve it into matter with the least possible
manipulative skill, it will yet find interpreters. It is the soul that
looks out with burning eyes through the most gross fleshly filament.
Whosoever should portray truly the life and death of a little flower--its
birth, sucking in of nourishment, reproduction of its kind, withering and
vanishing--would have shaped a symbol of all existence. All true facts of
nature or the mind are related. Your little carving represents some mental
facts as they really are, therefore fifty different true stories might be
read from it. What your work wants is not truth, but beauty of external
form, the other half of art." He leaned almost gently toward the boy.
"Skill may come in time, but you will have to work hard. The love of
beauty and the desire for it must be born in a man; the skill to reproduce
it he must make. He must work hard."