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Updated: June 4, 2025
All perception of relative importances depends upon a just appreciation of which letters in association's bond association will most readily dispense with. This depends upon the sympathy of the painter both with his subject and with him who is to look at the picture. And this depends upon a man's common sense.
If we did not conduct our thought on this principle simplifying by suppression of detail and breadth of treatment it would take us a twelvemonth to say that it was a fine morning and another for the hearer to apprehend our statement. Any other principle reduces thought to an absurdity. All painting depends upon simplification. All simplification depends upon a perception of relative importances.
That was ever our wonder as we bounded forth at last to the old clay-pit to make pots, or to hunt bears among the hazels. It was incessant matter for amazement how these Olympians would talk over our heads during meals, for instance of this or the other social or political inanity, under the delusion that these pale phantasms of reality were among the importances of life.
It was harder not to paint a detail than to paint it, easier to put in all that one can see than to judge what may go without saying, omit it and range the irreducible minima in due order of precedence. Hence we all lean towards prolixity. The difficulty lies in the nice appreciation of relative importances and in the giving each detail neither more nor less than its due.
Nothing, however, could be further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the south side, between court and I suppose garden, where Dover Street gives way to Grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold reserves and deep suggestions, I used to think after scaling the steep quite on purpose to wonder about it.
It was the theory of the time and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough, all the difference of the old importances.
If other importances, not to extend the question, kept themselves down, they were in no direction less obtruded than in that of our friend's dress, adopted once for all as with a sort of sumptuary scruple.
Or the hour brought a stroll with the French danseuse and her poodle, and a conversation about the mere trivialities of life, which a year or two, or even a few months ago, Bernardine would have condemned as beneath contempt, but, which were now taking their rightful place in her new standard of importances.
Now and then, to be sure, faint echoes in her of her father, touches of youthful assurance, youthful grandiloquence, stirred the young man's sense of humor; but it was quickly quelled by an irradiating tenderness that showed her limitations as symptoms of an influence that, in its foolish aspects, he would not have had her too clearly recognize; her beautiful, filial devotion more than compensated for her filial blindness nay, sanctified it; and her heavenly face had but to turn on him for him to envelop all her little solemnities and importances in a comprehending reverence.
The truth was, above all, that to them the formative forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very definite by their measure and intention; there were "advantages," generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values, importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was their belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided.
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