[Note: for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents tothe beginning of the text. Also I have made one spelling change:irrevelant circumstance to irrelevant circumstance. ]

THE GATE OF APPRECIATIONStudies in the Relation of Art to Life

BY

CARLETON NOYES

BOSTON AND NEW YORKHOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANYThe Riverside Press, Cambridge1907

COPYRIGHT 1907 BY CARLETON NOYESALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1907_

TOMY FATHERAND THE MEMORY OFMY MOTHER

"Only themselves understand themselves and the like of themselves, As souls only understand souls. "

CONTENTS

Preface iI. The Impulse to Expression iII. The Attitude of Response 23III. Technique and the Layman 44IV. The Value of the Medium 87V. The Background of Art 105VI. The Service of Criticism 137VII. Beauty and Common Life 165VIII. The Arts of Form 201IX. Representation 221X. The Personal Estimate 254

PREFACE

IN the daily life of the ordinary man, a life crowded with diverseinterests and increasingly complex demands, some few moments ofa busy week or month or year are accorded to an interest in art. Whatever may be his vocation, the man feels instinctively that in histotal scheme of life books, pictures, music have somewhere a place. In his own business or profession he is an expert, a man of specialtraining; and intelligently he does not aspire to a completeunderstanding of a subject which lies beyond his province. In thesame spirit in which he is a master of his own craft, he is content toleave expert knowledge of art to the expert, to the artist and to theconnoisseur. For his part as a layman he remains frankly and happilyon the outside. But he feels none the less that art has an interest anda meaning even for him. Though he does not practice any art himself, he knows that he enjoys fine things, a beautiful room, noblebuildings, books and plays, statues, pictures, music; and he believesthat in his own fashion he is able to appreciate art, I venture to thinkthat he is right. 

There is a case for the outsider in reference to art. And I have triedhere to state it. This book is an attempt to suggest the possiblemeaning of art to the ordinary man, to indicate methods of approachto art, and to trace the way of appreciation. It is essentially apersonal record, an account of my own adventures with the problem. The book does not pretend to finality; the results are true for me asfar as I have gone. They may or may not be true for another. If theybecome true for another man, he is the one for whom the book waswritten. I do not apologize because the shelter here put together, inwhich I have found a certain comfort, is not a palace. Rude as thestructure may be, any man is welcomed to it who may find solacethere in an hour of need. 

 C. N. CAMBRIDGE, _November second, 1906. _

I

THE IMPULSE TO EXPRESSION

TOWARD evening a traveler through a wild country finds himselfstill in the open, with no hope of reaching a village that night. Thewind is growing chill; clouds are gathering in the west, threateningrain. There rises in him a feeling of the need of shelter; and he looksabout him to see what material is ready to his hand. Scattered stoneswill serve for supports and low walls; there are fallen branches forthe roof; twigs and leaves can be woven into a thatch. Already thegeneral design has shaped itself in his mind. He sets to work, modifying the details of his plan to suit the resources of his material. At last, after hours of hard thought and eager toil, spurred on by hissense of his great need, the hut is ready; and fee takes refuge in it asthe storm breaks. 

The entire significance of the man's work is _shelter. _ Thebeginning of it lay in his need of shelter. The impulse to action roseout of his consciousness of his need. His imagination conceived theplan whereby the need might be met, and the plan gave shape to hismaterial. The actual result of his labor was a hut, but the hut itselfwas not the end for which he strove. The hut was but the means. Theall-inclusive import of his work--the stimulus which impelled him toact, the purpose for which he toiled, and the end which heaccomplished--is shelter. 

A man of special sensitiveness to the appeal of color and form findshimself also in the open. He is weary with the way, which shows butbroken glimpses of the road. His spirit, heavy with the "burden ofthe mystery, " is torn by conflict and confusion. As he looks acrossthe stony places to the gnarled and weather-tortured trees beyond, and up to the clouds piling black above him, there is revealed to hima sudden harmony among the discords; an inner principle, apprehended by his imagination, compels the fragments of theseeming chaos into a regnant order. These natural forms become forhim the expression external to himself of the struggle of his ownspirit and its final resolution. The desire rises in him to express byhis own act the order he has newly perceived, the harmony of hisspirit with the spirit of nature. As life comes to him dominantly interms of color and form, it is with color and form that he works toexpression so as to satisfy his need. The design is already projectedin his imagination, and to realize concretely his ideal he draws uponthe material of nature about him. The picture which he paints is notthe purpose of his effort. The picture is but the means. His end is toexpress the great new harmony in which his spirit finds shelter. 

Both men, the traveler and the painter, are wayfarers. Both areseeking shelter from stress and storm, and both construct theirmeans. In one case the product is more obviously and immediatelypractical, and the informing purpose tends to become obscured inthe actual serviceableness of the result. The hut answers a need thatis primarily physical; the need in the other case is spiritual. But it isa matter of degree. In essence and import the achievement of the twomen is the same. The originating impulse, a sense of need; theprocesses involved, the combination of material elements to adefinite end; the result attained, shelter which answers the need, --theyare identical. Both men are artists. Both hut and picture areworks of art. 

So art is not remote from common life after all. In its highestmanifestations art is life at its best; painting, sculpture, poetry, musicare the distillment and refinement of experience. Architecture andthe subsidiary arts of decoration adorn necessity and add delight touse. But whatever the flower and final fruit, art strikes its roots deepdown into human need, and draws its impulse and its sustenancefrom the very sources of life itself. In the wide range from the hut inthe wilderness to a Gothic cathedral, from the rude scratchesrecorded on the cave walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities ofthe Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort andaspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist, so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot bepassed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day thatart has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few;in consequence artists have become a kind of class. But essentiallythe possibilities of art lie within the scope of any man, given theright conditions. So too the separation of the "useful arts" from the"fine arts" is unjust to art and perversive of right appreciation. Whatever the form in which it may manifest itself, from the lowestto the highest, the art spirit is one, and it may quicken in any manwho sets mind and heart to the work of his hand. That man is anartist who fashions a new thing that he may express himself inresponse to his need. 

Art is creation. It is the combination of already existing materialelements into new forms which become thus the realization of apreconceived idea. Both hut and picture rose in the imagination oftheir makers before they took shape as things. The material of eachwas given already in nature; but the form, as the maker fashioned it, was new. Commonly we think of art as the expression andcommunication of emotion. A picture, a statue, a symphony werecognize as the symbol of what the artist has felt in some passageof his experience and the means by which he conveys his feeling tous. Art _is_ the expression of emotion, but all art springs out of need. The sense of need which impels expression through the medium ofcreation is itself an emotion. The hut which the traveler built forhimself in the wilderness--shaping it according to the design whichhis imagination suggested, having reference to his need and to thecharacter of his materials--was a work of creation; the need whichprompted it presented itself to him as emotion. The picture whichthe other wayfarer painted of the storm-swept landscape, a harmonywhich his imagination compelled out of discords, was a work ofcreation; the emotion which inspired the work was attended by need, the need of expression. The material and practical utility of the hutobscures the emotional character of its origin; the emotional importof the picture outweighs consideration of its utility to the painter asthe means by which his need of expression is satisfied. Thesatisfaction of physical needs which results in the creation ofutilities and the satisfaction of spiritual needs which results in theforms of expression we commonly call works of art differ one fromthe other in their effect on the total man only in degree. All works ofuse whose conception and making have required an act of creationare art; all art--even in its supreme manifestations--embraceselements of use. The measure in which a work is art is establishedby the intensity and scope of its maker's emotion and by his powerto body forth his feeling in harmonious forms which in turn recreatethe emotion in the spirit of those whom his work reaches. 

In its essence and widest compass art is the making of a new thing inresponse to a sense of need. The very need itself creates, workingthrough man as its agent. This truth is illustrated vividly by themiracles of modern invention. The hand of man unaided was notable to cope with his expanding opportunities; the giant steam andthe magician electricity came at his call to work their wonders. Theplow and scythe of the New England colonist on his little farm weremetamorphosed into the colossal steam-driven shapes, in whichmachinery seems transmuted into intelligence, as he moved to theconquest of the acres of the West which summoned him to dominion. First the need was felt; the contrivance was created in response. Aman of business sees before him in imagination the end to bereached, and applying his ideal to practical conditions, he makesevery detail converge to the result desired. All rebelliouscircumstances, all forces that pull the other way, he bends to hiscompelling will, and by the shaping power of his genius heaccomplishes his aim. His business is his medium of self-expression;his success is the realization of his ideal. A painter does no morethan this, though he works with a different material. The landscapewhich is realized ultimately upon his canvas is the landscape seen inhis imagination. He draws his colors and forms from nature around;but he selects his details, adapting them to his end. All accidents andincidents are purged away. Out of the apparent confusion of liferises the evident order of art. And in the completed work the artist's_idea_ stands forth salient and victorious. 

That consciousness of need which compels creation is the origin ofart. The owner of a dwelling who first felt the need of securing hisdoor so that he alone might possess the secret and trick of accessdevised a lock and key, rude enough, as we can fancy. As the makerof the first lock and key he was an artist. All those who followedwhere he had led, repeating his device without modification, werebut artisans. In the measure that any man changed the design, however, adapting it more closely to his peculiar needs and somaking it anew, to that extent he was an artist also. The man whodoes a thing for the first time it is done is an artist; a man who does athing better is an artist. The painter who copies his object imitatively, finding nothing, creating nothing, is an artisan, however skillful hemay be. He is an artist in the degree in which he brings to his subjectsomething of his own, and fashioning it, however crudely, to expressthe idea he has conceived of the object, so creates. 

The difference between work which is art and work which is not artis just this element of the originating impulse and creative act. Thedifference, though often seemingly slight and not alwaysimmediately perceived, is all-important. It distinguishes the artistfrom the artisan; a free spirit from a slave; a thinking, feeling manfrom a soulless machine. It makes the difference between life richand significant, and mere existence; between the mastery of fate andthe passive acceptance of things as they are. 

If a mind and heart are behind it to control and guide it to expression, even the machine may be an instrument in the making of a work ofart. It is not the work itself, but the motive which prompted themaking of it, that determines its character as art. Art is not the way athing is done, but the reason why it is done. A chair, though turnedon a lathe, may be a work of art, if the maker has truly expressedhimself in his work. A picture, though "hand-painted, " may bewholly mechanical in spirit. To set about "making a picture" is tobegin at the wrong end. The impulse to art flows from withinoutwards. Art is bound up with life itself; like nature, it is organicand must grow. The form cannot be laid on from the outside; it isborn and must develop in response to vital need. In so far as our actsare consciously the expression of ourselves they are prompted by theart spirit. 

All our acts are reducible to one of two kinds: either they are acts ofcreation, effecting a new result, or they are acts of repetition. Acts ofrepetition tend rapidly to become habits; and they may be performedwithout attention or positive volition. Thus, as I am dressing in themorning I may be planning the work for the day; while my mind isgiven over to thought, I lose the sense of my material surroundings, my muscles work automatically, the motor-currents flowing throughthe well-worn grooves, and by force of habit the acts executethemselves. Obviously, acts of repetition, or habits, make up thelarger part of our daily lives. 

Acts of creation, on the other hand, are performed by an effort of thewill in response to the consciousness of a need. To meet the newneed we are obliged to make new combinations. I assume that thetraveler constructed his hut for the first time, shaping it to the specialnew conditions; that the harmony which the painter discerned in thetumult around him he experienced for the first time, and the picturewhich he paints, shaped with reference to his need and fulfilling it, is a new thing. In the work produced by this act of creation, thefeeling which has prompted it finds expression. In the making of thehut, in the painting of the picture, the impelling need is satisfied. 

Although acts of repetition constitute the bulk of life, creation is ofits very essence and determines its quality. The significance and joyof life are less in being than in _becoming. _ Growth is expression, and in turn expression is made possible by growth. In ourconscious experience the sense of becoming is one of our supremesatisfactions. Growth is the purpose and the recompense of ourbeing here, the end for which we strive and the reward of all theeffort and the struggle. In the exercise of brain or hand, to feel thework take form, develop, and become something, --that is happiness. And the joy is in the creating rather than in the thing created; thecompleted work is behind us, and we move forward to new creation. A painter's best picture is the blank canvas before him; an author'sgreatest book is the one he is just setting himself to write. The desirefor change for the sake of change which we all feel at times, a vaguerestlessness of mind and body, is only the impulse to growth whichhas not found its direction. Outside of us we love to see themanifestation of growth. We tend and cherish the little plant in thewindow; we watch with delight the unfolding of each new leaf andthe upward reach into blossom. The spring, bursting triumphantfrom the silent, winter-stricken earth, is nature's parable ofexpression, her symbol perennially renewed of the joy of growth. 

The impulse to expression is cosmic and eternal. But even in thehomeliness and familiarity of our life from day to day the need ofexpression is there, whether we are entirely aware of it or not; andwe are seeking the realization and fulfillment of ourselves throughthe utterance of what we are. A few find their expression in formswhich with distinct limitation of the term we call works of art. Mostmen find it in their daily occupations, their profession or theirbusiness. The president of one of the great Western railroadsremarked once in conversation that he would rather build a thousandmiles of railroad than live in the most sumptuous palace on FifthAvenue. Railroad building was his medium of expression; it was hisart. Some express themselves in shaping their material environment, in the decoration and ordering of their houses. A young woman said, "My ambition is to keep my house well. " Again, for her, housekeeping is her art. Some find the realization of themselves inthe friends they draw around them. Love is but the utterance of whatwe essentially are; and the response to it in the loved one makes theutterance articulate and complete. Expression rises out of ourdeepest need, and the need impels expression. 

The assertion that art is thus involved with need seems for themoment to run counter to the usual conception, which regards art asa product of leisure, a luxury, and the result not of labor but of play. Art in its higher forms becomes more and more purely theexpression of emotion, the un-trammeled record of the artist'sspiritual experience. It is only when physical necessities have beenmet or ignored that the spirit of man has free range. But the makerwho adds decoration to his bowl after he has moulded it is just astruly fulfilling a need--the need of self-expression--as he fulfilled aneed when he fashioned the bowl in the first instance in order that hemight slake his thirst. Art is not superadded to life, --somethingdifferent in kind. All through its ascent from its rudimentary formsto its highest, from hut to cathedral, art is coordinate with thedevelopment of life, continuous and without breach or sudden end; itis the expression step by step of ever fuller and ever deeperexperience. 

Creation, therefore, follows upon the consciousness of need, whether the need be physical, as with the traveler, or spiritual, aswith the painter; from physical to spiritual we pass by a series ofgradations. At their extremes they are easy to distinguish, one fromthe other; but along the way there is no break in the continuity. Thecurrent formula for art, that art is the utterance of man's joy in hiswork, is not quite accurate. In the act of creation the maker finds theexpression of himself. The man who decorates a bowl in response tohis own creative impulse is expressing himself. The painter whothrills to the wonder and significance of nature is impelled toexpression; and his delight is not fully realized and complete until hehas uttered it. Such art is love expressed, and the artist's work is his"hymn of the praise of things. " But the joy for both the potter andthe painter, the joy which is so bound up with art as to partake of itsvery essence, is the joy which attends self-expression and thesatisfaction of the need. 

A work of art is a work of creation brought into being as theexpression of emotion. The traveler creates not the wood and stonebut shelter, by means of the hut; the painter creates not the landscapebut the beauty of it; the musician creates not the musical tones, butby means of a harmony of tones he creates an emotional experience. The impulse to art rises out of the earliest springs of consciousnessand vibrates through all life. Art does not disdain to manifest itselfin the little acts of expression of simple daily living; with all itssplendid past and vital present it is ever seeking new and greaterforms whose end is not yet. I spoke of the work of the travelerthrough the wilderness as art; the term was applied also torailroad-building and to housekeeping. The truth to be illustrated by theseexamples is that the primary impulse to artistic expression does notdiffer in essence from the impulse to creation of any kind. Thenature of the thing created, as art, depends upon the emotional valueof the result, the degree in which it expresses immediately theemotion of its creator, and the power it possesses to rouse theemotion in others. To show that all art is creation and that allcreation tends toward art is not to obscure useful distinctions, butrather to restore art to its rightful place in the life of man. 

In the big sense, then, art is bounded only by life itself. It is not acult; it is not an activity practiced by the few and a mystery to beunderstood only by those who are initiated into its secrets. Onedifficulty in the way of the popular understanding of art is due to thefact that the term art is currently limited to its highest manifestations;we withhold the title of artist from a good carpenter orcabinet-maker who takes a pride in his work and expresses his creativedesire by shaping his work to his own idea, and we bestow the nameupon any juggler in paint: with the result that many people who arenot painters or musicians feel themselves on that account excludedfrom all appreciation. If we go behind the various manifestations ofart to discover just what art is in itself and to determine wherein it isable to link itself with common experience, we find that art is theresponse to a need. And that need may waken in any man. Everyman may be an artist in his degree; and every man in his degree canappreciate art. A work of art is the expression of its maker'sexperience, the expression in such terms that the experience can becommunicated to another. The processes of execution involved infashioning a work, its technique, may be as incomprehensible andperplexed and difficult as its executants choose to make them. Technique is not the same as art. The only mystery of art is themystery of all life itself. Accept life with its fundamental mysteries, with its wonders and glories, and we have the clue to art. But wemiss the central fact of the whole matter if we do not perceive thatart is only a means. It is by expression that we grow and so fulfillourselves. The work itself which art calls into being is not the end. Itfails of its purpose, remaining void and vain, if it does not performits function. The hut which does not furnish shelter is labor lost. Thesignificance of the painter's effort does not stop with the canvas andpigment which he manipulates into form and meaning. The artistsees beyond the actual material thing which he is fashioning; hispurpose in creation is expression. By means of his picture heexpresses himself and so finds the satisfaction of his deepest need. The beginning and the end of art is life. 

But the artist's work of expression is not ultimately complete untilthe message is received, and expression becomes communication ashis utterance calls out a response in the spirit of a fellow-man. Artexists not only for the artist's sake but for the appreciator too. As arthas its origin in emotion and is the expression of it, so for theappreciator the individual work has a meaning and is art in so far asit becomes for him the expression of what he has himself felt butcould not phrase; and it is art too in the measure in which it is therevelation of larger possibilities of feeling and creates in him a newemotional experience. The impulse to expression is common to all;the difference is one of degree. And the message of art is for all, according as they are attuned to the response. Art is creation. For theartist it is creation by expression; for the appreciator it is creation byevocation. These two principles complete the cycle; abstractly andvery briefly they are the whole story of art. 

To be responsive to the needs of life and its emotional appeal is thefirst condition of artistic creation. By new combinations of materialelements to bring emotion to expression in concrete harmoniousforms, themselves charged with emotion and communicating it, is tofashion a work of art. To feel in material, whether in the forms ofnature or in works of art, a meaning for the spirit is the condition ofappreciation. 

II

THE ATTITUDE OF RESPONSE

IT is a gray afternoon in late November. The day is gone; evening isnot yet come. Though too dark to read or write longer, it is not darkenough for drawn shades and the lamp. As I sit in the gathering dusk, my will hovering between work done and work to do, I surrender tothe mood of the moment. The day is accomplished, but it is not yet aremembrance, for it is still too near for me to define the details thatmade up its hours. Consciousness, not sharp enough for thought, floats away into diffused and obscure emotion. The sense is uponme and around me that I am vaguely, unreasoningly, yet pleasantly, unhappy. Out of the dimness a trick of memory recalls to me thelines, --

 "Tears! tears! tears! In the night, in solitude, tears, On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand, Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate, Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head; O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears? What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand? Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries; O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and desperate! O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace, But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the unloosened ocean Of tears! tears! tears!"

Now I know. My mood was the mood of tears. The poet, too, hasfelt what I was feeling. And as a poet he has been able to bring hisemotion to expression. By the magic of phrase and the mystery ofimage he has, out of the moving of his spirit, fashioned a concretereality. By means of his expression, because of it, his emotionbecomes realized, and so reaches its fulfillment. And for me, whatbefore was vague has been made definite. The poet's lines havewakened in me a response; I have felt what he has phrased; and nowthey become my expression too. As my mood takes form, I becomeconscious of its meaning. I can distill its significance for the spirit, and in the emotion made definite and realizable as consciousness Ifeel and know that I am living. Doubly, completely, the poem is awork of art. And my response to it, the absorption of it into my ownexperience, is appreciation. 

I appreciate the poem as I make the experience which the poet hashere phrased my own, and at the instant of reading I live out inmyself what he has lived and here expressed. I read the words, andintellectually I take in their signification, but the poem is notrealized in me until it wakens in me the feeling which the words areframed to convey. The images which an artist employs have thepower to rouse emotion in us, so that they come to stand for theemotion itself. We care for nature and it is beautiful to us as itsforms become objectively the intimate expression for us of what wefeel. 

 "O to realize space! The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds, To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds, as one with them. "

In his contact with the external world the artist identifies himselfwith his object. If he is painting a tree he in a measure becomes thetree; he values it at all because it expresses for him concretely whathe feels in its presence. The object and his spirit fuse; and throughthe fusion they together grow into a new and larger unity. What hiswork expresses is not the object for its own sake but this larger unityof his identity with it. To appreciate the artist's work, therefore, wemust in our turn merge ourselves in his emotion, and becoming onewith it, so extend our personality into larger life. 

To make the artist's emotion our own, to identify ourselves with theobject which he presents to us, we must pass beyond the materialform in which the work is embodied, letting the spirit and meaningof it speak to our spirit. In itself an individual picture or statue orsymphony is an objective, material thing, received intoconsciousness along the channel of the senses; but its origin and itsend alike are in emotion. The material form, whether in nature or inworks of art, is only the means by which the emotion iscommunicated. A landscape in nature is composed of meadow andhills, blue sky and tumbling clouds; these are the facts of thelandscape. But they are not fixed and inert. The imagination of thebeholder combines these elements into a harmony of color and mass;his spirit flows into consonance with the harmony his imaginationhas compelled out of nature, becoming one with it. To regard theworld not as facts and things, but as everywhere the stimulus offeeling, feeling which becomes our own experience, is the conditionof appreciation. 

To the awakening mind of a child, life is full of wonder, and eachunfolding day reveals new marvels of excitement and surprise. Asyet untrammeled by any sense of the limitations of material, hisquick imagination peoples his world with creatures of his fancy, which to him are more real than the things he is able actually to seeand touch. For him the external world is fluid and plastic, to bemoulded into forms at will in obedience to his creative desire. In thetiny bundle of rags which mother-love clasps tight to her heart, alittle girl sees only the loveliest of babies; and a small boy with hisstick of lath and newspaper cap and plume is a mightier thanNapoleon. The cruder the toy, the greater is the pleasure in the game;for the imagination delights in the exercise of itself. A wax doll, sentfrom Paris, with flaxen hair and eyes that open and shut, is laid away, when the mere novelty of it is exhausted, in theatric chest, and thelittle girl is fondling again her first baby of rag and string. A realsteel sword and tin helmet are soon cast aside, and the boy is backagain among the toys of his own making. That impulse to creationwhich all men feel, the impulse which makes the artist, is especiallyactive in a child; his games are his art. With a child material is notan end but a means. Things are for him but the skeleton of life, to beclothed upon by the flesh and blood reality of his own fashioning. His feeling is in excess of his knowledge. He has a faculty ofperception other than the intellectual. It is imagination. 

The child is the first artist. Out of the material around him he createsa world of his own. The prototypes of the forms which he devisesexist in life, but it is the thing which he himself makes that interestshim, not its original in nature. His play is his expression. He creates;and he is able to merge himself in the thing created. In his play heloses all consciousness of self. He and the toy become one, caughtup in the larger unity of the game. According as he identifies himselfwith the thing outside of him, the child is the first appreciator. 

Then comes a change. 

 "Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. "

Imagination surrenders to the intellect; emotion gives place toknowledge. 

Gradually the material world shuts in about us until it becomes forus a hard, inert thing, and no longer a living, changing presence, instinct with infinite possibilities of experience and feeling. Nowcustom lies upon us

 "with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"

It happens, unfortunately for our enjoyment of life, that we get usedto things. Little by little we come to accept them, to take them forgranted, and they cease to mean anything to us. Habit, which is ourmost helpful ally in lending our daily life its practical efficiency, isthe foe of emotion and appreciation. Habit allows us to performwithout conscious effort the innumerable little acts of each day'snecessity which we could not possibly accomplish if every single actrequired a fresh exercise of will. But just because its action isunconscious and unregarded, habit blunts the edge of oursensibilities. "Thus let but a Rising of the Sun, " says Carlyle, "let buta creation of the World happen _twice, _ and it ceases to bemarvelous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable. "

"Except ye become as little children!" Unless the world isnew-created every day, unless we can thrill to the beauty of nature withits fair surfaces and harmonies of vibrant sounds, or quicken to thethrob of human life with its occupations and its play of energies, itsburdens and its joys, unless we find an answer to our needs, andgladness, in sunlight or storms, in the sunset and evening andsolitude under the stars, in fields and hills or in thronging city streets, in conflict and struggle or in the face of a friend, unless each newday is a gift and new opportunity, then we cannot interpret themeaning of life nor read the riddle of art. For we cannot trulyappreciate art except as we learn to appreciate life. Until then art hasno message for us; it is a sealed book, and we shall not open thebook nor loose the seals thereof. The meaning of life is for the spirit, and art is its minister. To share in the communion we must becomeas children. As a child uses the common things of life to his ownends, transfiguring them by force of his creative desire, andfashioning thus a wonderful world of his own by the exercise of hisshaping imagination, a world of limitless incident and highadventure, so we must penetrate the visible and tangible actualityaround us, the envelope of seemingly inert matter cast in forms ofrigid definition, and we must open ourselves to the influence ofnature. That influence--nature's power to inspire, quicken, anddilate--flowing through the channel of the senses, plays upon ourspirit. The indwelling significance of things is apprehended by theimagination, and is won for us in the measure that we feel. 

As we respond to the emotional appeal of the great universe externalto ourselves we come to realize that the material world which we seeand touch is not final. In the experience of us all there are momentsof exaltation and quickened response, moments of illuminationwhen--

 "with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. "

The "life of things" is their significance for the spirit. By spirit Imean the sum of our conscious being, that complete entity within uswhich we recognize as the self. The material world, external, visible, tangible, may be regarded as the actual world. The real world is theworld of spiritual forces and relations, apprehended by theimagination and received with feeling. Life, in the sense of ourconscious experience of the world, is the moving of the spirit inemotion. 

The measure of life for the individual, therefore, is the degree ofintensity with which he feels. Experience is not meted out by weeksand months; it is to be sounded by the depth and poignancy ofinstant emotion. Variety and multitude of incident may crowdthrough insentient years and leave no record of their progress alongthe waste places of their march. Or a day may be a lifetime. In suchmoments of intensest experience time and space fall away and arenot. The outermost bounds of things recede; they vanish altogether:and we are made free of the universe. At such moments we are trulyliving; then we really _are. _

As the meaning of art is not the material thing which it calls intoform, but what the work expresses of life, so in order to appreciateart it is necessary to appreciate life, which is the inspiration of artand its fulfillment. To appreciate life is to send out our being intoexperience and to _feel_, --to realize in terms of emotion ouridentity with the great universe outside of us, this world of color andform and sound and movement, this web of illimitable activities andenergies, shot through with currents of endlessly varied andmodulated feeling. "My son, " says the father in Hindu lore, pointingto an animal, a tree, a rock, "my son, thou art that!" The universe isone. Of it we are each an essential part, distinct as individuals, yetfusing with it in our sense of our vital kinship with all other partsand with the whole. I am sauntering through the Public Garden on afragrant hushed evening in June; touched by the lingering afterglow, the twilight has not yet deepened into night. Grouped about a bench, children are moving softly in the last flicker of play, while themother nods above them. On the next bench a wanderer is stretchedat full length, his face hidden in his crooked-up arm. I note a coupleseated, silent, with shoulder touching shoulder. I meet a young manand woman walking hand in hand; they do not see me as I pass. Beyond, other figures are soundless shadows, gathering out of theenveloping dusk. It is all so intimate and friendly. The air, theflowers, the bit of water through the trees reflecting the lights of thelittle bridge, are a caress. And it is all for me! I am a child at histired play, I am the sleeping tramp, I am the young fellow with hisgirl. It is not the sentiment of the thing, received intellectually, thatmakes it mine. My being goes out into these other lives and becomesone with them. I feel them in myself. It is not thought thatconstitutes appreciation; it is emotion. 

Another glimpse, caught this time through a car window. Now it is awinter twilight. The flurry of snow has passed. The earth ispenetrated with blue light, suffused by it, merged in it, ever blue. Vague forms, still and shadowy, of hills and trees, soppy with light, are blue within the blue. The brief expanse of bay is deeplyluminous and within the pervasive tempering light resolves itselfinto the cool and solemn reaches of the sky which bends down andtouches it. Once more my spirit meets and mingles with the spirit ofthe landscape. By the harmony of nature's forms and twilight tones Iam brought into a larger harmony within myself and with the worldaround. 

All experience offers to us at any moment just such possibilities ofliving. The infinite and ever-changing expressiveness of nature atevery instant of day and night is ours to read if we will but lookupon it with the inner vision. The works of men in cities andcultivated fields, if we will see beyond the actual material, mayquicken our emotions until we enact in ourselves their story ofstruggle, of hopes and ambitions partly realized, of defeat or finaltriumph. The faces seen in a passing crowd bear each the record oflife lived, of lives like ours of joys or disappointments, lives of greataims or no aims at all, of unwritten heroisms, of hidden tragediesbravely borne, lives sordid and mean or generous and bright. Thepanorama of the world unrolls itself _for us. _ It is ours to experienceand live out in our own being according as we are able to feel. Justas the impulse to expression is common to all men, and all are artistspotentially, differing in the depth of their insight into life and in thedegree of emotion they have to express, so appreciation lies withinthe scope of all, and the measure of it to us as individuals isdetermined by our individual capability of response. 

Life means to each one of us what we are able to receive of it in"wise passiveness, " and then are able by the constructive force ofour individuality to shape into coherence and completeness. As thelandscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned inimagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so lifefurnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elementswe construct a meaning, each for himself. To one man an object orincident is commonplace and blank; to another it may be chargedwith significance and big with possibilities of fuller living. "In everyobject. " says Carlyle, "there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye seesin it what it brings means of seeing. " To _see_ is not merely toreceive an image upon the retina. The stimulation of the visual organbecomes sight properly only as the record is conveyed to theconsciousness. When I am reading a description of a sunset, there isan image upon my retina of a white page and black marks ofdifferent forms grouped in various combinations. But what I see isthe sunset. Momentarily to rest the eye upon a landscape is notreally to see it, for our mind may be quite otherwhere. We see thelandscape only as it becomes part of our conscious experience. Thebeauty of it is in us. A novelist conceives certain characters andassembles them in action and reaction, but it is we who in effectcreate the story as we read. We take up a novel, perhaps, which weread five years ago; we find in it now new significances and appeals. The book is the same; it is we who have changed. We bring to it theadded power of feeling of those five years of living. Art works notby information but by evocation. Appreciation is not reception butresponse. The artist must compel us to feel what he has felt, --notsomething else. But the scope of his message, with its overtones andsubtler implications, is limited by the rate of vibration to which weare attuned. 

 "All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?) All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. "

And again Whitman says, "A great poem is no finish to a man orwoman, but rather a beginning. " The final significance of both lifeand art is not won by the exercise of the intellect, but unfolds itselfto us in the measure that we feel. 

To illustrate the nature of appreciation and the power from whichappreciation derives, the power to project ourselves into the worldexternal to us, I spoke of the joy of living peculiar to the child and tothe childlike in heart. But that is not quite the whole of the story. Achild by force of his imagination and capacity of feeling is able topass beyond the limits of material, and he lives in a world ofexhaustless play and happiness; for him objects are but means andnot an end. To transcend thus the bounds of matter imposed by thesenses and to live by the power of emotion is the first condition ofappreciation. The second condition of appreciation is to feel andknow it, to become conscious of ourselves in our relation to theobject. To _live_ is the purpose of life; to be aware that we areliving is its fulfillment and the reward of appreciation. 

Experience has a double value. There is the instant of experienceitself, and then the reaction on it. A child is unconscious in his play;he is able to forget himself in it completely. At that moment he ismost happy. The instant of supreme joy is the instant of ecstasy, when we lose all consciousness of ourselves as separate and distinctindividualities. We are one with the whole. But experience does notyield us its fullest and permanent significance until, havingabandoned ourselves to the moment, we then react upon it andbecome aware of what the moment means. A group of children areat play. Without thought of themselves they are projected into theirsport; with their whole being merged in it, they are intensely living. A passer on the street stands and watches them. For the moment, inspirit he becomes a child with them. In himself he feels theabsorption and vivid reality to them of what they are doing. But hefeels also what they do not feel, and that is, what it means to be achild. Where they are unconscious he is conscious; and therefore heis able, as they are not, to distill the significance of their play. Thisrecognition makes possible the extension of his own life; for theman adds to himself the child. The reproach is sometimes broughtagainst Walt Whitman that the very people he writes about do notread him. The explanation is simple and illustrates the differencebetween the unconscious and the conscious reception of life. The"average man" who is the hero of Whitman's chants is not aware ofhimself as such. He goes about his business, content to do his work;and that makes up his experience. It is not the average man himself, but the poet standing outside and looking on with imaginativesympathy, who feels what it means to be an average man. It is thepoet who must "teach the average man the glory of his daily walkand trade. " It is not enough to be happy as children arehappy, --unconsciously. We must be happy and know it too. 

The attitude of appreciation is the attitude of response, --theprojection of ourselves into new and fuller ranges of feeling, withthe resultant extension of our personality and a larger grasp on life. We do not need to go far afield for experience; it is here and now. To-day is the only day, and every day is the best day. "The readinessis all. " But mere contact with the surface of life is not enough. Living does not consist in barely meeting the necessities of ourmaterial existence; to live is to feel vibrantly throughout our beingthe inner significance of things, their appeal and welcome to thespirit. This fair world of color and form and texture is but a showworld, after all, --this world which looms so near that we can see it, touch it, which comes to us out of the abysms of time and recedesinto infinitudes of space whither the imagination cannot follow it. The true and vital meaning of it resides within and discovers itself tous finally as emotion. Some of this meaning art reveals to us, and inthat measure it helps us to find ourselves. But art is only the means. The starting-point of the appreciation of art, and its goal, is theappreciation of life. The reward of living is the added ability to live. And life yields its fullest opportunities, its deepest tragedies, itshighest joys, all its infinite scope of feeling, to those who enter bythe gate of appreciation. 

III

TECHNIQUE AND THE LAYMAN

A PEASANT is striding across a field in the twilight shadow of ahill. Beyond, where the fold of the hill dips down into the field, another peasant is driving a team of oxen at a plow. The distantfigures are aglow with golden mellow light, the last light of day, which deepens the gloom of the shadowing hillside. The sower's capis pulled tight about his head, hiding under its shade the unseeingeyes. The mouth is brutal and grim. The heavy jaw flows down intothe thick, resistive neck. The right arm swings powerfully out, scattering the grain. The left is pressed to his body; the big, stubbornhand clutches close the pouch of seed. Action heroic, elemental; thedumb bearing of the universal burden. In the flex of the shoulder, the crook of the outstretched arm, the conquering onward stride, isexpressed all the force of that word of the Lord to the first toiler, "Inthe sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. "

Three men are standing before Millet's canvas. 

One recognizes the subject of the picture. With the pleasure ofrecognition he notes what the artist has here represented, and he isinterested in the situation. This is a peasant, and he is sowing hisgrain. So the onlooker stands and watches the peasant in hismovement, and he _thinks_ about the sower, recalling any sower hemay have read of or seen or known, his own sower rather than theone that Millet has seen and would show to him. This man's pleasurein the picture has its place. 

The second of the three men is attracted by the qualities of executionwhich the work displays, and he is delighted by what he calls the"actual beauty" of the painting. With eyes close to the canvas henotes the way Millet has handled his materials, his drawing, hiscolor, his surfaces and edges, all the knack of the brush-work, recognizing in his examination of the workmanship of the picturethat though Millet was a very great artist, he was not a great painter, that the reach of his ideas was not equaled by his technical skill. Then as the beholder stands back from the canvas to take in theensemble, his eye is pleased by the color-harmony, it rests lovinglyupon the balance of the composition, and follows with satisfactionthe rhythmic flow of line. His enjoyment is both intellectual andsensuous. And that too has its place. 

The third spectator, with no thought of the facts around which thepicture is built, not observing the technical execution as such, unconscious at the moment also of its merely sensuous charm, feelswithin himself, "_I_ am that peasant!" In his own spirit is enactedthe agelong world-drama of toil. He sees beyond the bare subject ofthe picture; the medium with all its power of sensuous appeal andsatisfaction becomes transparent. The beholder enters into the verybeing of the laborer; and as he identifies himself with this other lifeoutside of him, becoming one with it in spirit and feeling, he addsjust so much to his own experience. In his reception of the meaningof Millet's painting of the "Sower" he lives more deeply andabundantly. 

It is the last of these three men who stands in the attitude of full andtrue appreciation. The first of the three uses the picture simply as apoint of departure; his thought travels away from the canvas, and hebuilds up the entire experience out of his own knowledge and storeof associations. The second man comes a little nearer to appreciation, but even he falls short of full realization, for he stops at the actualmaterial work itself. His interest in the technical execution and hispleasure in the sensuous qualities of the medium do not carry himthrough the canvas and into the emotion which it was the artist'spurpose to convey. Only he truly appreciates the painting of the"Sower" who feels something of what Millet felt, partaking of theartist's experience as expressed by means of the picture, and makingit vitally his own. 

But before the appreciator can have brought himself to the point ofperception where he is able to respond directly to the significance ofart and to make the artist's emotion a part of his own emotionalexperience, he must needs have traveled a long and rather deviousway. Appreciation is not limited to the exercise of the intellect, as inthe recognition of the subject of a work of art and in the interestwhich the technically minded spectator takes in the artist's skill. Itdoes not end with the gratification of the senses, as with the delightin harmonious color and rhythmic line and ordered mass. Yet theintellect and the senses, though they are finally but the channelthrough which the artist's meaning flows to reach and rouse thefeelings, nevertheless play their part in appreciation. Between thespirit of the artist and the spirit of the appreciator standsthe individual work of art as the means of expression andcommunication. In the work itself emotion is embodied in materialform. The material which art employs for expression constitutes itslanguage. Certain principles govern the composition of the work, certain processes are involved in the making of it, and the resultpossesses certain qualities and powers. The processes which enterinto the actual fashioning of the work are both intellectual andphysical, requiring the exercise of the artist's mind in the planning ofthe work and in the directing of his hand; so far as the appreciatorconcerns himself with them, they address themselves to his intellect. The finished work in its material aspect possesses qualities whichare perceived by the senses and which have a power of sensuousdelight. Upon these processes and these qualities depends in part thetotal character of a work of art, and they must be reckoned with inappreciation. 

In his approach to any work of art, therefore, the layman isconfronted first of all with the problem of the language which thework employs. Architecture uses as its language the structuralcapabilities of its material, as wood or stone, bringing all togetherinto coherent and serviceable form. Poetry is phrased in words. Painting employs as its medium color and line and mass. At theoutset, in the case of any art, we have some knowledge of thesignification of its terms. Here is a painting of a sower. Out ofprevious experience of the world we easily recognize the subject ofthe picture. But whence comes the majesty of this rude peasant, thedignity august of this rough and toil-burdened laborer, his power tomove us? In addition to the common signification of its terms, then, language seems to have a further expressiveness, a new meaningimparted to it by the way in which the artist uses it. In a poem weknow the meaning of the words, but the _poetry_ of it, which wefeel rather than know, is the creation of the poet, wrought out of thefamiliar words by his cunning manipulation of them. 

 "The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. 

 "Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

A drama in twelve lines. These are words of common daily usage, every one, --for the most part aggressively so. But the romancewhich they effuse, the glamour which envelops the commonplaceincident as with an aura, is due to the poet's strategic selection of histerms, the one right word out of many words that offered, and hissubtle combination of his terms into melody and rhythm. Thewonder of the poet's craft is like the musician's, --

 "That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. "

A building rises before us; we recognize it as a building, and againeasily we infer the purpose which it serves, that it is a temple or adwelling. And then the beauty of it, a power to affect us beyond themere feet that it is a building, lays hold upon us, an influenceemanating from it which we do not altogether explain to ourselves. Simply in its presence we feel that we are pleased. The fact, thematerial which the artist uses, exists out there in nature. But thebeauty of the building, the majesty and power of the picture, thecharm of the poem, --this is the _art_ of the artist; and he wins hiseffects by the way in which he handles his materials, by his_technique. _ Some knowledge of technique, therefore, --not theartist's knowledge of it, but the ability to read the language of art asthe artist intends it to be read, --is necessary to appreciation. 

The hut which the traveler through a wild country put together toprovide himself shelter against storm and the night was in essence awork of art. The purpose of his effort was not the hut itself butshelter, to accomplish which he used the hut as his means. Theemotion of which the work was the expression, in this case thetraveler's consciousness of his need, embodied itself in a concreteform and made use of material. The hut which he conceived inresponse to his need became for him the subject or motive of hiswork. For the actual expression of his design he took advantage ofthe qualities of his material, its capabilities to combine thus and so;these inherent qualities were his medium. The material wood andstone which he employed were the vehicle of his design. The way inwhich he handled his vehicle toward the construction of the hut, availing himself of the qualities and capabilities of his material, might be called his technique. 

The sight of some landscape wakens in the beholder a vivid anddefinite emotion; he is moved by it to some form of expression. If heis a painter he will express his emotion by means of a picture, whichinvolves in the making of it certain elements and certain processes. The picture will present selected facts in the landscape; thelandscape, then, as constructed according to the design the painterhas conceived of it, becomes the motive or subject of his picture. The particular aspects of the landscape which the picture records areits color and its form. These qualities of color and form are thepainter's medium. An etching of the scene would use not color butline to express the artist's emotion in its presence; so line is themedium of etching. But "qualities" of objects are an abstractionunless they are embodied in material. In order, therefore, to give hismedium actual embodiment the painter uses pigment, as oil-color orwater-color or tempera, laid upon a surface, as canvas, wood, paper, plaster; this material pigment is his vehicle. The etcher employsinked scratches upon his plate of zinc or copper, bitten by acid orscratched directly by the needle; these marks of ink are the vehicleof etching. To the way in which the artist uses his medium forpractical expression and to his methods in the actual handling of hisvehicle is applied the term technique. The general conception of hispicture, its total design, the choice of motive, the selection of details, the main scheme of composition, --these belong to the great strategyof his art. The application of these principles in practice and theirmaterial working out upon his canvas are an affair of tactics and fallwithin the province of technique. 

The ultimate significance of a work of art is its content of emotion, the essential controlling idea, which inspires the work and gives itconcrete form. In its actual embodiment, the expressive power of thework resides in the medium. The medium of any art, then, as colorand mass in painting, line in drawing and etching, form in sculpture, sound in music, is its means of expression and constitutes itslanguage. Now the signification of language derives fromconvention. Line, for example, which may be so sensitive and soexpressive, is only an abstraction and does not exist in nature. Whatthe draughtsman renders as line is objectively in fact the boundaryof forms. A head, with all its subtleties of color and light and shade, may be represented by a pencil or charcoal drawing, black upon awhite surface. It is not the head which is black and white, butthe drawing. Our acceptance of the drawing as an adequaterepresentation of the head rests upon convention. Writing is anelementary kind of drawing; the letters of the alphabet wereoriginally pictures or symbols. So to-day written or printed lettersare arbitrary symbols of sounds, and grouped together in arbitrarycombinations they form words, which are symbols of ideas. Theword _sum_ stood to the old Romans for the idea "I am;" toEnglish-speaking people the word signifies a "total" and also a problem inarithmetic. A painting of a landscape does not attempt to imitate thescene; it uses colors and forms as symbols which serve forexpression. The meaning attaching to these symbols derives fromcommon acceptance and usage, Japanese painting, rendering theabstract spirit of movement of a wave, for example, rather than theconcrete details of its surface appearance, differs fundamentallyfrom the painting of the western world; it is none the less pregnantwith meaning for those who know the convention. To understandlanguage, therefore, we must understand the convention and acceptits terms. The value of language as a means of expression andcommunication depends upon the knowledge, common to the userand to the person addressed, of the signification of its terms. Itseffectiveness is determined by the way in which it is employed, involving the choice of terms, as the true line for the false ormeaningless one, the right value or note of color out of many thatwould almost do, the exact and specific word rather than the vagueand feeble; involving also the combination of terms into articulateforms. These ways and methods in the use of language are theconcern of technique. Technique, therefore, plays an important partin the creation and the ultimate fortunes of the artist's work. 

Just here arises a problem for the layman in his approach to art. Theman who says, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what Ilike, " is a familiar figure in our midst; of such, for the most part, the"public" of art is constituted. What he really means is, "I don't knowanything about technique, but art interests me. I read books, I go toconcerts and the theatre, I look at pictures; and in a way they havesomething for me. " If we make this distinction between art andtechnique, the matter becomes simplified. The layman does nothimself paint pictures or write books or compose music; his contactwith art is with the purpose of appreciation. Life holds somemeaning for him, as he is engaged in living, and there his chiefinterest lies. So art too has a message addressed to him, for art startswith life and in the end comes back to it. If art is not the expressionof vital feeling, in its turn communicating the feeling to theappreciator so that he makes it a real part of his experience of life, then the thing called art is only an exercise in dexterity for the makerand a pastime for the receiver; it is not art. But art is not quite thesame as life at first hand; it is rather the distillment of it. In order torender the significance of life as he has perceived and felt it, theartist selects and modifies his facts; and his work depends for itsexpressiveness upon the material form in which the emotion isembodied. The handling of material to the end of making itexpressive is an affair of technique. The layman may ask himself, then, To what extent is a knowledge of technique necessary forappreciation? And how may he win that knowledge?

On his road to appreciation the layman is beset with difficulties. Most of the talk about art which he hears is either the translation ofpicture or sonata into terms of literary sentiment or it is a discussionof the way the thing is done. He knows at least that painting is notthe same as literature and that music has its own province; herecognizes that the meaning of pictures is not literary but pictorial, the meaning of music is musical. But the emphasis laid upon themanner of execution confuses and disturbs him. At the outset hefrankly admits that he has no knowledge of technical processes assuch. Yet each art must be read in its own language, and each has itsspecial technical problems. He realizes that to master the techniqueof any single art is a career. And yet there are many arts, all ofwhich may have some message for him in their own kind. If he mustbe able to paint in order to enjoy pictures rightly, if he cannot listenintelligently at a concert without being able himself to compose or atleast to perform, his case for the appreciation of art seems hopeless. 

If the layman turns to his artist friends for enlightenment and a littlesympathy, it is possible he may encounter a rebuff. Artistssometimes speak contemptuously of the public. "A painter, " theysay, "paints for painters, not for the people; outsiders know nothingabout painting. " True, outsiders know nothing about painting, butperhaps they know a little about life. If art is more than intellectualsubtlety and manual skill, if art is the expression of something theartist has felt and lived, then the outsider has after all some standardfor his estimate of art and a basis for his enjoyment. He is able todetermine the value of the work to himself according as it expresseswhat he already knows about life or reveals to him fullerpossibilities of experience which he can make his own. He does notpretend to judge painting; but he feels that he has some right toappreciate art. In reducing all art to a matter of technique artiststhemselves are not quite consistent. My friends Jones, a painter, andSmith, a composer, do not withhold their opinion of this or thatnovel and poem and play, and they discourse easily on theperformances of Mr. James and Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Shaw; but Ihave no right to talk about the meaning to me of Jones's picture orSmith's sonata, for my business is with words, and therefore I cannothave any concern with painting or with music. To be sure, literatureuses as its vehicle the means of communication of daily life, namely, words. But the _art_ in literature, the interpretation of life which itgives us, as distinct from mere entertainment, is no more generallyappreciated than the art in painting. A man's technicalaccomplishment may be best understood and valued by hisfellow-workmen in the same craft; and often the estimate set by artists ontheir own work is referred to the qualities of its technical execution. As a classic instance, Raphael sent some of his drawings to AlbertDürer to "show him his hand. " So a painter paints for the painters. But the artist gives back a new fullness and meaning to life andaddresses all who live. That man is fortunate who does not allow hisprogress toward appreciation to be impeded by this confusion oftechnique with art. 

The emphasis which workers in any art place upon their powers ofexecution is for themselves a false valuation of technique, and ittends to obscure the layman's vision of essentials. Technique is not, as it would seem, the whole of art, but only a necessary part. A workof art in its creation involves two elements, --the idea and theexecution. The idea is the emotional content of the work; theexecution is the practical expressing of the idea by means of themedium and the vehicle. The idea of Millet's "Sower" is the emotionattending his conception of the laborer rendered in visual terms; theexecution of the picture is exhibited in the composition, the color, the drawing, and the actual brush-work. So, too, the artist himself isconstituted by two qualifications, which must exist together: first, the power of the subject over the artist; and second, the artist'spower over his subject. The first of these without the second resultssimply in emotion which does not come to expression as art. Thesecond without the first produces sham art; the semblance of art maybe fashioned by technical skill, but the life which inspires art iswanting. The artist, then, may be regarded in a dual aspect. He isfirst a temperament and a mind, capable of feeling intensely andable to integrate his emotions into unified coherent form; in thisaspect he is essentially the _artist_. Secondly, for the expression ofhis idea he brings to bear on the execution of his work his commandof the medium, his intellectual adroitness and his manual skill; inthis aspect he is the _technician_. Every artist has a special kind ofmeans with which he works, requiring knowledge and dexterity; butit may be assumed that in addition to his ability to express himselfhe has something to say. We may test a man's merit as a painter byhis ability to paint. As an artist his greatness is to be judged withreference to the greatness of his ideas; and in his capacity as artisthis technical skill derives its value from the measure in which it isadequate to their expression. In the case of an accomplished pianistor violinist we take his proficiency of technique for granted, and weask, What, with all this power of expression at his command, has heto say? In his rendering of the composer's work what has he of hisown to contribute by way of interpretation? Conceding at once to Mr. Sargent his supreme competence as a painter, his consummatemastery of all his means, we ask, What has he seen in this man orthis woman before him worthy of the exercise of such skill? In termsof the personality he is interpreting, what has he to tell us of thebeauty and scope of life and to communicate to us of largeremotional experience? The worth of technique is determined, not byits excellence as such, but by its efficiency for expression. 

It is difficult for an outsider to understand why painters, writers, sculptors, and the rest, who are called artists in distinction from theordinary workman, should make so much of their skill. Any manwho works freely and with joy takes pride in his performance. Andinstinctively we have a great respect for a good workman. Skill isnot confined to those who are engaged in what is conventionallyregarded as art. Indeed, the distinction implied in favor of "art" isunjust to the wide range of activities of familiar daily life into whichthe true art spirit may enter. A bootblack who polishes his shoes aswell as he can, not merely because he is to be paid for it, though toohe has a right to his pay, but because that is his work, his means ofexpression, even he works in the spirit of an artist. Extraordinaryskill is often developed by those who are quite outside the pale of art. In a circus or music-hall entertainment we may see a man throwhimself from a trapeze swinging high in air, and after executing adouble somersault varied by complex lateral gyrations, catch theextended arms of his partner, who is hanging by his knees onanother flying bar. Or a man leaning backwards over a chair shootsat a distance of fifty paces a lump of sugar from between theforeheads of two devoted assistants. Such skill presupposesintelligence. Of the years of training and practice, of the sacrificeand the power of will, that have gone to the accomplishment of thisresult, the looker-on can form but little conception. These men arenot considered artists. Yet a painter who uses his picture to exhibit askill no more wonderful than theirs would be grieved to beaccounted an acrobat or a juggler. Only such skill as is employed inthe service of expression is to be reckoned with as an element in art;and in art it is of value not for its own sake but as it serves itspurpose. The true artist subordinates his technique to expression, justly making it a means and not the end. He cares for thesignificance of his idea more than for his sleight of hand; he effaceshis skill for his art. 

A recognition of the skill exhibited in the fashioning of a work of art, however, if seen in its right relation to the total scope of the work, isa legitimate source of pleasure. Knowledge of any subject brings itssatisfactions. To understand with discerning insight the workings ofany process, whether it be the operation of natural laws, as inastronomy or chemistry, whether it be the construction of alocomotive, the playing of a game of foot-ball, or the painting of apicture, to see the "wheels go round" and know the how and thewherefore, --undeniably this is a source of pleasure. In theunderstanding of technical processes, too, there is a further occasionof enjoyment, differing somewhat from the satisfaction whichfollows in the train of knowledge. 

 "There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know, "

says the poet Cowper. There is a pleasure in the sense of difficultiesovercome known only to those who have tried to overcome them. But such enjoyment--the pleasure which comes with enlightenedrecognition and the pleasure of mastery and triumph--derives froman intellectual exercise and is not to be confounded with the fullappreciation of art. Art, finally, is not the "how" but the "what" interms of its emotional significance. Our pleasure in the result, in thedesign itself, is not the same as our pleasure in the skill thatproduced the work. The design, with the message that it carries, notthe making of it, is the end of art. 

Too great preoccupation with technique conflicts with fullappreciation. To fix the attention upon the manner of expression isto lose the meaning. A style which attracts notice to itself is in so farforth bad style, because it defeats its own end, which is expression;but beyond this, our interest in technical execution is purelyintellectual, whereas art reaches the emotions. At the theatre a criticsits unmoved; dispassionately he looks upon the personages of thedrama, as they advance, retreat, and countermarch, little by littleyielding up their secret, disclosing all the subtle interplay of humanmotives. From the heights of his knowledge the critic surveys thespectacle; with an insight born of his learning, he penetrates themysteries of the playwright's craft. He knows what thought and skillhave gone into this result; he knows the weary hours of toil, thedifficulties of invention and selection, the heroic rejections, theintricacies of construction, the final triumph. He sees it all from thepoint of view of the master-workman, and sympathetically heapplauds his success; his recognition of what has been accomplishedis his pleasure. But all the while he has remained on the outside. Notfor a moment has he become a party to the play. He brings to itnothing of his own feeling and power of response. There has beenno union of his spirit with the artist's spirit, --that union in which awork of art achieves its consummation. The man at his side, with noknowledge or thought of how the effect has been won, surrendershimself to the illusion. These people on the stage are more intenselyand vividly real to him than in life itself; the artist has distilled thesignificance of the situation and communicates it to him as emotion. The man's reaction is not limited to the exercise of his intellect, --hegives himself. In the experience which the dramatist conveys to himbeautifully, shaping discords into harmony and disclosing theirmeaning for the spirit, he lives. 

A true artist employs his medium as an instrument of expression;and he values his own technical skill in the handling of it accordingto the measure that he is enabled thereby to express himself moreeffectively. On the layman's part so much knowledge of technique isnecessary as makes it possible for him to understand the artist'slanguage and the added expressiveness wrought out of language bythe artist's cunning use of it. And such knowledge is not beyond hisreach. 

In order to understand the meaning of any language we must firstunderstand the signification of its terms, and then we must knowsomething of the ways in which they may be combined intoarticulate forms of expression. The terms of speech are words; inorder to speak coherently and articulately we must group words intosentences according to the laws of the tongue to which they belong. Similarly, every art has its terms, or "parts of speech, " and itsgrammar, or the ways in which the terms are combined. The termsof painting are color and form, the terms of music are tones. Colorsand forms are brought together into harmony and balance that bytheir juxtaposition they may be made expressive and beautiful. Tones are woven into a pattern according to principles of harmony, melody, and rhythm, and they become music. When technique isturned to such uses, not for the vainglory of a virtuoso, but for theservice of the artist in his earnest work of expression, then itidentifies itself with art. 

A knowledge of the signification of the terms of art the layman maywin for himself by a recognition of the expressive power of allmaterial and by sensitiveness to it. The beholder will not respond tothe appeal of a painting of a landscape unless he has himself feltsomething of the charm or glory of landscape in nature; he will notquicken and expand to the dignity or force caught in rigid marbletriumphantly made fluent in statue or relief until he has realized forhimself the significance of form and movement which exhales fromevery natural object. Gesture is a universal language. The mightyburden of meaning in Millet's picture of the "Sower" is carried bythe gesture of the laborer as he swings across the background offield and hill, whose forms also are expressive; here, too, theelemental dignity of form and movement is reinforced by thesolemnity of the color. Gesture is but one of nature's characterswherewith she inscribes upon the vivid, shifting surface of the worldher message to the spirit of man. A clue to the understanding of theterms of art, therefore, is found in the layman's own appreciation ofthe emotional value of all objects of sense and their multitudinouspower of utterance, --the sensitive decision of line, the might ordelicacy of form, the splendor and subtlety of color, the magic ofsound, the satisfying virtue of harmony in whatever embodiment, allthe beauty of nature, all the significance of human life. And thisappreciation is to be won largely by the very experience of it. Themore we feel, the greater becomes our power for deeper feeling. Every emotion to which we thrill is the entrance into larger capacityof emotion. We may allow for growth and trust to the inevitableworking of its laws. In the appreciation of both life and art theindividual may be his own teacher by experience. 

The qualities of objects with their inherent emotional valuesconstitute the raw material of art, to be woven by the artist into afabric of expressive form and texture. Equipped with a knowledge ofthe terms of any art, the layman has yet to understand something ofthe ways in which the terms may be combined. Every artist has hisidiom or characteristic style. Rembrandt on the flat surface of hiscanvas secures the illusion of form in the round by a system of lightand shade; modeling is indicated by painting the parts in greaterrelief in light and the parts in less relief in shadow. Manet rendersthe relief of form by a system of "values, " or planes of more and lesslight. The local color of objects is affected by the amount of lightthey receive and the distance an object or part of an object is fromthe eye of the spectator. Manet paints with degrees of light, and hewins his effects, not by contrasts of color, but by subtle modulationswithin a given hue. Landscape painters before the middle of thenineteenth century, working with color in masses, secured a totalharmony by bringing all their colors, mixed upon the palette, intothe same key. The "Luminarists, " like Claude Monet, work withlittle spots or points of color laid separately upon the canvas; thefusion of these separate points into the dominant tone is made by theeye of the beholder. The characteristic effect of a work of art isdetermined by the way in which the means are employed. Someknowledge, therefore, of the artist's aims as indicated in his methodof working is necessary to a full understanding of what he wants tosay. 

In his effort to understand for his own purposes of appreciation whatthe artist has accomplished by his technique, the layman may first ofall distinguish between processes and results. A landscape in natureis beautiful to the beholder because he perceives in it some harmonyof color and form which through the eye appeals to the emotions. His vision does not transmit every fact in the landscape;instinctively his eye in its sweep over meadow and trees and hillselects those details that compose. By this act of _integration_ he isfor himself in so far forth an artist. If he were a painter he wouldknow what elements in the landscape to put upon his canvas. But hehas no skill in the actual practice of drawing and of handling thebrush, no knowledge of mixing colors and matching tones; heunderstands nothing of perspective and "values" and the relations oflight and shade. He knows only what he sees, that the landscape ashe sees it is beautiful; and equally he recognizes as beautiful thepresentment of it upon canvas. He is ignorant of the technicalproblems with which the painter in practice has had to contend inorder to reach this result; it is the result only that is of concern tohim in so far as it is or is not what he desires. The painter's color issignificant to him, not because he knows how to mix the color forhimself, but because that color in nature has spoken to himunutterable things and he has responded to it. The layman cannotmake a sunset and he cannot paint a picture; but he can enjoy both. So he cares, then, rather for what the painter has done than for howhe has done it, because the processes do not enter into his ownexperience. The picture has a meaning for him in the measure that itexpresses what he perceives and feels, and that is the beauty of thelandscape. 

Any knowledge of technical processes which the layman mayhappen to possess may be a source of intellectual pleasure. But forappreciation, only so much understanding of technique is necessaryas enables him to receive the message of a given work in the degreeof expressiveness which the artist by his use of his medium hasattained. A clue to this understanding may come to him by intuition, by virtue of his own native insight and intelligence. He may gain itby reading or by instruction. He may go out and win it by intrepidquestioning of those who know; and it is to be hoped that such willbe very patient with him, for after all even a layman has the right tolive. Once started on the path, then, in the mysteries of art as in thewhole complex infinite business of living, he becomes his own tutorby observation and experience; and he may develop into a fullerknowledge in obedience to the law of growth. Each partial clue tounderstanding brings him a step farther on his road; each newglimmer of insight beckons him to ultimate illumination. Thoughbaffled at the outset, yet patient under disappointment, undauntedlyhe pushes on in spite of obstacles, until he wins his way at last totrue appreciation. 

If the layman seeks a standard by which to test the value of anytechnical method, he finds it in the success of the work itself. Everymethod is to be judged in and for itself on its own merits, and not asbetter or worse than some other method. Individually we may preferVelasquez to Frans Hals; Whistler may minister to our personalsatisfaction in larger measure than Mr. Sargent; we may enjoy Mr. James better than Stevenson; Richard Strauss may stir us moredeeply than Brahms. We do not affirm thereby that impressionism isinherently better than realism, or that subtlety is more to be desiredthan strength; the psychological novel is not necessarily greater thanromance; because of our preference "programme music" is nottherefore more significant than "absolute music. " The greatness ofan artist is established by the greatness of his ideas, adequatelyexpressed. And the value of any technical method is determined byits own effectiveness for expression. 

There is, then, no invariable standard external to the work itself bywhich to judge technique. For no art is final. A single work is themanifestation of beauty as the individual artist has conceived or feltit. The perception of what is beautiful varies from age to age andwith each person. So, too, standards of beauty in art change witheach generation; commonly they are deduced from the practice ofpreceding artists. Classicism formulates rules from works that havecome to be recognized as beautiful, and it requires of the artistconformity to these rules. By this standard, which it regards asabsolute, it tries a new work, and it pretends to adjudge the workgood or bad according as it meets the requirements. Then a Titanemerges who defies the canons, wrecks the old order, and in his ownway, to the despair or scorn of his contemporaries, creates a workwhich the generation that follows comes to see is beautiful. "Everyauthor, " says Wordsworth, "as far as he is great and at the same time_original, _ has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to beenjoyed. " Wordsworth in his own generation was ridiculed; Millet, when he ceased painting nudes for art-dealers' windows andventured to express himself, faced starvation. Every artist is in somemeasure an innovator; for his own age he is a romanticist. But theromanticist of one age becomes a classic for the next; and hisperformance in its turn gives laws to his successors. Richard Strauss, deriving in some sense from Wagner, makes the older man seem aclassic and conservative. Then a new mind again is raised up, a newtemperament, with new needs; and these shape their own adequatenew expression. "The cleanest expression, " says Whitman, "is thatwhich finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one. " As all life isgrowth, as there are no bounds to the possibilities of humanexperience, so the workings of the art-impulse cannot becompressed within the terms of a hard and narrow definition, andany abstract formula for beauty is in the very nature of thingsforedoomed to failure. No limit can be set to the forms in whichbeauty may be made manifest. 

"The true poets are not followers of beauty, but the august mastersof beauty. " And Whitman's own verse is a notable example of a newtechnique forged in response to a new need of expression. Dealingas he did with the big basic impulses of common experienceaccessible to all men, Whitman needed a largeness and freedom ofexpression which he did not find in the accepted and current poeticforms. To match the limitlessly diversified character of the people, occupations, and aspirations of "these States, " as yet undevelopedbut vital and inclosing the seed of unguessed-at possibilities, to tallythe fluid, indeterminate, outward-reaching spirit of democracy and anew world, the poet required a medium of corresponding scope andflexibility, all-inclusive and capable of endless modulation andvariety. Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not thatWhitman did not draw for his resources on the great treasury ofworld-literature; and he profited by the efforts and achievement ofpredecessors. But the form in his hands and as he uses it is new. Whatever we may think of the success of his total accomplishment, there are very many passages to which we cannot deny the name ofpoetry. Nor did Whitman work without conscious skill anddeliberate regard for technical processes. His note-books and papersreveal the extreme calculation and pains with which he wrote, beginning with the collection of synonyms applying to his idea andmood, and so building them up gradually, with many erasures, corrections, and substitutions, into the finished poem. Much of thevigor of his style is due to his escape from conventional literaryphrase-making and his return to the racy idiom of common life. Hisverse, apparently inchoate and so different from classical poeticforms, is shaped with a cunning incredible skill. And more than that, it is art, in that it is not a bare statement of fact, but communicates tous the poet's emotion, so that we realize the emotion in ourselves. When his purpose is considered, it is seen that no other techniquewas possible. His achievement proves that a new need creates itsown means of expression. 

What is true of Whitman in respect to his technique is true in greateror less degree of every artist, working in any form. It is true ofPheidias, of Giotto and Michelangelo and Rembrandt, of Dante andShakespeare, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Monet, of Rodin, in fine, from the beginnings of art to the day that now is. All have createdout of existing forms of expression their own idiom and way ofworking. Every artist owes something to his predecessors, butlanguage is re-created in the hands of each master and becomes anew instrument. There can be then no single formula for technicalmethod nor any fixed and final standard of judgment. 

An artist himself is justified from his own point of view in hisconcern with technique, for upon his technique depends hiseffectiveness of expression. His practice serves to keep alive thelanguage and to develop its resources. Art in its concretemanifestations is an evolution. From Velasquez through Goya toManet and Whistler is a line of inheritance. But a true artistrecognizes that technique is only a means. As an artist he is seekingto body forth in external form the vision within, and he tries to makehis medium "faithful to the coloring of his own spirit. " Every artistworks out his characteristic manner; but the progress must be fromwithin outwards. Toward the shaping of his own style he is helpedby the practice of others, but he is helped and not hindered only inso far as the manner of others can be made genuinely the expressionof his own feeling. Direct borrowing of a trick of execution andservile imitation of a style have no place in true art. A painter whowould learn of Velasquez should study the master's technique, notthat in the end he may paint like Velasquez, but that he maydiscover just what it was that the master, by means of his individualstyle, was endeavoring to express, and so bring to bear on his ownenvironment here in America to-day the same ability to see and thesame power of sympathetic and imaginative penetration thatVelasquez brought to his environment at the court of seventeenth-centurySpain. The way to paint like Velasquez is to be Velasquez. No manis a genius by imitation. Every man may seek to be a masterin his own right. Technique does not lead; it follows. Style is theman. 

From within outwards. Art is the expression of sincere and vitalfeeling; the material thing, picture, statue, poem, which the artistconjures into being is only a means. The moment art is worshipedfor its own sake, that moment decadence begins. "No one, " saysLeonardo, "will ever be a great painter who takes as his guide thepaintings of other men. " In general the history of art exhibits thiscourse. In the beginning arises a man of deep and genuine feeling, the language at whose command, however, has not been developedto the point where it is able to carry the full burden of his meaning. Such a man is Giotto; and we have the "burning messages ofprophecy delivered by the stammering lips of infants. " In thegenerations which supervene, artists with less fervor of spirit butwith growing skill of hand, increased with each inheritance, turntheir efforts to the development of their means. The names of thisperiod of experiment and research are Masaccio, Uccello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio. At length, when the fullness of time is come, emergesthe master-mind, of original insight and creative power. Heir to thetechnical achievements of his predecessors, he is able to give histranscendent idea its supremely adequate expression. Content isperfectly matched by form. On this summit stand Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo. Then follow the Carracci, Domenichino, Guercino, Guido Reni, Carlo Dolci, men who mistake the master'smanner for his meaning. The idea, the vital principle, has spent itself. The form only is left, and that is elaborated into the exuberance ofdecay. Painters find their impulse no longer in nature and life but inpaint. Technique is made an end in itself. And art is dead, to bereborn in another shape and guise. 

The relation of technique to appreciation in the experience of thelayman begins now to define itself. Technique serves the artist forefficient expression; an understanding of it is of value to the laymanin so far as the knowledge helps him to read the artist's language andthus to receive his message. Both for artist and for layman techniqueis only a means. Out of his own intelligent and patient experiencethe layman can win his way to an understanding of methods; and hisstandard of judgment, good enough for his own purposes, is thedegree of expressiveness which the work of art, by virtue of itsqualities of execution, is able to achieve. Skill may be enjoyedintellectually for its own sake as skill; in itself it is not art. Technique is most successful when it is least perceived. _Ars celareartem:_ art reveals life and conceals technique. We must understandsomething of technique and then forget it in appreciation. When wethrill to the splendor and glory of a sunset we are not thinking of thelaws of refraction. Appreciation is not knowledge, but emotion. 

IV

THE VALUE OF THE MEDIUM

AS I swing through the wide country in the freshness and fullness ofa blossoming, sun-steeped morning in May, breathing the breath ofthe fields and the taller by inches for the sweep of the hills and thereaches of sky above my head, every nerve in my body is alive withsensation and delight. My joy is in the fragrance of earth, theingratiating warmth of the fresh morning, the spacious, inclosing air. My pleasure in this direct contact with the landscape is a physicalreaction, to be enjoyed only by the actual experience of it; it cannotbe reproduced by any other means; it can be recalled by memory butfaintly and as the echo of sensation. There is, however, somethingelse in the landscape which can be reproduced; and this recall mayseem more glorious than the original in nature. There are elementsin the scene which a painter can render for me more intensely andvividly than I perceived them for myself. These elements embodythe value that the landscape has for my emotions. The scene appealsto something within me which lies beyond my actual physicalcontact with it and the mere sense of touch. The harmony that theeye perceives in these open fields, the gracious line of trees alongthe stream's edge, the tossing hills beyond, and the arch of the bluesky above impregnating the earth with light, is communicated to myspirit, and I feel that this reach of radiant country is an extension ofmy own personality. A painter, by the manipulation of his color andline and mass, concentrates and intensifies the harmony of it and soheightens its emotional value. The meaning of the scene for thespirit is conveyed in terms of color and mass. 

Color and mass are the painter's medium, his language. The finalimport of art is the _idea, _ the emotional content of the work. On hisway to the expression of his idea the artist avails himself of materialto give his feeling concrete actuality and visible or audiblerealization. He paints a picture, glorious in color and compelling inthe concentration of its massing; he carves a statue, noble in form orsubtly rhythmic; he weaves a pattern of harmonious sounds. Hevalues objects not for their own sake but for the energies theypossess, --their power to rouse his whole being into heightenedactivity. And they have this power by virtue of their materialqualities, as color and form or sound. A landscape is gay inspringtime or sad in autumn. The difference in its effect upon us isnot due to our knowledge that it is spring or autumn and ourconsciousness of the associations appropriate to each season. Theemotional quality of the scene is largely a matter of its color. Let thespring landscape be shrouded in gray mist sifting down out of grayskies, and we are sad. Let the autumn fields and woodland sparkleand dance in the crisp golden sunlight, and our blood dances withthem and we want to shout from full lungs. In music the major keywakens a different emotion from the minor. The note of a violin isvirgin in quality; the voice of the 'cello is the voice of experience. The distinctive emotional value of each instrument inheres in thecharacter of its sound. These qualities of objects art uses as itslanguage. 

Though all art is one in essence, yet each art employs a medium ofits own. In order to understand a work in its scope and truesignificance we must recognize that an artist thinks and feels interms of his special medium. His impulse to create comes with hisvision, actual or imaginative, of color or form, and his thought istransmitted to his hand, which shapes the work, without theintervention of words. The nature of his vehicle and the conditionsin which he works determine in large measure the details of the formwhich his idea ultimately assumes. Thus a potter designs his vesselfirst with reference to its use and then with regard to his material, itscharacter and possibilities. As he models his plastic clay upon awheel, he naturally makes his bowl or jug round rather than sharplyangular. A pattern for a carpet, to be woven by a system of littlesquares into the fabric, will have regard for the conditions in whichit is to be rendered, and it will differ in the character of its lines andmasses from a pattern for a wall-paper, which may be printed fromblocks. The designer in stained glass will try less to make a picturein the spirit of graphic representation than to produce an harmoniouscolor-pattern whose outlines will be guided and controlled by thepossibilities of the "leading" of the window. The true artist uses theconditions and very limitations of his material as his opportunity. The restraint imposed by the sonnet form is welcomed by the poet ascompelling a collectedness of thought and an intensity of expressionwhich his idea might not achieve if allowed to flow in freer channels. The worker in iron has his triumphs; the goldsmith has his. Thelimitations of each craft open to it effects which are denied to theother. There is an art of confectionery and an art of sculpture. Thedesigner of frostings who has a right feeling for his art will notemulate the sculptor and strive to model in the grand style; thesculptor who tries to reproduce imitatively the textures of lace orother fabrics and who exuberates in filigrees and fussinesses so fardeparts from his art as to rival the confectioner. In the degree that apainter tries to wrench his medium from its right use and functionand attempts to make his picture tell a story, which can better be toldin words, to that extent he is unfaithful to his art. Painting, workingas it does with color and form, should confine itself to theexpression of emotion and idea that can be rendered visible. On thepart of the appreciator, likewise, the emotion expressed in one kindof medium is not to be translated into any other terms without adifference. Every kind of material has its special value forexpression. The meaning of pictures, accordingly, is limitedprecisely to the expressive power of color and form. The impressionwhich a picture makes upon the beholder maybe phrased by him inwords, which are his own means of expression; but he suggests theimport of the picture only incompletely. If I describe in wordsMillet's painting of the "Sower" according to my understanding of it, I am telling in my own terms what the picture means to me. What itmeant to Millet, the full and true significance of the situation as thepainter felt it, is there expressed upon his canvas in terms of visibleaspect; and correspondingly, Millet's meaning is fully and trulyreceived in the measure that we feel in ourselves the emotion rousedby the sight of his color and form. 

The essential content of a work of art, therefore, is modified in itseffect upon us by the kind of medium in which it is presented. If anidea phrased originally in one medium is translated into the terms ofanother, we have _illustration. _ Turning the pages of an "illustrated"novel, we come upon a plate showing a man and a woman againstthe background of a divan, a chair, and a tea-table. The man, in afrock coat, holding a top hat in his left hand, extends his right handto the woman, who has just risen from the table. The legend underthe picture reads, "Taking his hat, he said good-by. " Here theillustrator has simply supplied a visible image of what wassuggested in the text; the drawing has no interest beyond helping thereader to that image. It is a statement of the bare fact in other terms. In the hands of an artist, however, the translation may take on avalue of its own, changing the original idea, adding to it, andbecoming in itself an independent work of art. This value derivesfrom the form into which the idea is translated. The frescoes of theSistine Chapel are only sublime illustration; but how little of theirpower attaches to the subject they illustrate, and how much of theirsublimity lies in the painter's rendering! Conversely, an example ofthe literary interpretation of a picture is Walter Pater's description ofLeonardo's Mona Lisa. 

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, isexpressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come todesire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world arecome, " and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought outfrom within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strangethoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for amoment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautifulwomen of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughtsand experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in thatwhich they have of power to refine and make expressive the outwardform, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of themiddle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, thereturn of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older thanthe rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been deadmany times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been adiver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; andtrafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother ofMary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded thechanging lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. Thefancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousandexperiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived theidea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, allmodes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as theembodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. 

It is Leonardo's conception, yet with a difference. Here the critic haswoven about the subject an exquisite tissue of associations, a wholewide background of knowledge and thought and feeling which it laybeyond the painter's range to evoke; but the critic is denied thevividness, the immediateness and intimate warmth of vital contact, which the painter was able to achieve. The Lisa whom Leonardoshows us and the Lisa whom Pater interprets for us are the same inessence yet different in their power to affect us. The differenceresulting from the kind of medium employed is well exemplified byRossetti's "Blessed Damozel. " The fundamental concept of bothpoem and picture is identical, but picture and poem have each itsdistinctive range and limitations and its own peculiar appeal. If wecancel the common element in the two, the difference remainingmakes it possible for us to realize how much of the effect of a workof art inheres in the medium itself. Painting may be an aid toliterature in that it helps us to more vivid images; the literaryinterpretation of pictures or music gives to the works with which itdeals an intellectual definiteness. But the functions peculiar to eachart are not to be confounded nor the distinctions obscured. 

Pictures are not a substitute for literature, and their true meaning isfinally not to be translated into words. Their beauty is a visiblebeauty; the emotions they rouse are such as can be conveyedthrough the sense of sight. In the end they carry their messagesufficingly as color and mass. Midway, however, our enjoymentmay be complicated by other elements which have their place in ourtotal appreciation. Thus a painting of a landscape may appeal to usover and above its inherent beauty because we are already, out ofactual experience, familiar with the scene it represents, and the sightof it wakens in our memory a train of pleasant allied associations. Aruined tower, in itself an exquisite composition in color and line andmass, may gather about it suggestions of romance, elementalpassions and wild life, and may epitomize for the beholder thewhole Middle Age. Associated interest, therefore, may besentimental or intellectual. It may be sensuous also, appealing toother senses than those of sight. The sense of touch plays a largepart in our enjoyment of the world. We like the "feel" of objects, thecatch of raw silk, the chill smoothness of burnished brass, the thicksoftness of mists, the "amorous wet" of green depths of sea. Thesenses of taste and smell may be excited imaginatively andcontribute to our pleasure. Winslow Homer's breakers bring back tous the salt fragrance of the ocean, and in the presence of these whitemad surges we feel the stinging spray in our faces and we taste thecosmic exhilaration of the sea-wind. But the final meaning of apicture resides in the total harmony of color and form, a harmonyinto which we can project our whole personality and which itselfconstitutes the emotional experience. 

All language in its material aspect has a sensuous value, as thewealth of color of Venetian painting, the sumptuousness ofRenaissance architecture, the melody of Mr. Swinburne's verse, thegem-like brilliance of Stevenson's prose, the all-inclusivesensuousness, touched with sensuality, of Wagner's music-dramas. Because of the charm of beautiful language there are manyart-lovers who regard the sensuous qualities of the work itself asmaking up the entire experience. Apart from any consideration ofintention or expressiveness, the material _thing_ which the artist'stouch summons into form is held to be "its own excuse for being. "

This order of enjoyment, valid as far as it goes, falls short ofcomplete appreciation. It does not pass the delight one has in theradiance of gems or the glowing tincture of some fabric. Theelement of meaning does not enter in. There is a beauty for the eyeand a beauty for the mind. The qualities of material may givepleasure to the senses; the object embodying these qualities becomesbeautiful only as it is endowed with a significance wakened in thehuman spirit. A landscape, says Walter Crane, "owes a great part ofits beauty to the harmonious relation of its leading lines, or to certainpleasant contrasts, or a certain impressiveness of form and mass, andat the same time we shall perceive that this linear expression isinseparable from the sentiment or emotion suggested by thatparticular scene. " In the appreciation of art, to stop with thesensuous appeal of the medium is to mistake means for an end. "Rhyme, " says the author of "Intentions, " "in the hands of a realartist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, buta spiritual element of thought and passion also. " An artist's color, glorious or tender, is only a symbol and manifestation to sense of hisemotion. At first glance Titian's portrait of the "Man with the Glove"is an ineffable color-harmony. But truly seen it is infinitely more. Bymeans of color and formal design Titian has embodied here hisvision of superb young manhood; by the expressive power of hismaterial symbols he has rendered visible his sense of dignity, offineness, of strength in reserve. The color is beautiful because hisidea was beautiful. Through the character of this young man asrevealed and interpreted by the artist, the beholder is brought intocontact with a vital personality, whose influence is communicated tohim; in the appreciation of Titian's message he sees and feels andlives. 

The value of the medium resided not in the material itself but in itspower for expression. When language is elaborated at the expense ofthe meaning, we have in so far forth sham art. It should be easy todistinguish in art between what is vital and what is mechanical. Themechanical is the product of mere execution and calls attention tothe manner. The vital is born out of inspiration, and the living ideatransmutes its material into emotion. Too great an effort atrealization defeats the intended illusion, for we think only of theskill exercised to effect the result, and the operation of the intellectinhibits feeling. In the greatest art the medium is least perceived, andthe beholder stands immediately in the presence of the artist's idea. The material is necessarily fixed and finite; the idea struggles to freeitself from its medium and untrammeled to reach the spirit. It ismind speaking to mind. However complete the material expressionmay seem, it is only a part of what the artist would say; imaginationtranscends the actual. In the art which goes deepest into life, themedium is necessarily inadequate. The artist fashions his work in asublime despair as he feels how little of the mighty meaning withinhim he is able to convey. In the greatest works rightly seen themedium becomes transparent. Within the Sistine Chapel the visitor, when once he has yielded to the illusion, is not conscious of plastersurface and pigment; indeed, he hardly sees color and design as suchat all; through them he looks into the immensity of heaven, peopledwith gods and godlike men. Consummate acting is that which makesthe spectator forget that it is acting. The part and the player becomeone. The actor, in himself and in the words he utters, is theunregarded vehicle of the dramatist's idea. In a play like Ibsen's"Ghosts, " the stage, the actors, the dialogue merge and fall away, and the overwhelming meaning stands revealed in its completeintensity. As the play opens, it cuts out a segment from the chaos ofhuman life; step by step it excludes all that is unessential, stroke bystroke with an inevitableness that is crushing, it converges to thegreat one-thing that the dramatist wanted to say, until at the end thespectator, conscious no longer of the medium but only of the ideaand all-resolving emotion, bows down before its overmasteringforce with the cry, "What a _mind_ is there!"

In the art which most completely achieves expression the medium isnot perceived as distinct from the emotion of which the medium isthe embodiment. In order to render expressive the materialemployed in its service, art seeks constantly to identify means andend, to make the form one with the content. The wayfarer out of hisneed of shelter built a hut, using the material which chance gave intohis hand and shaping his design according to his resources; thepurpose of his work was not the hut itself but shelter. So the artist inany form is impelled to creation by his need of expression; the thingwhich he creates is not the purpose and end of his effort, but onlythe means. Each art has its special medium, and each medium has itspeculiar sensuous charm and its own kind of expressiveness. Thispower of sensuous delight is incidental to the real beauty of thework; and that beauty is the message the work is framed to conveyto the spirit. In the individual work, the inspiring and shaping ideaseeks so to fuse its material that we feel the idea could not have beenphrased in any other way as we surrender to its ultimate appeal, --thesum of the emotional content which gave it birth and in which itreaches its fulfillment. 

V

THE BACKGROUND OF ART

SCENE: The main hall of the Accademia in Venice. 

Time: Noon of a July day. 

Dramatis personae: A guide; two drab-colored and tired men; agroup of women, of various ages, equipped with red-covered littlevolumes, and severally expressive of great earnestness, wide-eyedrapture, and giggles. 

_The guide, in strident, accentless tones:_ Last work of Titian. Ninety-nine years old. He died of smallpox. 

_A woman:_ Is that it?

_A high voice on the outskirts:_ I'm going to get one for fortydollars. 

_Another voice:_ Well, I'm not going to pay more than fifty formine. 

_A straggler:_ Eliza, look at those people. Oh, you missed it!_(Stopping suddenly?)_ My, isn't that lovely!

_Chorus:_ Yes, that's Paris Bordone. Which one is that? He hasmagnificent color. 

_The guide:_ The thing you want to look at is the five figures infront. 

_A voice:_ Oh, that's beautiful. I love that. 

_A man:_ Foreshortened; well, I should say so! But I say, you can'tremember all these pictures. 

_The other man:_ Let's get out of this!

_The guide, indicating a picture of the Grand Canal:_ This one hasbeen restored. 

_A girl's voice:_ Why, that's the house where we are staying!

_The guide:_ The next picture . . . 

The squad shuffles out of range. 

This little comedy, enacted in fact and here faithfully reported, is notwithout its pathos. These people are "studying art. " They really wantto understand, and if possible, to enjoy. They have visited galleriesand seen many pictures, and they will visit other galleries and seemany more pictures before their return home. They have readguide-books, noting the stars and double stars; they have dipped intohistories of art and volumes of criticism. They have been told toobserve the dramatic force of Giotto, the line of Botticelli, theperfect composition of Raphael, the color of Titian; all this theyhave done punctiliously. They know in a vague way that Giotto wasmuch earlier than Raphael, that Botticelli was rather pagan thanChristian, that Titian belonged to the Venetian school. They havecome to the fountain head of art, the very works themselves asgathered in the galleries; they have tried to remember what theyhave read and to do what they have been told; and now they are leftstill perplexed and unsatisfied. 

The difficulty is that these earnest seekers after knowledge of arthave laid hold on partial truths, but they have failed to see thesepartial truths in their right relation to the whole. The period in whichan artist lived means something. His way of thinking and feelingmeans something. The quality of his color means something. Butwhat does his _picture_ mean? These people have not quite foundthe key by which to piece the fragments of the puzzle into thecomplete design. They miss the central fact with regard to art; and asa consequence, the ways of approach to the full enjoyment of art, instead of bringing them nearer the centre, become for them anetwork of by-paths in which they enmesh themselves, and they areleft to wander helplessly up and down and about in the blind-alleysof the labyrinth. The central fact with regard to art is this, that awork of art is the expression of some part of the artist's experienceof life, his vision of some aspect of the world. For the appreciator, the work takes on a meaning as it becomes for him in his turn theexpression of his own actual or possible experience and thus relatesitself by the subtle links of feeling to his own life. This is the centralfact; but there are side issues. Any single work of art is in itselfnecessarily finite. Because of limitations in both the artist and theappreciator the work cannot express immediately and completely ofitself all that the author wished to convey; it can present but a singlefacet of his many-sided radiating personality. What is actually saidmay be reinforced by some understanding on the beholder's part ofwhat was intended. In order to win its fullest message, therefore, theappreciator must set the work against the large background out ofwhich it has proceeded. 

A visitor in the _Salon Carré_ of the Louvre notes that there arearrayed before him pictures by Jan van Eyck and Memling, Raphaeland Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, Rembrandt and Metsu, Rubensand Van Dyck, Fouquet and Poussin, Velasquez and Murillo. Eachone bears the distinctive impress of its creator. How different someof them, one from another, --the Virgin of Van Eyck from theVirgin of Raphael, Rembrandt's "Pilgrimsat Emmaus" from the"Entombment" by Titian. Yet between others there are commonelements of likeness. Raphael and Titian are distinguished by anopulence of form and a luxuriance of color which reveal supremetechnical accomplishment in a fertile land under light-impregnatedskies. The rigidity and restraint of Van Eyck and Memling suggestthe tentative early efforts of the art of a sober northern race. To athoughtful student of these pictures sooner or later the questioncomes, Whence are these likenesses and these differences?

Hitherto I have referred to the creative mind and executive hand asgenerically _the artist. _ I have thought of him as a type, representative of all the great class of those who feel and express, and who by means of their expression communicate their feeling. Similarly I have spoken of _the work of art, _ as though it werecomplete in itself and isolated, sprung full-formed and panopliedfrom the brain of its creator, able to win its way and consummate itsdestiny alone. The type is conceived intellectually; in actual life thetype resolves itself into individuals. So there are individual artists, each with his own distinctive gifts and ideals, each with his ownseparate experience of life, with his personal and special vision ofthe world, and his characteristic manner of expression. Similarly, asingle work of art is not an isolated phenomenon; it is only a part ofthe artist's total performance, and to these other works it must bereferred. The kind of work an artist sets himself to do is determinedto some extent by the period into which he was born and the countryin which he lived. The artist himself, heir to the achievements of hispredecessors, is a development, and his work is the product of anevolution. A work of art, therefore, to be judged aright and trulyappreciated, must be seen in its relation to its background, fromwhich it detaches itself at the moment of consideration, --thebackground of the artist's personality and accomplishment and of thenational life and ideals of his time. 

If the layman's interest in art is more than the casual touch-and-go ofa picture here, a concert there, and an entertaining book of anevening, he is confronted with the important matter of the study ofart as it manifests itself through the ages and in diverse lands. It isnot a question of practicing an art himself, for technical skill liesoutside his province. The study of art in the sense proposed has todo with the consideration of an individual work in its relation to allthe factors that have entered into its production. The work of anartist is profoundly influenced by the national ideals and way of lifeof his race and of his age. The art of Catholic Italy is ecclesiastical;the art of the Protestant North is domestic and individual. The actualform an artist's work assumes is modified by the resources at hisdisposal, --resources both of material and of technical methods. Raphael may have no more to say than Giotto had, but he is able toexpress himself in a fuller and more finished way, because in histime the language of painting had become richer and more variedand the rhetoric of it had been carried to a farther point ofdevelopment. Finally, as all art is in essence the expression ofpersonality, a single work is to be understood in its widest intentionand scope by reference to the total personality of the individual artistas manifested in his work collectively, and to be interpreted by theappreciator through his knowledge of the artist's experience of life. 

In order to wrest its fullest expressiveness from a work of art it isnecessary as far as possible to regard the work from the artist's ownpoint of view. We must try to see with his eyes and to feel with himwhat he was working for. To this end we must reconstructimaginatively on a basis of the facts the conditions in which he livedand wrought. The difference between Giotto and Raphael is adifference not of individuality only. Each gives expression to theideals and ways of thought of his age. Each is a creative mind, buteach bases his performance upon what has gone before, and theform of their work is conditioned by the resources each had at hisdisposal. To discover the artist's purpose more completely than hewas able to realize it for himself in the single work, --that is the aimand function of the historical study of art. A brief review of theachievement of Giotto and of Raphael may serve to illustrateconcretely the application of the principle and to fix its value toappreciation. 

In the period of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire art passedfrom Rome to Byzantium. The arts of sculpture and painting wereemployed in the service of the Church, imposing by its magnificenceand all-powerful in its domination over the lives and minds of men. The function of art was to teach; its character was symbolic anddecorative. Art had no separate and independent existence. It had nodirect reference to nature; the pictorial representation of individualtraits was quite outside its scope; a few signs fixed by conventionsufficed. A fish--derived from the acrostic _ichtbus--_symbolizedthe Saviour; a cross was the visible token of redeeming grace. Andso through several hundred years. The twelfth century saw thebeginnings of a change in the direction of spiritual and intellectualemancipation. The teachings and example of Francis of Assisibrought men to the consciousness of themselves and to a realizationof the worth and significance of the individual life. The work ofGiotto is the expression in art of the new spirit. 

Of necessity Giotto founded his work upon the accepted forms ofthe Byzantine tradition. But Giotto was a man of genius and acreative mind. In the expression of his fresh impulse and vitalfeeling, the assertion of new-found individuality, he tried to_realize_ as convincingly and vividly as possible the situation withwhich he was dealing; and with this purpose he looked not backupon art but out upon nature. Where the Byzantine convention hadpresented but a sign and remote indication of form by means of flatcolor, Giotto endows his figures with life and movement andactuality by giving them a body in three dimensions; his forms existin the round. Until his day, light and shade had not been employed;and such perspective as he was able to achieve he had to discoverfor himself. For the first time in Christian painting a figure hasbodily existence. Giotto gives the first evidence, too, of a sense ofthe beauty of color, and of the value of movement as a means ofadded expressiveness. His power of composition shows an immenseadvance on his predecessors. In dealing with traditional subjects, asthe Madonna and child, he follows in general the traditionalarrangement. But in those subjects where his own inventiveness isgiven free play, as in the series of frescoes illustrating the life of St. Francis, he reveals an extraordinary faculty of design and a dramaticsense which is matched by a directness and clarity of expression. 

Not only in the technique of his craft was Giotto an innovator, butalso in the direction of naturalness and reality of feeling. He was thefirst to introduce portraits into his work. His Madonnas and saintsare no longer mere types; they are human and individual, vividly feltand characterized by immediate and present actuality. Giotto wasthe first realist, but he was a poet too. His insight into life istempered by a deep sincerity and piety; his work is genuinely andpowerfully felt. As a man Giotto was reverent and earnest, joyousand beautifully sane. As a painter, by force of the freshness of hisimpulse and the clarity of his vision, he created a new manner ofexpression. As an artist he reveals a true power of imaginativeinterpretation. The casual spectator of to-day finds him naive andquaint. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was anything but that;they regarded him as a marvel of reality, surpassing nature itself. When judged with reference to the conditions of life in which heworked and to the technical resources at his command, Giotto isseen to be of a very high order of creative mind. 

The year 1300 divides the life of Giotto into two nearly equal parts;the year 1500 similarly divides the life of Raphael. In the twocenturies that intervene, the great age of Italian painting, initiated byGiotto, reaches its flower and perfection in Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. The years which followed the passing of thesegreatnesses were the years of decadence and eclipse. If we are tounderstand and justly appreciate the work of each man in its ownkind, the painting of Giotto must be tried by other standards thanthose we apply to the judgment of Raphael. Giotto was a pioneer;Raphael is a consummation. The two centuries between were aperiod of development and change, a development in all that regardstechnique, a change in national ideals and in the artist's attitudetoward life and toward his art. A quick survey of the period, if sohasty a generalization permits correctness of statement, will help usin the understanding of the craft and art of Raphael. 

Giotto was succeeded by a host of lesser men, regarded as hisfollowers, men who sought to apply the principles and methods ofpainting worked out by the master, but who lacked his inspirationand his power. Thus it was for nearly a hundred years. The turn ofthe fourteenth century into the fifteenth saw the emergence of newforces in the science and the mechanics of painting. The laws ofperspective and foreshortening were made the object of specialresearch and practice by men like Uccello (1397-1475), Piero deiFranceschi (1416-1492), and Mantegna (1431-1506). "Oh, what abeautiful thing this perspective is!" Uccello exclaimed, as he stoodat his desk between midnight and dawn while his wife begged himto take some rest. In the first thirty years of the fifteenth century, Masaccio contributed to the knowledge of anatomy by his paintingof the nude form; and the study of the nude was continued byPollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli, in the second half of the century. Masaccio, also, was the first to place his figures in _air, _ envelopingthem in atmosphere. Verrocchio, a generation later than Masaccio, was one of the first of the Florentines to understand landscape andthe part played in it by air and light. The realistic spirit, whichsuffices itself with subjects drawn from every-day actual experience, finds expression in the first half of the fifteenth century in the workof Andrea del Castagno. And so down through that century of springand summer. Each painter in his own way carries some detail of hiscraft to a further point of development and prepares the path for thesupreme triumphs of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. 

The growing mastery of the principles and technique of paintingaccompanied a change in the painter's attitude toward his art. Originally, painting, applied in subjection to architecture andemployed in the service of the Church, was decorative in scope; itspurpose was illustration, its function was to teach. As painters, fromgeneration to generation, went deeper into the secrets of their craft, they became less interested in the didactic import of their work, andthey concerned themselves more and more with its purely artisticsignificance. Religious subjects were no longer used merely assymbols for the expression of piety and as incitements to devotion;they became inherently artistic motives, valued as they furnished theartist an opportunity for the exercise of his knowledge and skill andfor the exhibition of lovely color and significant form. A change inthe mechanical methods of painting, also, had its influence on achange in the conception of the function of art. With a very fewexceptions, the works of Giotto were executed in fresco as walldecorations. The principles of mural painting require that thecomposition shall be subordinated to the architectural conditions ofthe space it is to fill and that the color shall be kept flat. The frescomethod meets these requirements admirably, but because of itsflatness it has its limitations. The introduction of an oil vehicle forthe pigment material, in the fifteenth century, made possible a muchgreater range in gradated color, and reinforcing the increasedknowledge of light and shade, aided in the evolution of decorationinto the "easel picture, " complete in itself. Released from itssubjection to architecture, increasing its technical resources, andwidening its interests in the matter of subject so as to include all life, painting becomes an independent and self-sufficing art. 

Coincident with the development of painting as a craft, a mightychange was working itself out in the national ideals and in men'sways of thought and feeling. Already in Giotto's time the spirit ofindividualism had begun to assert itself in reaction from thedominance of an all-powerful restrictive ecclesiasticism, but the agewas still essentially pietistic and according to its lights, religious. The fifteenth century witnessed the emancipation from tradition. The new humanism, which took its rise with the rediscovery ofGreek culture, extended the intellectual horizon and intensified theenthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowlyreligious, but human; their art became the expression of the newspirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of lifeand the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, withsomething of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body anddelighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends taketheir place alongside of Bible episodes and stories of saints andmartyrs, as subjects of representation; all served equally as motivesfor the expression of the artist's sense of the beauty of this world. 

To this new culture and to these two centuries of growth andaccomplishment in the practice of painting Raphael was heir. With aknowledge of the background out of which he emerges, we areprepared now to understand and appreciate his individualachievement. In approaching the study of his work we may ask, What is in general his ideal, his dominant motive, and in whatmanner and by what means has he realized his ideal?

How much was already prepared for him, what does he owe to theage and the conditions in which he worked, and what to the commonstore has he added that is peculiarly his own?

Whereas Giotto, the shepherd boy, was a pioneer, almost solitary, bysheer force of mind and by his sincerity and intensity of feelingbreaking new paths to expression, for Raphael, on the contrary, theson of a painter and poet, the fellow-worker and well-beloved friendof many of the most powerful artistic personalities of his own or anyage, the way was already prepared along which he moved intriumphant progress. The life of Raphael as an artist extends throughthree well-defined periods, the Umbrian, the Florentine, and theRoman, each one of which contributed a distinctive influence uponhis development and witnessed a special and characteristicachievement. 

To his father, who died when the boy was eleven years old, Raphaelowed his poetic nature, scholarly tastes, and love of beauty, thoughhe probably received from him no training as a painter. His firstmaster was Timoteo Viti of Urbino, a pupil of Francia; from him helearned drawing and acquired a "certain predilection for round andopulent forms which is in itself the negation of the ascetic ideal. " Atthe age of seventeen he went from Urbino to Perugia; there heentered the workshop of Perugino as an assistant. The ideal of theUmbrian school was tenderness and sweetness, the outward andvisible rapture of pietistic feeling; something of these qualitiesRaphael expressed in his Madonnas throughout his career. Under theteaching of Perugino he laid hold on the principles of "spacecomposition" which he was afterwards to carry to supremeperfection. 

From Perugia the young Raphael made his way to Florence, andhere he underwent many influences. At that moment Florence wasthe capital city of Italian culture. It was here that the new humanismhad come to finest flower. Scholarship was the fashion; art was thechief interest of this beauty-loving people. It was the Florentineswho had carried the scientific principles of painting to their highestpoint of development, particularly in their application to therendering of the human figure. In Florence were collected the arttreasures of the splendid century; here Michelangelo and Leonardowere at work; here were gathered companies of lesser men. By thestudy of Masaccio Raphael was led out to a fresh contact with nature. Fra Bartolomeo revealed to him further possibilities of compositionand taught him some of the secrets of color. In Florence, too, heacknowledged the spell of Michelangelo and Leonardo. But thoughhe learned from many teachers, Raphael was never merely animitator. His scholarship and his skill he turned to his own uses; andwhen we have traced the sources of his motives and the influencesin the moulding of his manner, there emerges out of the fusion acreative new force, which is his genius. What remains after ouranalysis is the essential Raphael. 

Raphael's residence in Florence is the period of his Madonnas. FromFlorence Raphael, twenty-five years old and now a master in hisown right, was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II; and here heplaced his talents and his mastership at the disposal of the Church. He found time to paint Madonnas and a series of powerful andlovely portraits; but these years in Rome, which brought his brieflife to a close, are preeminently the period of the great frescoes, which are his supreme achievement. But even in these mature years, and though he was himself the founder of a school, he did not ceaseto learn. Michelangelo was already in Rome, and now Raphael camemore immediately under his influence, although not to submit to itbut to use it for his own ends. In Rome were revealed to him theculture of an older and riper civilization and the glories andperfectness of an elder art. Raphael laid antiquity under contributionto the consummation of his art and the fulfillment and completerealization of his genius. 

This analysis of the elements and influences of Raphael's career asan artist--inadequate as it necessarily is--may help us to define hisdistinctive accomplishment. A comparison of his work with that ofhis predecessors and contemporaries serves to disengage hisessential significance. By nature he was generous and tender; thebent of his mind was scholarly; and he was impelled by a passion forrestrained and formal beauty. Chiefly characteristic of his mentalmake-up was his power of assimilation, which allowed him torespond to many and diverse influences and in the end to dominateand use them. He gathered up in himself the achievements of twocenturies of experiment and progress, and fusing the variouselements, he created by force of his genius a new result and stampedit with the seal perfection. Giotto, to whom religion was a reality, was deeply in earnest about his message, and he phrased it as best hecould with the means at his command; his end was expression. Raphael, under the patronage of wealthy dilettanti and in the serviceof a worldly and splendor-loving Church, delighted in hisknowledge and his skill; he worshiped art, and his end was beauty. The genius of Giotto is a first shoot, vigorous and alive, breakingground hardily, and tentatively pushing into freer air. The genius ofRaphael is the full-blown flower and final fruit, complete, mature. The step beyond is decay. 

By reference to Giotto and to Raphael I have tried to illustrate thepractical application of certain principles of art study. A work of artis not absolute; both its content and its form are determined by theconditions out of which it proceeds. All judgment, therefore, mustbe comparative, and a work of art must be considered in its relationto its background and its conventions. Art is an interpretation ofsome aspect of life as the artist has felt it; and the artist is a child ofhis time. It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas, serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil. Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eagerstriving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; inMillet's work the realism of his age is transfigured. As showingfurther how national ideals and interests may influence individualproduction, we may note that the characteristic art of the ItalianRenaissance is painting; and Italian sculpture of the period ispictorial rather than plastic in motive and handling. Ghiberti's doorsof the Florence Baptistery, in the grouping of figures and the threeand four planes in perspective of the backgrounds, are essentiallypictures in bronze. Conversely, in the North the characteristic art ofthe thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is carving and sculpture; and"the early painters represented in their pictures what they werefamiliar with in wood and stone; so that not only are the figures dryand hard, but in the groups they are packed one behind another, heads above heads, without really occupying space, in imitation ofthe method adopted in the carved relief. " Some knowledge of theorigin and development of a given form of technique, a knowledgeto be reached through historical study, enables us to measure thedegree of expressiveness of a given work. The ideas of a child maybe very well worth listening to, though his range of words is limitedand his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, havingacquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. Inour endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or byTennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or asymphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wantedto say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? Witha sense of the artist's larger motive, whether religious sentiment, or alove of sheer beauty of color and form, or insight into humancharacter, we are aided by a study of the history of technique todetermine how far the artist with the language at his command wasable to realize his intention. 

But not only is art inspired and directed by the time-spirit of its age. A single work is the expression for the artist who creates it of hisideal. An artist's ideal, what he sets himself to accomplish, is theprojection of his personality, and that is determined by manyinfluences. He is first of all a child of his race and time; inheritanceand training shape him to these larger conditions. Then his ideal ismodified by his special individuality. A study of the artist's characteras revealed in his biography leads to a fuller understanding of theintention and scope of his work. The events of his life becomesignificant as they are seen to be the causes or the results of his totalpersonality, that which he was in mind and temperament. What werethe circumstances that moulded his character and decided his course?What events did he shape to his own purpose by the active force ofhis genius? What was the special angle of vision from which helooked upon the world? The answers to these questions are the clueto the full drift of his work. As style is the expression of the man, soconversely a knowledge of the man is an entrance into the wider andsubtler implications of his style. We explore the personality of theman in order more amply to interpret his art, and we turn to his artas the revelation of his personality. In studying an artist we mustlook for his _tendency_ and seek the unifying principle which bindshis separate works into a whole. An artist has his successive periodsor "manners. " There is the period of apprenticeship, when the youngman is influenced by his predecessors and his masters. Then hecomes into his own, and he registers nature and life as he sees itfreshly for himself. Finally, as he has mastered his art and won someof the secrets of nature, and as his own character develops, he tendsmore and more to impose his subjective vision upon the world, andhe subordinates nature to the expression of his distinctiveindividuality. A single work, therefore, is to be considered inrelation to its place in the artist's development; it is but a part, and itis to be interpreted by reference to the whole. 

In the study of biography, however, the man must not be mistakenfor the artist; his acts are not to be confounded with his message. "Aman is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what hebecame. " We must summon forth the spirit of the man from withinthe wrappages of material and accident. In our preoccupation withthe external details of a man's familiar and daily life it is easy to losesight of his spiritual experience, which only is of significance. Whistler, vain, aggressive, quarrelsome, and yet so exquisite and sosubtle in extreme refinement, is a notable example of a great spiritand a little man. Wagner wrote to Liszt: "As I have never felt thereal bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful ofmy dreams, in which from beginning to end that love shall bethoroughly satiated. " Not the Wagner of fact, but the Wagner ofdreams. Life lived in the spirit and imagination may be differentfrom the life of daily act. So we should transcend the material, trying through that to penetrate to the spiritual. It is not a visit to theartist's birthplace that signifies, it is not to do reverence before hislikeness or cherish a bit of his handwriting. All this may have avalue to the disciple as a matter of loyalty and fine piety. But in theend we must go beyond these externals that we may enterintelligently and sympathetically into the temper of his mind andmood and there find disclosed what he thought and felt and was ableonly in part to express. It is not the man his neighbors knew that isimportant. His work is the essential thing, what that work has to tellus about life in terms of emotional experience. 

Studies in the history of art and in biography are avenues ofapproach to the understanding of a work of art; they do not inthemselves constitute appreciation. Historical importance must notbe mistaken for artistic significance. In reading about pictures wemay forget to look at them. The historical study of art in its variousdivisions reduces itself to an exercise in analysis, resolving a givenwork into its elements. But art is a synthesis. In order to appreciate awork the elements must be gathered together and fused into a whole. A statue or a picture is meant not to be read about, but to be lookedat; and its final message must be received through vision. Ourknowledge will serve us little if we are not sensitive to the appeal ofcolor and form. There is danger that preoccupation with the historyof art may betray us if we are not careful to keep it in its place. Thestudy of art should follow and not lead appreciation. We are apt tosee what we are looking for. So we ought to come to each workfreshly without prejudice or bias; it is only afterwards that we shouldbring to bear on it our knowledge about the facts of its production. Connoisseurship is a science and may hold within itself no elementof aesthetic enjoyment. Appreciation is an art, and the quality of itdepends upon the appreciator himself. The end of historical study isnot a knowledge of facts for their own sake, but through those factsa deeper penetration and fuller true enjoyment. By the aid of suchknowledge we are enabled to recognize in any work more certainlyand abundantly the expression of an emotional experience whichrelates itself to our own life. 

The final meaning of art to the appreciator lies in just this sense ofits relation to his own experience. The greatest works are thosewhich express reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions, but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carrytheir message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest. Gather intoa single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's"Day and Night, " Botticelli's "Spring, " the sprites and children ofDonatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent, "Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers, " Frans Hals' "Musician, " Millet's"Sower, " Whistler's "Carlyle. " There is here no thought of period orof school. These living, present, eternal verities are all one company. 

VI

THE SERVICE OF CRITICISM

THE greatest art is universal. It transcends the merely localconditions in which it is produced. It sweeps beyond the individualpersonality of its creator, and links itself with the commonexperience of all men. The Parthenon, so far as it can bereconstructed in imagination, appeals to a man of any race or anyperiod, whatever his habit of mind or degree of culture, as a perfectutterance. The narrow vault of the Sistine Chapel opens intoimmensity, and every one who looks upon it is lifted out of himselfinto new worlds. Shakespeare's plays were enjoyed by theapprentices in the pit and royalty in the boxes, and so all the waybetween. The man Shakespeare, of such and such birth and training, and of this or that experience in life, is entirely merged in hiscreations; he becomes the impersonal channel of expression of theprofoundest, widest interpretation of life the world has known. Suchart as this comes closest to the earth and extends farthest intoinfinity, "beyond the reaches of our souls. "

But there is another order of art, more immediately the product oflocal conditions, the personal expression of a distinctiveindividuality, phrased in a language of less scope and currency, andlimited as to its content in the range of its appeal. These lesser workshave their place; they can minister to us in some moment of needand at some point in our development. Because of their limitations, however, their effectiveness can be furthered by interpretation. Aman more sensitive than we to the special kind of beauty which theyembody and better versed in their language, can discover to us asignificance and a charm in them to which we have not penetrated. To help us to the fullest enjoyment of the great things and to a moreenlightened and juster appreciation of the lesser works is the serviceof criticism. 

We do not wholly possess an experience until, having mergedourselves in it, we then react upon it and become conscious of itssignificance. A novel, a play, a picture interests us, and we surrenderto the enjoyment of the moment. Afterwards we think about ourpleasure, defining the nature of the experience and analyzing themeans by which it was produced, the subject of the work and theartist's method of treating it. It may be that we tell our pleasure to afriend, glad also perhaps to hear his opinion of the matter. Theimpulse is natural; the practice is helpful. And herein lies the originof criticism. In so far as an appreciator does not rest in hisimmediate enjoyment of a work of art, but seeks to account for hispleasure, to trace the sources of it, to establish the reasons for it, andto define its quality, so far he becomes a critic. As every man whoperceives beauty in nature and takes it up into his own life ispotentially an artist, so every man is a critic in the measure that hereasons about his enjoyment. The critical processes, therefore, are anessential part of our total experience of art, and criticism may be anaid to appreciation. 

The function of criticism has been variously understood through thecenturies of its practice. Early modern criticism, harking back to themethod of Aristotle, concerned itself with the form of a work of art. From the usage of classic writers it deduced certain "rules" ofcomposition; these formulas were applied to the work underexamination, and that was adjudged good or bad in the degree that itconformed or failed to conform to the established rules. It was acriticism of law-giving and of judgment. In the eighteenth centurycriticism extended its scope by the admission of a new consideration, passing beyond the mere form of the work and reckoning with itspower to give pleasure. Addison, in his critique of "Paradise Lost, "still applies the formal tests of the Aristotelian canons, but hediscovers further that a work of art exists not only for the sake of itsform, but also for the expression of beautiful ideas. This power of"affecting the imagination" he declares is the "very life and highestperfection" of poetry. This is a long step in the right direction. Withthe nineteenth century, criticism conceives its aims and procedure innew and larger ways. A work of art is now seen to be an evolution;and criticism adapts to its own uses the principles of historical studyand the methods of scientific investigation. Recognizing that art isorganic, that an art-form, as religious painting or Gothic architectureor the novel, is born, develops, comes to maturity, lapses, and dies, that an individual work is the product of "race, environment, and themoment, " that it is the expression also of the personality of the artisthimself, criticism no longer regards the single work as an isolatedphenomenon, but tries to see it in its relation to its total background. 

Present-day criticism avails itself of this larger outlook upon art. Butthe ends to be reached are understood differently by different critics. With M. Brunetière, to cite now a few representative names, criticism is authoritative and dogmatic: he looks at the workobjectively, refusing to be the dupe of his pleasure, if he has any;and approaching the work in the spirit of dispassionate impersonalinquiry as an object of historical importance and scientific interest, he decrees that it is good or bad. Matthew Arnold considersliterature a "criticism of life, " and he values a work with reference tothe moral significance of its ideas. Ruskin's criticism is didactic; hewishes to educate his public, and by force of his torrential eloquencehe succeeds in persuading his disciples into acceptance of histeaching, though he may not always convince. Impressionisticcriticism, as with M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaître, does noteven try to see the work "as in itself it really is, " but is an account ofthe critic's own subjective reaction on it, a narrative of what hethought and felt in this chance corner of experience. With WalterPater criticism becomes _appreciation. _ A given work of artproduces a distinctive impression and communicates a special andunique pleasure; this active power constitutes its beauty. So thefunction of the critic as Pater conceives it is "to distinguish, analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, alandscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces thisspecial impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the sourceof that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. "The interpretative critic--represented in the practice of Pater--standsbetween a work of art and the appreciator as mediator and revealer. 

Each kind of criticism performs a certain office, and is of use withinits own chosen sphere. To the layman, for his purposes ofappreciation, that order of criticism will be most helpful whichresponds most closely and amply to his peculiar needs. A work ofart may be regarded under several aspects, its quality of technicalexecution, its power of sensuous appeal, its historical importance;and to each one of these aspects some kind of criticism applies. Thelayman's reception of art includes all these considerations, butsubordinates them to the total experience. His concern, therefore, isto define the service of criticism to appreciation. 

The analysis of a work of art resolves it into these elements. There isfirst of all the emotion which gives birth to the work and which thework is designed to express. The emotion, to become definite, gathers about an idea, conceived in the terms of its own medium, asform, or color and mass, or musical relations; and this artistic ideapresents itself as the subject or motive of the work. The emotion andartistic idea, in order that they may be expressed and becomecommunicable, embody themselves in material, as the marble of astatue, the pigment of a picture, the audible tones of a musicalcomposition. This material form has the power to satisfy the mindand delight the senses. Through the channel of the senses and themind the work reaches the feelings; and the aesthetic experience iscomplete. 

As art springs out of emotion, so it is to be received as emotion; anda work to be appreciated in its true spirit must be enjoyed. But to becompletely enjoyed it must be understood. We must know what theartist was trying to express, and we must be able to read hislanguage; then we are prepared to take delight in the form and torespond to the emotion. 

To help us to understand a work of art in all the components thatentered into the making of it is the function of historical study. Suchstudy enables us to see the work from the artist's own point of view. A knowledge of its background, the conditions in which the artistwrought and his own attitude toward life, is the clue to his ideal; andby an understanding of the language it was possible for him toemploy, we can measure the degree of expressiveness he was able toachieve. This study of the artist's purpose and of his methods is anexercise in explanation. 

The interpretation of art, for which we look to criticism, deals withthe picture, the statue, the book, specifically in its relation to theappreciator. What is the special nature of the experience which thework communicates to us in terms of feeling? In so far as themedium itself is a source of pleasure, by what qualities of form hasthe work realized the conditions of beauty proper to it, delightingthus the senses and satisfying the mind? These are the questionswhich the critic, interpreting the work through the medium of hisown temperament, seeks to answer. 

Theoretically, the best critic of art would be the artist himself. Heabove all other men should understand the subtle play of emotionand thought in which a work of art is conceived; and the artist ratherthan another should trace the intricacies and know the cunning of themagician processes by which the immaterial idea builds itself intovisible actuality. In practice, however, the theory is not borne out bythe fact. The artist as such is very little conscious of the workings ofhis spirit. He is creative rather than reflective, synthetic and notanalytic. From his contact with nature and from his experience oflife, out of which rises his generative emotion, he moves directly tothe fashioning of expressive forms, without pausing on the way toscan too closely the "meaning" of his work. Mr. Bernard Shawremarks that Ibsen, giving the rein to the creative impulse of hispoetic nature, produced in "Brand" and "Peer Gynt" a "great puzzlefor his intellect. " Wagner, he says, "has expressly described how theintellectual activity which he brought to the analysis of his musicdramas was in abeyance during their creation. Just so do we findIbsen, after composing his two great dramatic poems, entering on astruggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done. "Moreover, the artist is in the very nature of things committed to oneway of seeing. His view of life is limited by the trend of his owndominant and creative personality; what he gains in intensity andpenetration of insight he loses in breadth. He is less quick to seebeauty in another guise than that which his own imagination weavesfor him; he is less receptive of other ways of envisaging the world. 

The ideal critic, on the contrary, is above everything else catholicand tolerant. It is his task to discover beauty in whatever form and toaffirm it. By nature he is more sensitive than the ordinary man, bytraining he has directed the exercise of his powers toward theirfullest scope, and by experience of art in its diverse manifestationshe has certified his judgment and deepened his capacity to enjoy. The qualifications of an authentic critic are both temperament andscholarship. Mere temperament uncorrected by knowledge mayvibrate exquisitely when swept by the touch of a thing of beauty, butits music may be in a quite different key from the original motive. Criticism must relate itself to the objective fact; it should interpretand not transpose. Mere scholarship without temperament misses artat its centre, that art is the expression and communication ofemotional experience; and the scholar in criticism may wander hisleaden way down the by-paths of a sterile learning. To mediatebetween the artist and the appreciator, the critic must understand theartist and he must feel with the appreciator. He is at once the artisttranslated into simpler terms and the appreciator raised to a higherpower of perception and response. 

The service of criticism to the layman is to furnish him a clue to themeaning of the work in hand, and by the critic's own response to itsbeauty to reveal its potency and charm. With technique as such thecritic is not concerned. Technique is the business of the artist; onlythose who themselves practice an art are qualified to judge inmatters of practice. The form is significant to the appreciator only sofar as regards its expressiveness and beauty. It is not the function ofthe critic to tell the artist what his work _should be;_ it is the critic'smission to reveal to the appreciator what the work _is_. Thatrevelation will be accomplished in terms of the critic's ownexperience of the beauty of the work, an experience imaged forth insuch phrases that the pleasure the work communicates is conveyedto his readers in its true quality and foil intensity. It is not enough todogmatize as Ruskin dogmatizes, to bully the reader into a terrifiedacceptance. It is not enough to determine absolute values asMatthew Arnold seeks to do, to fix certain canons of intellectualjudgment, and by the application of a formula as a touchstone, todecide that this work is excellent and that another is less good. Really serviceable criticism is that which notes the special anddistinguishing quality of beauty in any work and helps the reader tolive out that beauty in his own experience. 

These generalizations may be made more immediate and practicalby examples. In illustration of the didactic manner in criticism I maycite a typical paragraph of Ruskin, chosen from his "Mornings inFlorence. "

First, look at the two sepulchral slabs by which you are standing. That farther of the two from the west end is one of the mostbeautiful pieces of fourteenth-century sculpture in this world. . . . And now, here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity forunderstanding Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see thatthe lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of thefolds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that thesoftness and ease of them is complete, --though only sketched with afew dark touches, --then you can understand Giotto's drawing, andBotticelli's;--Donatello's carving, and Luca's. But if you see nothingin _this_ sculpture, you will see nothing in theirs, _of_ theirs. Wherethey choose to imitate flesh, or silk, or to play any vulgar moderntrick with marble--(and they often do)--whatever, in a word, isFrench, or American, or Cockney, in their work, you can see; butwhat is Florentine, and for ever great--unless you can see also thebeauty of this old man in his citizen's cap, --you will see never. 

The earnest and docile though bewildered layman is intimidated intothinking that he sees it, whether he really does or not. But it is aquestion if the contemplation of the "beauty of this old man in hiscitizen's cap, " however eager and serious the contemplation may be, adds much to his experience; it may be doubted whether as a resultof his effort toward the understanding of the rightness and lovelinessof the lines of the cap and the exquisiteness of the choice of folds, which the critic has pointed out to him with threatening finger, hefeels that life is a fuller and finer thing to live. 

An example of the intellectual estimate, the valuation by formulas, and the assignment of abstract rank, is this paragraph from MatthewArnold's essay on Wordsworth. 

Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, ofprofound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he isunique. His best poems are those which most perfectly exhibit thisbalance. I have a warm admiration for "Laodameia" and for the great"Ode;" but if I am to tell the very truth, I find "Laodameia" notwholly free from something artificial, and the great "Ode" notwholly free from something declamatory. If I had to pick out poemsof a kind most perfectly to show Wordsworth's unique power, Ishould rather choose poems such as "Michael, " "The Fountain, ""The Highland Reaper. " And poems with the peculiar and uniquebeauty which distinguishes these, Wordsworth produced inconsiderable number; besides very many other poems of which theworth, although not so rare as the worth of these, is still exceedinglyhigh. 

Thus does the judicial critic mete out his estimate by scale andmeasuring-rod. We are told dogmatically what is good and what isless good; but of distinctive quality and energizing life-givingvirtues, not a word. The critic does not succeed in communicating tous anything of Wordsworth's special charm and power. We areinformed, but we are left cold and unresponding. 

The didactic critic imposes his standard upon the layman. Thejudicial critic measures and awards. The appreciative critic does notattempt to teach or to judge; he makes possible to his reader anappreciation of the work of art simply by recreating in his own termsthe complex of his emotions in its presence. Instead of declaring thework to be beautiful or excellent, he makes it beautiful in the verytelling of what it means to him. As the artist interprets life, disclosing its depths and harmonies, so the appreciative critic in histurn interprets art, reconstituting the beauty of it in his own terms. Through his interpretation, the layman is enabled to enter more fullyinto the true spirit of the work and to share its beauty in his ownexperience. 

In contrast to the passage from Arnold is this paragraph from anessay on Wordsworth by Walter Pater. 

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentratedpresentment of passion, who appraise men and women by theirsusceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle ofit. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of theirdaily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those greatelementary feelings, lifting and solemnizing their language andgiving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came toMichael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding thesehumble children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionatesouls. In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that ofGeorge Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. Witha penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with themasters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold andVictor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement whichwere to be found in that pastoral world--the girl who rung herfather's knell; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; theinstinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures, even--their home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales ofpassionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a heap ofstones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outerworld, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflowerthese quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrowof the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personalbeauty even, in those whom men have wronged--their patheticwanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on thestormy seas;" the wild woman teaching her child to pray for herbetrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that ofthe young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;--all thepathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, theirwonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures ofchildren, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; theiryearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at theirearly toil. A sort of biblical depth and solemnity hangs over thisstrange, new, passionate, pastoral world, of which he first raised theimage, and the reflection of which some of our best modern fictionhas caught from him. 

Here is the clue to Wordsworth's meaning; and the special qualityand power of his work, gathering amplitude and intensity as it playsacross the critic's temperament, is reconstituted in other andilluminating images which communicate the emotion to us. Thecritic has felt more intimately than we the appeal of this poetry, andhe kindles in us something of his own enthusiasm. So we return toWordsworth for ourselves, more alert to divine his message, moresusceptible to his spell, that he may work in us the magic ofevocation. 

Criticism is of value to us as appreciators in so far as it serves torecreate in us the experience which the work was designed toconvey. But criticism is not a short cut to enjoyment. We cannottake our pleasure at second hand. We must first come to the workfreshly and realize our own impression of it; then afterwards we mayturn to the critic for a further revelation. Criticism should not shapeour opinion, but should stimulate appreciation, carrying us fartherthan we could go ourselves, but always in the same direction withour original impression. There is a kind of literary exercise, callingitself criticism, which takes a picture or a book as its point ofdeparture and proceeds to create a work of art in its own right, attaching itself only in name to the work which it purports tocriticise. "Who cares, " exclaims a clever maker of epigrams, "whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What doesit matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and sofiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaboratesymphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice ofword and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of thosewonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases inEngland's Gallery. " A very good appreciation of Ruskin, this. Butthe answer is that such writing as is here attributed to Ruskin ismagnificent: it may be art; but it is not true criticism. A work of artis not "impressive" merely, but "expressive" too. Criticism in itsrelation to the work itself has an objective base, and it must besteadied and authenticated by constant reference to the original feet. Criticism is not the source of our enjoyment but a medium ofinterpretation. 

Before we turn to criticism, therefore, we must first, as Patersuggests, know our own impression as it really is, discriminate it, and realize it distinctly. Only so shall we escape becoming the dupeof some more aggressive personality. In our mental life suggestionplays an important and perhaps unrecognized part. In a certain frameof mind we can be persuaded into believing anything and into likinganything. When, under the influence of authority or fashion, wethink we care for that which has no vital and consciously realizedrelation to our own experience, we are the victims of a kind ofhypnotism, and there is little hope of our ultimate adjustment overagainst art. It is far better honestly to like an inferior work and knowwhy we like it than to pretend to like a good one. In the latter caseno real progress or development is possible, for we have nostandards that can be regarded as final; we are swayed by theauthority or influence which happens at that moment to be mostpowerful. In the former case we are at least started in the rightdirection. Year by year, according to the law of natural growth, wecome to the end of the inferior work which up to that time has beenable to minister to us, and we pass on to new and greater works thatsatisfy the demands of our deepening experience. It is sometimesasked if we ought not to try to like the best things in art. I shouldanswer, the very greatest things we do not have to _try_ to like; theaccent of greatness is unmistakable, and greatness has a message forevery one. As regards the lesser works, we ought to be willing togrow up. There was a time when I enjoyed "Robinson Crusoe" inwords of one syllable. If I had _tried_ then to like Mr. GeorgeMeredith, I should not really have enjoyed him, and I should havemissed the fun of "Robinson Crusoe. " Everything in its time andplace. The lesser works have their use: they may be a starting-pointfor our entrance into life; and they furnish a basis of comparison bywhich we are enabled to realize the greatness of the truly great. Wemust value everything in its own kind, affirming what it is, and notregretting what it is not. But the prerequisite of all appreciation, without which our contact with art is a pastime or a pretense, is thatwe be honest with ourselves. In playing solitaire at least we oughtnot to cheat. 

So the layman must face the situation squarely and accept theresponsibility of deciding finally for himself. On the way we maylook to criticism to guide us to those works which are meant for us. In art as in the complex details of living, there is need of selection;and criticism helps toward that. In literature alone, to name but asingle art, there is so much to be left unread which the length of ourlife would not otherwise permit us to escape, that we are grateful tothe critic who aids us to omit gracefully and with success. But themost serviceable criticism is positive and not destructive. The lesserworks may have a message for us, and it is that message in itsdistinctive quality which the critic should affirm. In the end, however, the use we make of criticism should not reduce itself to anunquestioning acceptance of authority. In the ceremonial of theRoman service, at the moment preceding the elevation of the Host, two acolytes enter the chancel, bearing candles, and kneel betweenthe congregation and the ministrants at the altar; the tapers, suffusing the altar in their golden radiance, throw the dim figures ofthe priests into a greater gloom and mystery. So it happens that artoften is enshrouded by the off-giving of those who would seem toilluminate it; and "dark with excess of light, " the obscurity isintensified. The layman is told of the virginal poetry of early Italianpainting; he is bidden to sit at the homely, substantial feast of thefrank actuality of Dutch art; he listens in puzzled wonder to theglorification of Velasquez and Goya; he reads in eloquent, glowinglanguage of the splendor of Turner. He is more than half persuaded;but he does not quite understand. From this tangle of contendinginterests there seems for the moment to be no way out. It is assumedthat the layman has no standard of his own; and he yields himself tothe appeal which comes to him immediately at the instant. The nextday, perhaps, brings a new interest or another judgment which runscounter to the old. Back and forth and back again, without purposeand without reason; it is only an endless recurrence of the conflictinstead of development and progress. Taking all his estimates atsecond hand, so for his opinion even of a concert or a play he is atthe mercy of a critic who may have dined badly. Some boy, caughtyoung at the university and broken to miscellaneous tasks on a bignewspaper, is sent to "do" a picture-exhibition, a concert, and thetheatre in the same day. He is expected to "criticise" in an hour thework of a lifetime of struggle and effort and knowledge and thoughtand feeling. This is the guide of opinion and the foundation ofartistic creed. I have stated the reduction to absurdity of the case forauthority in criticism. If the layman who leans too heavily uponcriticism comes to realize the hopelessness of his position and thinksthe situation through to its necessary conclusion, he sees that theauthority of criticism is not absolute, but varies with the powers andrange of the individual critic, and that at the last he must find hisstandard within himself. 

There are, of course, certain standards of excellence recognizeduniversally and certain principles of taste of universal validity; andto these standards and these principles must be referred ourindividual estimates for comparison and correction. Given a nativesensibility to the worth of life and to the appeal of beauty, the justiceof our estimate will be in proportion to the extent of our knowledgeof life and of our contact with art. Our individual judgment, therefore, must be controlled by experience, --our momentaryjudgments by the sum of our own experience, and our totaljudgment by universal experience. In all sound criticism and rightappreciation there must be a basis of disciplined taste. We mustguard ourselves against whims and caprice, even our own. So theindividual may not cut loose altogether from external standards. Butthese must be brought into relation to his personal needs and appliedwith reference to his own standard. Finally, for his own uses, theindividual has the right to determine the meaning and value to himof any work of art in the measure that it links itself with his ownactual or possible experience and becomes for him a revelation offuller life. For beauty is the power possessed by objects to quickenus with a sense of larger personality; and art, whether the arts ofform or of representation, is the material bodying forth of beauty asthe artist has perceived it and the means by which his emotion in itspresence is communicated. Upon this conception of beauty and thisinterpretation of the scope and function of art rests the justice of thepersonal estimate. 

VII

BEAUTY AND COMMON LIFE

TO become sensitive to the meaning of color and form and sound asthe artist employs them for expression, to feel a work of art in itsrelation to its background, to find in criticism enlightenment andguidance but not a substitute for one's own experience, --these aremethods of approach to art. But the appreciator has yet to penetrateart's inmost secret. At the centre, as the motive of all his efforts tounderstand the language of art and the processes of technique, as thegoal of historical study and the purpose of his recourse to criticism, stands the work itself with its power to attract and charm. Here isMillet's painting of the "Sower. " In the actual presence of the picturethe appreciator's experience is complex. Analysis resolves it intoconsiderations of the material form of the work, involving itssensuous qualities and the processes of execution, considerationsalso of the subject of the picture, which gathers about itself manyassociations out of the beholder's own previous knowledge of life. But the clue to the final meaning of the work, its meaning both tothe artist and to the appreciator, is contained in the answer to thequestion, Why did Millet paint this picture? And just what is itdesigned to express?

Art is born out of emotion. Though the symbols it may employ toexpression, the forms in which it may manifest itself, are infinitelyvarious in range and character, essentially all art is one. A work ofart is the material bodying forth of the artist's sense of a meaning inlife which unfolds itself to him as harmony and to which his spiritresponds accordantly. It may be a pattern he has conceived; or headapts material to a new use in response to a new need: the artist ishere a craftsman. He is stirred by the tone and incident of alandscape or by the force or charm of some personality: and he putsbrush to canvas. He apprehends the complex rhythms of form: andthe mobile clay takes shape under his fingers. He feels thesignificance of persons acting and reacting in their contact with oneanother: and he pens a novel or a drama. He is thrilled by theemotion attending the influx of a great idea; philosophy is touchedwith feeling: and the thinker becomes a poet. The discords ofexperience resolve themselves within him into harmonies: and hegives them out in triumphant harmonies of sound. The particularmedium the artist chooses in which to express himself is incidentalto the feeling to be conveyed. The stimulus to emotion which impelsthe artist to create and the essential content of his work is _beauty. _As beauty, then, is the very stuff and fibre of art, inextricably boundup with it, so in our effort to relate art to our experience we mayseek to know something of the nature of beauty and its place incommon life. 

During a visit in Philadelphia I was conducted by a member of thefirm through the great Locomotive Works in that city. From the vastoffice, with its atmosphere of busy, concentrated quiet, punctuatedby the clicking of many typewriters, I was led through doors andpassages, and at length came upon the shrieking inferno of the shops. The uproar and din were maddening. Overhead, huge cranes wereswinging great bulks of steel from one end of the cavernous shed tothe other; vague figures were moving obscurely in the murk; thefloor was piled and littered with heaps of iron-work of unimaginableshapes. After a time we made our way into another area where therewas more quiet but no less confusion. I yelled to my guide, "Such arumpus and row I never saw; it is chaos come again!" And hereplied, "Why, to me it is all a perfect order. Everything is in itsplace. Every man has his special job and does it. I know the meaningand purpose of all those parts that seem to you to be thrown aroundin such a mess. If you could follow the course of making from thedraughting-rooms to the finishing-shop, if you could see the processat once as a whole, you would understand that it is all a completeharmony, every part working with every other part to a definiteend. " It was not I but my friend who had the truth of the matter. Where for me there was only chaos, for him was order. And thedifference was that he had the clue which I had not. His sense of themeaning of the parts brought the scattering details into a final unity;and therein he found harmony and satisfaction. 

I went away much impressed by what I had seen. When I hadcollected my wits a little in the comparative calm of the streets, itoccurred to me that the immense workshops were a symbol of man'slife in the world. In the instant of experience all seems chaos. Atclose range, in direct contact with the facts and demands of everyday, we feel how confusing and distracting it all is. Life is beating inupon us at every point; all our senses are assailed at once. Each newday brings its conflicting interests and obligations. Now, whether weare aware of it or not, our constant effort is, out of the great varietyof experience pressing in upon us, to select such details as make to adefinite purpose and end. Instinctively we grope toward and attractto us that which is special and proper to our individual development. Our progress is toward harmony. By the adjustment of new materialto the shaping principle of our experience, the circle of ourindividual lives widens its circumference. We are able to bring moreand more details into order, and correspondingly fuller and richerour life becomes. 

The mental perception of order in the parts gives the whole itssignificance. This quick grasp of the whole is like the click of thekaleidoscope which throws the tumbling, distorted bits into a design. The conduct of practical life on the mental plane is the process alsoof art on the plane of the emotions. Not only does experience offeritself to us as the subject of thought; our contact with the world isalso the stimulus of feeling. In my account of the visit to theLocomotive Works I have set down but a part and not the sum of myreaction. After I had come away, I fell to thinking about what I hadseen, and intellectually I deduced certain abstract principles withregard to unity and significance. But at the moment of experienceitself I simply felt. I was overwhelmed by the sense of unloosenedpower. The very confusion of it all constituted the unity ofimpression. The emotion roused in me by the roar and riotousmovement and the vast gloom torn by fitful yellow gleams fromopened furnaces and shapes of glowing metal was the emotionappropriate to the experience of chaos. That I can find a single wordby which to characterize it, is evidence that the moment had itsharmony for me and consequent meaning. All the infinite universeexternal to us is everywhere and at every instant potentially thestimulus to emotion. But unless feeling is discriminated, it passesunregarded. When the emotion gathers itself into design, when themoment reveals within itself order and significance, then and not tillthen the emotion becomes substance for expression in forms of art. 

If I were able to phrase what I saw and what I felt in the LocomotiveWorks, so that by means of presenting what I saw I mightcommunicate to another what I felt and so rouse in him the sameemotion, I should be an artist. Whistler or Monet might picture forus the murk and mystery of this pregnant gloom. Wagner mightsound for us the tumultuous, weird emotions of this Niebelungenworkshop of the twentieth century. Dante or Milton might phrasethis inferno and pandemonium of modern industry and leave usstirred by the sense of power in the play of gigantic forces. Whetherthe medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet'swords, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as thework expresses the emotion which the artist has felt in the presenceof this spectacle. He, the artist, more than I or another, has thrilled toits mystery, its tumult, its power. It is this effect, received as a unityof impression, that he wants to communicate. This power of theobject over him, and consequently the content of his work, is beauty. 

In the experience of us all there are objects and situations which canstir us, --the twilight hour, a group of children at play, the spectacleof the great human crowd, it may be, or solitude under the stars, theworks of man as vast cities or cunningly contrived machines, orperhaps it is the mighty, shifting panorama which nature unrolls forus at every instant of day and night, her endless pageant of color andlight and shade and form. Out of them at the moment of our contactis unfolded a new significance; because of them life becomes for uslarger, deeper. This power possessed by objects to rouse in us anemotion which comes with the realization of inner significanceexpressed in harmony is beauty. A brief analysis of the nature andaction of beauty may help us in the understanding and appreciationof art, though the value to us of any explanation is to quicken us to amore vivid sensitiveness to the effect of beauty in the domain ofactual experience of it. 

Because the world external to us, which manifests beauty, isreceived into consciousness by the senses, it is natural to seek ourexplanation in the processes involved in the functioning of ourorganism. Our existence as individual human beings is conditionedby our embodiment in matter. Without senses, without nerves and abrain, we should not _be. _ Our feelings, which determine for usfinally the value of experience, are the product of the excitement ofour physical organism responding to stimulation. The rudimentaryand most general feelings are pleasure and pain. All the complexand infinitely varied emotions that go to make up our conscious lifeare modifications of these two elementary reactions. The feeling ofpleasure results when our organism "functions harmoniously withitself;" pain is the consequence of discord. In the words of a recentadmirable statement of the psychologists' position: "When rhythmand melody and forms and colors give me pleasure, it is because theimitating impulses and movements that have arisen in me are suchas suit, help, heighten my physical organization in general and inparticular. . . . The basis, in short, of any aestheticexperience--poetry, music, painting and the rest--is beautifulthrough its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of thesuggestions and impulses it arouses with the whole organism. " Beauty, then, according to the psychologists, is the quality inherent inthings, the possession of which enables them to stimulate ourorganism to harmonious functioning. And the perception of beautyis a purely physiological reaction. 

This explanation, valid within its limits, seems to me to fall short ofthe whole truth. For it fails to reckon with that faculty and that entitywithin us whose existence we know but cannot explain, --the facultywe call mind, which operates as imagination, and the entity werecognize as spirit or soul. I mean the faculty which gives us theidea of God and the consciousness of self, the faculty whichapprehends relations and significance in material transcending theirmaterial embodiment. I mean the entity within us which expressesitself in love and aspiration and worship, the entity which is able tofuse with the harmony external to it in a larger unity. When I glanceout upon a winter twilight drenching earth and sky with luminousblue, a sudden delight floods in upon me, gathering up all my sensesin a surging billow of emotion, and my being pulses and vibrates ina beat of joy. Something within me goes out to meet the landscape;so far as I am at all conscious of the moment, I feel, There, that iswhat I am! This deep harmony of tone and mass is the expression ofa fuller self toward which I yearn. My being thrills and dilates withthe sensation of larger life. Then, after the joy has throbbed itself outand my reaction takes shape as consciousness, I set myself toconsider the sources and the processes of my experience. I note thatmy eye has perceived color and form. My intellect, as I summon itinto action, tells me that I am looking upon a scene in naturecomposed of material elements, as land and trees and water andatmosphere. My senses, operating through channels of matter, receive, and my brain registers, impressions of material objects. Butthis analysis, though defining the processes, does not quite explain_my joy. _ I know that beyond all this, transcending my materialsense-perception and transcending the actual material of thelandscape, there is something in me and there is something in naturewhich meet and mingle and become one. Above all embodiment inmatter, there is a plane on which I feel my community with theworld external to me, recognizing that world to be an extension ofmy own personality, a plane on which I can identify myself with thething outside of me in so far as it is the expression of what I am ormay become. Between me and the external world there is a commonterm. The effect which nature has upon us is determined, not by theobject itself alone and not by our individual mind and temperamentalone, but by the meeting of the two, the community between theobject and the spirit of man. When we find nature significant andexpressive, it is because we make nature in some way a part of ourown experience. 

The material of an object is perceived by the senses. We see that it isblue or green or brown; we may touch it and note that it is rough orsmooth, hard or soft, warm or cold. But the expressiveness of theobject, its value for the emotions, does not stop with its merelymaterial qualities, but comes with our grasp of the "relations" whichit embodies; and these relations, transmitted through material by thesenses, are apprehended by the mind. There are, of course, elementary data of sense-perception, such as color and sound. It maybe that I prefer red to yellow because my eye is so constituted as tofunction harmoniously with a rate of vibration represented by 450billions per second, and discordantly with a rate of vibrationrepresented by 526 billions per second. So also with tones of a givenpitch. But though simple color and simple sound have each thepower to please the senses, yet in actual experience neither color norsound is perceived abstractly, apart from its embodiment in form. Color is felt as the property of some concrete object, as the crimsonof a rose, the dye of some fabric or garment, the blue of the sky, which, though we know it to be the infinite extension of atmosphereand ether, we nevertheless conceive as a dome, with curvature andthe definite boundary of the horizon. Sound in and of itself has pitchand _timbre_, qualities of pure sensation; but even with theperception of sound the element of form enters in, for we hear itwith a consciousness of its duration--long or short--or of its relationto other sounds, heard or imagined. 

Our perceptions, therefore, give us forms. Now form implies_relation, _ the reference of one part to the other parts in thecomposition of the whole. And relation carries with it thepossibilities of harmony or discord, of unity or disorder. Before anobject can be regarded as beautiful it must give out a unity ofimpression. This unity does not reside in the object itself, but iseffected by the mind which perceives it. In looking at acheckerboard I may see it as an aggregation of white squares set offby black, or as black squares relieved by white. I may read it as aseries of horizontals, or of verticals, or of diagonals, according as I_attend_ to it. The design of the checker-board is not an absoluteand fixed quantity inherent in the object itself, but is capable of avarious interpretation according to the relative emphasis given to theparts by the perceiving mind. So with all objects in nature. Thetwilight landscape which stirred me may have been quite withoutinterest or meaning to the man at my side; or, if he responded to it atall, his feelings may have been of a different order and quality thanmine. Where I felt a deep and intimate solemnity in the landscape, he might have received the twilight as chill and forbidding. Beauty, then, which consists in harmonious relation, does not lie in natureobjectively, but is constituted by the perception in man'sconstructive imagination of a harmony and consequent significancedrawn out of natural forms. It is, in Emerson's phrase, "the integrityof impression made by manifold natural objects. " And Emerson saysfurther, "The charming landscape which I saw this morning isindubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller ownsthis field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But noneof them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizonwhich no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, thatis, the poet. " The mere pleasurable excitement of the senses is hardlyto be called beauty. An object to be beautiful must express aharmony of relations and hence a meaning, --a meaning which goesbeyond sense-perception and does not stop with the intellect, butreaches the spirit. Psychologists tell us that "a curved line is pleasingbecause the eye is so hung as best to move in it. " Pleasing, yes; butnot beautiful. And precisely herein is illustrated the distinction. Alife wearied with an undulating uniformity of days will find beautyless in the curve than in the zigzag, because the sight of the brokenline brings to the spirit suggestions of change and adventure. Asupine temper finds shock, excitement, and a meaning in the vertical. Yet the significance of forms is not determined necessarily bycontrasts. A quiet spirit sees its own expression, a harmony of selfwith external form, in the even lines and flat spaces of some Dutchetching. Or a vigorous, hardy mind takes fresh stimulus and couragefrom the swirling clouds of Turner or the wind-torn landscapes ofConstable. An object is beautiful, not because of the physical easewith which the eye follows its outlines, but in so far as it has thepower to communicate to us the feeling of larger life, to express andcomplete for us a harmony within our emotional experience. 

Our senses report to us the material world; we see, we hear, wetouch and taste and smell. But we recognize also that nature has avalue for the emotions; it can delight and thrill and uplift, taking usout of ourselves and carrying us beyond the confines of the littlecircle of our daily use and wont. As I look from my window I seeagainst the sky a pear tree, radiant with blossom, an explosion oflight and sensation. Its green and white, steeped in sunshine andquivering out of rain-washed depths of blue, are good to behold. Butfor me, as my spirit goes out to meet it, the tree is spring! In this I donot mean to characterize a process of intellectual deduction, --that asblossoms come in the spring, so the flowering of the tree is evidencethat spring is here. I mean that by its color and form, all its outwardloveliness, the tree communicates to me the spirit of the new birth ofthe year. In myself I feel and live the spring. My joy in the tree, therefore, does not end with the sight of its gray trunk andinterwoven branches and its gleaming play of leaves: there my joyonly begins, and it comes to its fulfillment as I feel the life of thetree to be an expression and extension of the life that is in me. Myphysical organism responds harmoniously in rhythm with the formof the tree, and so far the tree is pleasing. But, finally, a form isbeautiful because it is expressive. "Beauty, " said Millet, "does notconsist merely in the shape or coloring of a face. It lies in thegeneral effect of the form, in suitable and appropriate action. . . . When I paint a mother, I shall try and make her beautiful simply bythe look she bends upon her child. Beauty is expression. " Beautyworks its effect through significance, a significance which is notalways to be phrased in words, but is felt; conveyed by the senses, itat last reaches the emotions. Where the spirit of man comes intoharmony with a harmony external to it, there is beauty. 

The elements of beauty are design, wholeness, and significance. Significance proceeds out of wholeness or unity of impression; andunity is made possible by design. Whatever the flower into which itmay ultimately expand, beauty has its roots in fitness and utility;design in this case is constituted by the adaptation of the means tothe end. The owner of a saw-mill wanted a support made for ashafting. Indicating a general idea of what he desired, he applied toone of his workmen, a man of intelligence and skill in his craft, butwithout a conventional education. The man constructed the support, a triangular framework contrived to receive the shafting at the apex;where there was no stress within the triangle, he cut away the timber, thus eliminating all surplusage of material. When the owner saw thefinished product he said to his workman, "Well, John, that is a reallybeautiful thing you have made there. " And the man replied, "I don'tknow anything about the beauty of it, but I know it's strong!" Theend to be reached was a support which should be strong. The strongsupport was felt to be beautiful, for its lines and masses wereapprehended as _right. _ Had the man, with the "little learning" thatis dangerous, attempted embellishment or applied ornament, hewould have spoiled the effect; for ornateness would have been out ofplace. The perfect fitness of means to end, without defect andwithout excess, constituted its beauty; and its beauty was perceivedaesthetically, as a quality inherent in the form, a quality which apartfrom the practical serviceableness of the contrivance was capable ofcommunicating pleasure. So in general, when the inherent needs ofthe work give shape to the structure or contrivance, the resultingform is in so far forth beautiful. The early "horseless carriages, " inwhich a form intended for one use was grafted upon a differentpurpose, were very ugly. Today the motor-car, evolved out ofstructural needs, a thing complete in and for itself, has in its linesand coherence of composition certain elements of beauty. In his"Song of Speed, " Henley has demonstrated that the motorcar, mechanical, modern, useful, may even be material for poetry. Thatthe useful is not always perceived as beautiful is due to the fact thatthe design which has shaped the work must be regarded apart fromthe material serviceableness of the object itself. Beauty consists notin the actual material, but in the unity of relations which the objectembodies. We appreciate the art involved in the making of the firstlock and key only as we look beyond the merely practical usefulnessof the device and so apprehend the harmony of relations effectedthrough its construction. As the lock and key serve to fasten the door, they are useful; they are beautiful as they manifest design and wefeel their harmony. Beauty is removed from practical life, notbecause it is unrelated to life, --just the reverse of that is true, --butbecause the enjoyment of beauty is disinterested. The detachmentinvolved in appreciation is a detachment from material. Theappreciator may seem to be a looker-on at life, in that he does notact but simply feels. But his spirit is correspondingly alert. In themeasure that he is released from servitude to material he gives freeplay to his emotion. 

Although beauty is founded upon design, design is not the whole ofbeauty. Not all objects which exhibit equal integrity of design areequally beautiful. The beauty of a work of art is determined by thedegree of emotion which impelled its creation and by the degree inwhich the work itself is able to communicate the emotionimmediately. The feeling which entered into the making of the firstlock and key was simply the inventor's desire for such a device, hisdesire being the feeling which accompanied his consciousness of hisneed. At the other extreme is the emotion such as attendedMichelangelo's vision of his "David" and urged his hand as he sethis chisel to the unshaped waiting block. And so all the way between. Many pictures are executed in a wholly mechanical spirit, as somuch manufacture; and they exhibit correspondingly little beauty. Many useful things, as a candle-stick, a pair of andirons, a chair, arewrought in the spirit of art; into them goes something of the maker'sjoy in his work; they become the expression of his emotion: andthey are so far beautiful. It is asserted that Millet's "Angelus" is agreater picture than the painting entitled "War" by Franz Stuck, because "the idea of peasants telling their beads is more beautifulthan the idea of a ruthless destroyer only in so far as it is morallyhigher. " The moral value as such has very little to do with it. It is aquestion of emotion. If Stuck were to put on canvas his idea ofpeasants at prayer and if Millet had phrased in pictorial terms hisfeeling about war, there is little doubt that Millet's painting would bethe more telling and beautiful. The degree of beauty is fixed by thedepth of the man's insight into life and the corresponding intensity ofhis emotion. 

Beauty is not limited to one class of object or experience andexcluded from another. A chair may be beautiful, although turned tocommon use; a picture is not beautiful necessarily because it is apicture. "Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place isbad, " says Whitman, Whistler speaks of art as "seeking and findingthe beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest, Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity inthe Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that itsinhabitants were not Greeks. " The beautiful must exhibit an integrityof relations within itself, and it must be in integral relation with itssurroundings. The standard of beauty varies with every age, withevery nation, indeed with every individual. As beauty is not in theobject itself, but is in the mind which integrates the relations whichthe object manifests, so our appreciation of beauty is determined byour individuality. And individuality is the resultant of many forces. The self, inexplicable in essence, is the product of inheritance, and ismodified by environment and training. More than we realize, ourjudgment is qualified by tradition and habit and even fashion. Because men have been familiar for so many centuries with the ideathat sculpture should find its vehicle in white marble, the knowledgethat Greek marbles originally were painted comes with something ofa shock; and for the moment they have difficulty in persuadingthemselves that a Parthenon frieze _colored_ could possibly bebeautiful. Until within comparatively recent years the French haveregarded Shakespeare as a barbarian. The heroic couplet, which wasthe last word in poetical expression in the age of Queen Anne, weconsider to-day as little more than a mechanical jingle. Last year'sfashions in dress, which seemed at the time to have their merits, arethis year amusingly grotesque. In our judgment of beauty, therefore, allowance must be made for standards which merely are imposedupon us from without. It is necessary to distinguish between aformula and the reality. As far as possible we should seek to comeinto "original relation" with the universe, freshly for ourselves. Sowe must return upon our individual consciousness, and thusdetermine what is vitally significant to us. For the man who wouldappreciate beauty, it is not a question between this or that "school"in art, whether the truth lies with the classicists or the romanticists; itis not a question of this or that subject or method to the exclusion ofall others. Beauty may be anywhere or everywhere. It is our task andjoy to find it, wherever it may be. And we shall find it, if we are ableto recognize it and we hold ourselves responsive to its multitudinousappeal. 

The conception of beauty which limits its manifestation to one kindof experience is so far false and leads to mischievous acceptancesand narrowing rejections. We mistake the pretty for the beautifuland so fail of the true value of beauty; we are blind to thesignificance which all nature and all life, in the lowest andcommonest as in the highest and rarest, hold within them. "Ifbeauty, " says Hamerton, "were the only province of art, neitherpainters nor etchers would find anything to occupy them in the foulstream that washes the London wharfs. " By beauty here is meant themerely agreeable. Pleasing the river may not be, to the ordinary man;but for the poet and the painter, those to whom it is given to see withthe inner eye, the "foul stream" and its wharfs may be lighted withmysterious and tender beauty. 

 "Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This city now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning. 

 . . . . . 

 Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!"

And Whistler, by the witchery of his brush and his needle, hastransmuted the confusion and sordidness and filth of thisThames-side into exquisite emotion. The essence of beauty is harmony, butthat harmony is not to be reduced to rule and measure. In the verychaos of the Locomotive Works we may feel beauty; in the thrillwhich they communicate we receive access of power and we _are, _more largely, more universally. The harmony which is beauty is thatunity or integrity of impression by force of which we are able to feelsignificance and the relation of the object to our own experience. Itis an error to suppose that beauty must be racked on a procrusteanbed of formula. Such false conceptions result in sham art. To createa work which shall be beautiful it is not necessary to "smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit. " Beauty is not imposed upon material from without, according to a recipe; it is drawn out from within by the integratingpower of imagination. Art is not artificiality. Art is the expression ofvital emotion and essential significance. The beauty of architecture, for example, consists not in applied ornament but in structuralfitness and adaptability, and grows out of the inherent needs of thework. The cathedral-builders of old time did not set themselves tocreate a "work of art. " They wanted a church; and it was a churchthey built. It is we who, perceiving the rightness of theirachievement, pronounce it to be beautiful. Beauty is notmanufactured, but grows; it cannot be laid on as ornament. Beauty isborn out of the contact of the spirit of man with natural forms, thatcontact which gives to objects their significance. 

The recognition of the true nature of beauty may change for us theface of the world. Some things are universally regarded as beautifulbecause their appeal is universal. There are passions, joys, aspirations, common to all the race; and the forms which objectifythese emotions are beautiful universally. We can all enter into thefeelings that gather about a group of children dancing round aMaypole in the Park; but in the murk and din and demoniacalactivity of the Locomotive Works the appeal is not so obvious. Thestupendous workshops become beautiful to me as my being mergesinto harmony with them and dilates with the emotion of intenser andfuller life. The Sistine Madonna is generally regarded as beautiful. But what is the beauty in the unspeakable witch on the canvas ofFrans Hals? Harmony of color and of composition is employed byRaphael in the rendering of a figure and in the expression of anemotion both of which relate themselves to the veneration ofmankind. Maternity, Christian or pagan, divine or human, evokes itsuniversal tribute of feeling. On Raphael's canvas complete harmonyis made visible; and the beauty of the picture for us is measured byits power to stir us. In the painting by Frans Hals the subjectrepresented is in itself not pleasing. The technical execution of thepicture is masterly. But our delight goes beyond any enjoyment ofthe skill here exhibited, goes beyond even the satisfaction of thesenses in its color and composition. What the picture expresses isnot merely the visible aspect of this woman, but the painter's ownsympathy and appreciation. He saw a beauty in ugliness, a beauty towhich we were blind, for he felt the significance of her life, theeternal rightness to herself of what she was. His joy in this innerharmony has transfigured the object and made it beautiful. Beautypenetrates deeper than grace and comeliness; it is not confined to thepretty and agreeable. Indeed, beauty is not always immediatelypleasant, but is received often with pain. The emotion of pleasure, which is regarded as the necessary concomitant of beauty, ensues aswe are able to merge ourselves in the experience and so come to feelits ultimate harmony. What is commonly accepted as ugly, asshocking or sordid, becomes beautiful for us so soon as weapprehend its inner significance. Judged by the canons of formalbeauty, the sky-line of New York city, seen from the North River, isugly and distressing. But the responsive spirit, reaching everoutward into new forms of feeling, can thrill at sight of those Titanicstructures out-topping the Palisades themselves, thrusting theirsquareness adventurously into the smoke-grayed air, and telling thetriumph of man's mind over the forces of nature in this fulfillment ofthe needs of irrepressible activity, this expression of tremendousactuality and life. Not that the reaction is so definitely formulated inthe moment of experience; but this is something of what is felt. Thediscovery of such a harmony is the entrance into fuller living. So itis that the boundaries of beauty enlarge with the expansion of theindividual spirit. 

To extend the boundaries of beauty by the revelation of newharmonies is the function of art. With the ordinary man, the plane offeeling, which is the basis of appreciation, is below the plane of hisattention as he moves through life from day to day. As a clock maybe ticking in the room quite unheeded, and then suddenly we hear itbecause our attention is called to it; so only that emotion reallycounts to us as experience which comes to our cognizance. Whenonce the ordinary man is made aware of the underlying plane offeeling, the whole realm of appreciation is opened to him by hisrecognition of the possibilities of beauty which life may hold. Consciously to recognize that forces are operating which lie behindthe surface aspect of things is to open ourselves to the play of theseforces. With persons in whom intellect is dominant and thecontrolling power, the primary need is to understand; and for such, first to know is to be helped finally to feel. To comprehend thatthere is a soul in every fact and that within material objects residemeanings for the spirit, or beauty, is to be made more sensitive totheir influence. With the artist, however, the case is different. At themoment of creation he is little conscious of the purport of the workto which he sets his hand. He is not concerned, as we have been, with the "why" of beauty; from the concrete directly to the concreteis his progress. Life comes to him not as thought but as emotion. Heis moved by actual immediate contact with the world about him, --bythe sight of a landscape, by the mood of an hour or place, by thepower of some personality; it may be, too, a welter of recollectedsensations and impressions that plays upon his spirit. The resultantemotion, not reasoned about but nevertheless directed to a definiteend, takes shape in external concrete forms which are works of art. Just because he is so quick to feel the emotional value of life he is anartist; and much of his power as an artist derives from theconcreteness of his emotion. The artist is the creative mind, creativein this sense, that in the outward shows of things he feels theirinward and true relations, and by new combinations of materialelements he reëmbodies his feeling in forms whose message isaddressed to the spirit. The reason why Millet painted the "Sower"was that he felt the beauty of this peasant figure interpreted assignificance and life. And it is this significance and life, in which weare made to share, that his picture is designed to express. 

Experience comes to us in fragments; the surface of the worldthrows back to us but broken glimpses. In the perspective of alifetime the fragments flow together into order, and we dimly see thepurpose of our being here; in moments of illumination and deeperinsight a glimpse may disclose a sudden harmony, and the briefsegment of nature's circle becomes beautiful. For then is revealedthe shaping principle. Within the fact, behind the surface, areapprehended the relations of which the fact and the surface are theexpression. The rhythm thus discovered wakens an accordantrhythm in the spirit of man. The moment gives out its meaning asman and nature merge together in the inclusive harmony. If thehuman spirit were infinite in comprehension, we should receive allthings as beautiful, for we should apprehend their rightness and theirharmony. To our finite perception, however, design is not alwaysevident, for it is overlaid and confounded with other elements whichare not at the moment fused. Just here is the office of art. For artpresents a harmony liberated from all admixture of conflictingdetails and purged of all accidents, thus rendering the singlemeaning salient. To compel disorder into order and so reveal newbeauty is the achievement of the artist. The world is commonplaceor fraught with divinest meanings, according as we see it so. To artwe turn for revelation, knowing that ideals of beauty may be manyand that beauty may manifest itself in many forms. 

VIII

THE ARTS OF FORM

THE maker of the first bowl moulds the plastic clay into the shapebest adapted to its purpose, a vessel to hold water, from which hecan drink easily; the half-globe rather than the cube affords thegreatest holding capacity with the least expenditure of material. Hefinds now that the form itself--over and above the practicalserviceableness of the bowl--gives him pleasure. With a pointedstick or bit of flint he traces in the yielding surface a flowing line oran ordered series of dots or crosses, allowing free play to his fancyand invention. The design does not resemble anything else, nor doesit relate itself to any object external to the maker; it has no meaningapart from the pleasure which it gave him as he conceived andtraced it, and the pleasure it now gives him to look at it. To anotherman who sees the bowl, its form and its decoration afford likewise adouble pleasure: there is first the satisfaction of senses and mind inthe contemplation of harmonious form and rhythmic pattern; andsecond, there is communicated to him a feeling of the maker'sdelight in his handiwork, and sympathetically and imaginatively thebeholder realizes that delight in his own experience. 

I am walking with a friend along a road which climbs a woodedhillside. A few steps bring us to the top and the edge of a clearing. There, suddenly a sweep of country is rolled out before us. A quickintake of the breath, and then the cry, "Ah!" Consciousness surgesback over me, and turning to my friend, I exclaim, "See the line ofthose hills over there across the tender sky and those cloudstumbling above them; see how the hills dip down into the meadows;look at the lovely group of willows along the bank of the river, howgraciously they come in, and then that wash of purple light overeverything!" My simple cry, "Ah!" was the expression of emotion, the unconscious, involuntary expression; it was not art. It did notformulate my emotion definitely, and although it was an expressionof emotion, it had no power to communicate the special quality of it. So soon, however, as I composed the elements in the landscape, which stimulated my emotion, into a distinct and coherent wholeand by means of that I tried to convey to my friend something ofwhat I was feeling, my expression tended to become art. Mymedium of expression happened to be words. If I had been alone andwanted to take home with me a record of my impression of thelandscape, a pencil-sketch of the little composition might haveserved to indicate the sources of my feeling and to suggest itsquality. Whether in words or in line and mass, my work would be ina rudimentary form a work of representative art. The objective factof the landscape which I point out to my friend engages his interest;his pleasure derives from those aspects of it which my emotionemphasizes and which constitute its beauty; and something of thesame emotion that I felt he realizes in his own experience. 

The impulse to expression which fulfills itself in a work of art isdirected in general by one of two motives, --the motive ofrepresentation and the motive of pure form. These two motives arecoexistent with human activity itself. The earliest vestiges ofprehistoric races and the remains of the remotest civilizations arewitnesses of man's desire to imitate and record, and also of hispleasure in harmony of form. Certain caves in France, inhabited byman some thousands of years before history begins, have yielded upreindeer horns and bones, carved with reliefs and engraved withdrawings of mammoths, reindeer, and fish. On the walls and roofs ofthese caves are paintings in bright colors of animals, rendered withcorrectness and animation. Flint axes of a still remoter epoch "arecarved with great dexterity by means of small chips flaked off thestone, and show a regularity of outline which testifies to the delightof primitive man in symmetry. "[*] Burial mounds, of unknownantiquity, and the rude stone monuments such as Stonehenge and thedolmens of Brittany and Wales, emerging out of prehistoric dawns, are evidence of man's striving after architectural unity in design andharmony of proportion. 

[*] S. Reinach, _The Story of Art throughout the Ages, _ chapter i. 

The existence of these two separate motives which impel creation, man's desire to imitate and his delight in harmony, gives rise to adivision of the arts into two general classes, namely, therepresentative arts and the arts of pure form. The representative artscomprise painting and sculpture, and literature in its manifestationsof the drama, fiction, and dramatic and descriptive poetry. These artsdraw their subjects from nature and human life, from the worldexternal to the artist. The arts of form comprise architecture andmusic, and that limitless range of human activities in design andpattern-making for embellishment--including also the wholecategory of "useful arts"--which may be subsumed under thecomprehensive term _decoration. _ In these arts the "subject" isself-constituted and does not derive its significance from its likeness toany object external to it; the form itself is the subject. Lyric poetrystands midway between the two classes. It is the expression of"inner states" but it externalizes itself in terms of the outer world. Ithas a core of thought, and it employs images from nature which canbe visualized, and it recalls sounds whose echo can be wakened inimaginative memory. 

 "Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes; With everything that pretty bin, My lady sweet, arise! Arise, arise!"

The intellectual and sensuous elements which lyric poetry embodiesare finally submerged under the waves of emotional stimulus whichflow from the form as form. Such poetry does not depend upon thefact of representation for its meaning; the very form itself, as inmusic, is its medium of communicating the emotion. Art, therefore, to phrase the same matter in slightly different terms, has a subjectiveand an objective aspect. In the one case, the artist projects hisfeeling into the forms which he himself creates; in the other case, theforms external to him, as nature and human life, inspire the emotion, and these external forms the artist reproduces, with of course thenecessary modifications, as the symbol and means of expression ofhis emotion. 

The distinction between the representative arts and the arts of formis not ultimate, nor does it exclude one class wholly from the other;it defines a general tendency and serves to mark certain differencesin original motive and in the way in which the two kinds of workmay be received and appreciated. In actual works of art themselves, though they differ as to origin and function, the line of divisioncannot be sharply drawn. The dance may be an art of form or arepresentative art according as it embodies the rhythms of puremovement or as it numerically figures forth dramatic ideas. Painting, as in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and the wall paintings ofTintoretto and Veronese in the Ducal Palace of Venice, may beemployed in the service of decoration. Decoration, as inarchitectural sculpture and in patterns for carpets and wall-coverings, often draws its motives from nature, such as leaves, flowers, fruits, and animals; but when the function of the work is decorative and notrepresentative, the naturalistic and graphic character of the subject issubordinated to the purposes of abstract and formal design. Apicture, on the other hand, which is frankly representative in purpose, must submit its composition and color-harmony to the requirementsof unity in design; in a sense it must make a pattern. And a statue, asthe "Victory of Samothrace, " bases its ultimate appeal, not upon thefact of representation, but upon complete, rhythmic, beautiful form. 

To the appreciator the arts of form carry a twofold significance. There is first the pleasure which derives from the contemplation andreception of a harmony of pure form, including harmony of color, ofline, and of flat design as well as form in the round, a pleasure of thesenses and the mind. Second, works of art in this category, as theyare the expression for the artist of his emotion, become therefore themanifestation to the appreciator and means of communication of thatemotion. 

Man's delight in order, in unity, in harmony, rhythm, and balance, isinborn. The possession of these qualities by an object constitutes itsform. Form, in the sense of unity and totality of relations, is not tobe confounded with mere regularity. It may assume all degrees ofdivergence from geometric precision, all degrees of variety, rangingfrom the visual perfectness of the Parthenon to the sublime andtriumphant inconsequence of the sky-line of New York city. It maymanifest all degrees of complexity from a cup to a cathedral or from"Home, Sweet Home" to Tschaikowski's "Pathetic Symphony. "Whatever the elements and the incidents, our sense of order in theparts and of singleness of impression endows the object with itsform. The form as we apprehend it of an object constitutes its beauty, its capability to arouse and to delight. 

Because of the essential make-up of man's mind and spirit, powersthat are innate and determined by forces still beyond the scope ofanalysis, the perception of a harmony of relations, which is beauty, is attended with pleasure, a pleasure that is felt and cannot beexplained. This inborn, inexplicable delight is at once the origin ofthe arts of form and the basis of our appreciation. Each art, as thefashioning of objects of use, as decoration, architecture, and music, is governed by its own intrinsic, inherent laws and rests its appealupon man's pleasure in form. There is no standard external to thelaws of the art itself by which to judge the rightness and the beautyof the individual work. In the arts of use and in decoration andarchitecture, the beauty of a work, as the beauty of a chair, as in theordering and appointments of a room, as the beauty of a temple, atheatre, a dwelling, derives primarily from the fitness of the object toits function, and finally from the rhythm of its lines and the harmonyof its masses and proportions, --its total form. A chair which cannotbe sat in may be interesting and agreeable to look at, but it is nottruly beautiful; for then it is not a chair but a curiosity, a bijou, and asuperfluity; to be beautiful it must be first of all frankly andpractically a chair. A living-room which cannot be lived in withcomfort and restfulness and peace of mind is not a living-room, buta museum or a concentrated department store; at best it is only aninclosed space. A beautiful building declares its function and use, satisfies us with the logic and coherence of its parts, and delights uswith its reticence or its boldness, its simplicity or its inventiveness, in fine, its personality, as expressed in its parts and their confluenceinto an ordered, self-contained, and self-sufficing whole. Music, using sound for its material, is a pattern-weaving in tones. Thepower of music to satisfy and delight resides in the sensuous valueof its material and in the character of its pattern as form, the balanceand contrast of tonal relations, the folding and unfolding of themes, their development and progress to the final compelling unity-in-varietywhich constitutes its form and which in its own inherent andself-sufficing way is made the expression of the composer's emotionand musical idea. Lyric poetry is the fitting of rhythmic, melodious, colored words to the emotion within, to the point where the veryform itself becomes the meaning, and the essence and mystery of thesong are in the singing. Beauty is harmony materialized; it isemotion ordered and made visible, audible, tangible. If in the arts ofform we seek further a standard of truth, their truth is not found intheir relation to any external verity, but is determined by theircorrespondence with inner experience. 

In the category of the arts of form the single work is to be receivedin its entirety and integrity as form. The whole, however, may beresolved into its parts, and the individual details may be interestingin themselves. Thus into decorative patterns are introduced elementsof meaning which attach themselves to the world and experienceexternal to the artist. Many ornamental motives, like the zigzag andthe egg-and-dart, for example, had originally a symbolic value. Sometimes they are drawn from primitive structures and fabrics, asthe checker-board pattern, with its likeness to the plaitings of rushmattings, and the volute and spiral ornaments, which recall thecurves and involutions of wattle and wicker work. Again, decorationmay employ in its service details that in themselves are genuinelyrepresentative art. The frieze of the Parthenon shows in relief aprocession of men and women and horses and chariots and animals. The sculptures of Gothic churches represent men and women, andthe carvings of mouldings, capitals, and traceries are based onnaturalistic motives, taking their designs from leaves and flowers. The essential function of ornament is to emphasize form and not toobscure it, though nowadays in machine-made things a kind ofpseudo-embellishment is laid on to distract attention from thebadness and meaninglessness of the form; in true decoration therepresentative elements are subordinated to the formal character ofthe whole. The representative interest may be enjoyed separately andin detail; but finally the graphic purpose yields to the decorative, andthe details take their place as parts of the total design. Thus a Gothiccathedral conveys its complete and true impression first and last asform. Midway we may set ourselves to a reading of the details. Thefigure of this saint on the jamb or the archivolt of the portal isexpressive of such simple piety and enthusiasm! In this group on thetympanum what animation and spirit! This moulding of leaves andblossoms is cut with such loving fidelity and exquisite feeling fornatural truth! But at the last the separate members fulfill theirappointed office as they reveal the supreme function of the livingtotal form. 

Music, too, in some of its manifestations, as in song, the opera, andprogramme music, has a representative and illustrative character. InChopin's "Funeral March" we hear the tolling of church bells, and itis easy to visualize the slow, straggling file of mourners followingthe bier; the composition here has a definite objective base drawnfrom external fact, and the "idea" is not exclusively musical, butadmits an infusion of pictorial and literary elements. In listening tothe love duet of the second act of "Tristan, " although the lovers arebefore us in actual presence on the stage, I find myself involuntarilyclosing my eyes, for the music is so personal and so spiritualized, itis in and of itself so intensely the realization of the emotion, that theobjective presentment of it by the actors becomes unnecessary and isalmost an intrusion. The representative, figurative element in musicmay be an added interest, but its appeal is intellectual; if as we hearthe "Funeral March, " we say to ourselves, This is so and so, and, Here they do this or that, we are thinking rather than feeling. Musicis the immediate expression of emotion communicated immediately;and the composition will not perfectly satisfy unless it is _music, _compelling all relations of melody, harmony, and rhythm into asupreme and triumphant order. 

Whereas the representative arts are based upon objective fact, drawing their "subjects" from nature and life external to the artist; indecoration, in architecture, and in music the artist creates his ownforms as the projection of his emotion and the means of itsexpression. Richard Wagner, referring to the composition of his"Tristan, " writes: "Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into theinner depth of soul events, and from out this inmost centre of theworld I fearlessly built up its outer form. . . . Life and death, thewhole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothingbut the inner movements of the soul. The whole affecting Actioncomes about for the reason only that the inmost soul demands it, andsteps to light with the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine. "The form, thus self-constituted, has the power to delight us, and thework is at the same time the expression of emotion. The arts of formplease us with the pleasure that attends the perception of formalbeauty; but this pleasure docs not exhaust their capability to ministerto us. What differentiates art from manufacture is the element ofpersonal expression. Born out of need, whether the need be physicalor spiritual, fulfilling the urge to expression, a work of art embodiesits maker's delight in creating. Correspondingly, beyond ourimmediate enjoyment of the work as form, we feel something ofwhat the man felt who was impelled to create it. His handiwork, hispattern, his composition, becomes the means of communicating tous his emotional experience. 

Obviously the significance of any work is determined primarily bythe intensity and scope of emotion which has prompted it. Thecreation of works of art involves all degrees of intention, from thehut in the wilderness rudely thrown together, whose purpose wasshelter, to a Gothic cathedral, in its multitudinousness eloquent ofman's worship and aspiration. The man who moulded the first bowl, adapting its form as closely as possible to its use and shaping itsproportions for his own pleasure to satisfy his sense of harmony andrhythm, differs from the builders of the Parthenon only in the degreeof intensity of his inspiring emotion and in the measure of hiscontrolling thought. The beauty of accomplished form of cathedraland of temple is compelling; and we may forget that they rose out ofneed. Both hut and bowl are immediately useful, and their beauty isnot so evident, --that little touch of feeling which wakens a responsein us. But in their adaptation to their function they becomesignificant; the satisfaction which accompanies expression iscommunicated to us as we apprehend in the work the creator'sintention and we realize in ourselves what the creation of it meant tohim as the fulfillment of his need and the utterance of his emotion. 

So the expressive power of an individual work is conditionedoriginally by the amount of feeling that enters into the making of it. Every phrase of a Beethoven symphony is saturated with emotion, and the work leads us into depths and up to heights of universalexperience, disclosing to us tortuous ways and infinite vistas of thepossibilities of human feeling. A simple earthen jug may bear theimpress of loving fingers, and the crudely turned form may beeloquent of the caress of its maker. So we come to value even in thehumblest objects of use this autographic character, which is the gateof entrance into the experience of the men who fashioned them. Every maker strives toward perfection, the completest realization ofhis ideal within his power of execution. But the very shortcomingsof his work are significant as expressive of what he felt and wasgroping after; they are so significant that by a curious perversion, machinery, which in our civilized day has supplanted the craftsman, tries by mechanical means to reproduce the roughness and supposedimperfections of hand work. Music is the consummate art, in whichthe form and the content are one and inextricable; its medium is thepurest, least alloyed means of expression of instant emotion. Architecture, in its harmonies and rhythms, the gathering up ofdetails into the balanced and perfect whole, partakes of the nature ofmusic. But the arts of use and decoration also have their message forthe spirit. There is no object fashioned by the hand of man sohumble that it may not embody a true thought and a sincere delight. There is no pattern or design so simple and so crude that it may notbe the overflow of some human spirit, a mind and heart touched toexpression. 

IX

REPRESENTATION

BEFORE me is a little bowl of old Satsuma. As I look at it therewakens in me a responsive rhythm, and involuntarily my fingersmove as if to caress its suave and lovely lines. The rich gold andmingled mellow browns of its surface pattern intricately woven are agracious harmony and a delight. Gradually, as I continue to look onit, a feeling is communicated to me of the maker's own joy in hiswork; and the bowl, its harmonies and rhythms, and all that itexpresses, become part of me. There it is, complete in itself, gathering up and containing within itself the entire experience. Mythoughts, sensations, feelings do not go beyond the bowl. 

Another time I am standing in the hall of the Academy in Florence. At the end of the corridor towers a superb form. I see that it is thefigure of a youth. His left hand holds a sling drawn across hisshoulder; his right arm hangs by his side, his hand grasping a pebbleclose to his thigh; calm and confident, his head erect, his strengthheld in leash waiting to be loosed, he fronts the oncoming of the foe. The statue is the presentation of noble form, and it wakens in me anaccordant rhythm; I feel in myself something of what youthfulcourage, life, and conscious power mean. But my experience doesnot stop there. The statue is not only presentation but representation. It figures forth a youth, David, the Hebrew shepherd-boy, and hestands awaiting the Philistine. I have read his story, I have my ownmental image of him, and about his personality cluster manythoughts. To what Michelangelo shows me I add what I alreadyknow. Recognition, memory, knowledge, facts and ideas, a wholestore of associations allied with my previous experience, minglewith my instant emotion in its presence. The sculptor, unlike thepotter, has not created his own form; the subject of his work existsoutside of him in nature. He uses the subject for his own ends, but inhis treatment of it he is bound by certain responsibilities to externaltruth. His work as it stands is not completely self-contained, but islinked with the outer world; and my appreciation of it is affected bythis reference to extrinsic fact. 

An artist is interested in some scene in nature or a personality orsituation in human life; it moves him. As the object external to himis the stimulus of his emotion and is associated with it, so he usesthe object as the symbol of his experience and means of expressionof his emotion. Here, then, the feeling, to express which the work iscreated, gathers about a subject, which can be recognizedintellectually, and the fact of the subject is received as in a measureseparate from the feeling which flows from it. In a painting of alandscape, we recognize as the basis of the total experience the factthat it is a landscape, so much water and field and sky; and then weyield ourselves to the _beauty_ of the landscape, the emotion withwhich the artist suffuses the material objects and so transfiguresthem. Into representative art, therefore, there enters an element notshared by the arts of pure form, the element of _the subject, _carrying with it considerations of objective truth and of likeness toexternal fact. Toward the understanding of the total scope of apicture or a statue, and by inference and application of the principles, toward the understanding of literature as well, it may help us if wedetermine the relation of beauty to truth and the function and valueof the subject in representative art. 

The final significance of a work of art is beauty, received asemotional experience. Nature becomes beautiful to us at the pointwhere it manifests a harmony to which we feel ourselves attuned. Atthe moment of enjoyment we unconsciously project our personalityinto this harmony outside of us, identifying ourselves with it andfinding it at that instant the expression of something toward whichwe reach and aspire. When we come consciously to reason about ourexperience, we see that the harmony external to us which we feel asthe extension of ourselves does not stop with the actual materialitself of nature, but emanates from it as the expression of nature'sspirit. The harmony is a harmony of relations, made visible throughmaterial, and significant to us and beautiful in the measure that werespond to it. 

It is the beauty of the object, its significance for the spirit, thatprimarily moves the artist to expression. Why one landscape and notanother impels him to render it upon his canvas is not to beexplained. This impulse to immediate and concrete utterance isinspiration. And inspiration would seem to be a confluence of forcesoutside of the individual consciousness or will, focused at the instantinto desire, which becomes the urge to creation. "The mind increation, " says Shelley, "is as a fading coal, which some invisibleinfluence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;this power rises from within, like the colour of a flower which fadesand changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of ournatures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. " Theartist does not say, "Lo, I will paint a landscape; let me find mysubject!" The subject presents itself. There it is, by chance almost, --asudden harmony before him, long low meadows stretching away tothe dark hills, the late sun striking on the water, gold and greenmelting into a suffusing flush of purple light, a harmony of color andline and mass which his spirit leaps out to meet and with which itfuses in a larger unity. In the moment of contact all consciousness ofself as a separate individuality is lost. Out of the union of the twoprinciples, the spirit of man and the beauty of the object, is born the_idea, _ which is to come to expression as a work of art. 

But the artist is a mind as well as a temperament. Experienceis a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy ofimmediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment, which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, theartist rises out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. Thelandscape has compelled him; it is now he who must compel thelandscape. To the shaping of his work he must bring to bear all hisconscious power of selection and organization and all his knowledgeof the capabilities and resources of his means. Art springs out ofemotion; painting is a science. The artist's command of his subjectas the symbol of his idea derives from the stern and vigorousexercise of mind. The rightness of his composition is determined bya logic more flexible, perhaps, but no less exacting than the laws ofgeometry. By the flow of his line and the disposition of his masses, the artist must carry the eye of the beholder along the way he wantsit to travel until it rests upon the point where he wants it to rest. There must be no leaks and no false directions; there must be thecosmos within the frame and nothing outside of it. The principles ofperspective have been worked out with a precision that entitles themto rank as a science. Color has its laws, which, again, science is ableto formulate. These processes and formulas and laws are not thewhole of art, but they have their place. The power to feel, theimaginative vision, and creative insight are not to be explained. Butknowledge too, acquired learning and skill, plays its part, and torecognize its function and service is to be helped to a fullerunderstanding of the achievement of the artist. 

Gifted with a vibrant, sensitive temperament, endowed withdiscriminating and organizing power of mind, equipped with aknowledge of the science and the mechanics of his craft, and trainedto skill in manual execution, the artist responds to the impulse of hisinspiration. His subject is before him. But what is his subject? Ascene in nature furnishes him the objective base of his picture, butproperly his work is the expression of what he feels. A storm mayconvey to different men entirely different impressions. In itspresence one man may feel himself overwhelmed with terror. Thesewild, black skies piling in upon him, the hilltops that seem to racethrough the clouds, the swaying, snapping trees, the earth caught upin the mad grasp of the tempest, may smite his soul with thepitilessness of nature and her inexorable blind power. Another thrillswith joy in this cosmic struggle, the joy of conflict which he hasknown in his own life, the meeting of equal forces in fair fight, where the issue is still doubtful and victory will fall at last upon thestrong, though it is not the final triumph but the present struggle thatmakes the joy. In rendering the "subject" upon his canvas, by themanipulation of composition and line and mass and color, he makesthe storm ominous and terrible, or glorious, according as he feels. The import of his picture is not the natural fact of the storm itself, but its significance for the emotions. 

A work of representative art is the rendering of a unity of impressionand harmony of relations which the artist has perceived and to whichhe has thrilled in the world external to him. He presents not the factsthemselves but their spirit, that something which endows the factswith their significance and their power to stir him. As the meaningof nature to the beholder is determined by the effect it produces onhis mind and temperament, so the artist, in the expression of thismeaning, aims less at a statement of objective accuracy of exteriorappearance than at producing a certain effect, the effect which is theequivalent of the meaning of nature to him. Thus the painter whosees beyond the merely intellectual and sensuous appeal of hissubject and enters into its spirit, tries to render on his canvas, not theactual color of nature, but the sensation of color and its value for theemotions. With the material splendor of nature, --her inexhaustiblelavish wealth of color, the glory of life which throbs throughcreation, the mystery of actual movement, --art cannot compete. Forthe hues and tones of nature, infinite in number and subtlety, thepainter has only the few notes within the poor gamut of his palette. How can he quicken his dull paint with the life-beat of palpitatingflesh, or the sculptor animate the rigid marble with the vibrations ofvivid motion? But where nature is infinite in her range she is alsoscattering in her effects. By the concentration of divergent forces, artgains in intensity and directness of impression what it sacrifices inthe scope of its material. Michelangelo uses as his subject David, theshepherd-boy; but the person, the mere name, does not signify. Whathis work embodies is triumphant youth, made visible andcommunicable. When Millet shows us the peasant, it is not what thepeasant is feeling that the artist represents, but what Millet felt abouthim. The same landscape will be rendered differently by differentmen. Each selects his details according to the interest of his eye andmind and feeling, and he brings them into a dominant harmonywhich stands to him for the meaning of the landscape. None of thepictures is an accurate statement of the facts as they are, off there innature; all are true to the integrating inner vision. The superficialobserver sees only the accidents, and he does not distinguish relativeimportance. The artist, with quicker sensibilities and a trained mind, analyzes, discovers the underlying principle, and then makes asynthesis which embodies only the essential; he seizes thedistinctive aspect of the object and makes it salient. There may be, of course, purely descriptive representation, which is a faithfulrecord of the facts of appearance as the painter sees them, withoutany feeling toward them; here he works as a scientist, not as an artist. Merely imitative painting falls short of artistic significance, for itembodies no meaning beyond the external fact. It is theexpressiveness of the object that the true artist cares to represent; itis its expressiveness, its value for the emotions, that constitutes itsbeauty. 

To achieve beauty the representative artist bases his work upon thetruth of nature. It is nature that supplies him with his motive, --someglimpse, some fragment, which reveals within itself a harmony. Itmay be a form, as a tree, a man, a mountain range, the race of cloudsacross the sky; it may be a color-harmony or "arrangement, " inwhich color rather than form is the dominant interest, as with alandscape or an interior; it may be the effects of light, as thesunshine playing over golden haystacks, or the glint of light onmetal, or the sheen of lovely fabrics. Out of the complex of interestsand appeals which an object offers, what is the _truth_ of the object?The truth of nature resides not in the accidents of surface but in theessential relations, of which the surface is the manifestation. A birchtree and an apple tree are growing side by side. Their roots strikedown into the same soil, their branches are warmed by the same sun, wet by the same rains, and swept by the same winds. The birch treeis always lithe and gracious and feminine; the apple tree is alwaysbent and sternly gnarled like the hand of an old man. The life-forcewhich impels the tree to growth is distinctive to each kind. Withinall natural objects, then, a crystal, a tree, a man, there is a shapingprinciple which determines their essential form. But no twoindividual apple trees are precisely alike; from the essential form ofthe tree there are divergences in the single manifestations. Thoughsubject to accident and variation, however, every tree exhibits acharacteristic, inviolate _tendency, _ and remains true to the innerlife-principle of its being. The "truth" of the apple tree is thisdistinctive, essential form, by virtue of which it is an apple tree andnot some other kind, the form which underlies and allows for allindividual variations. What the painter renders on his canvas is notthe superficial accidents of some single tree, but by means of that, he seeks to image forth in color and form the tendency of all trees. The truth of an object presents itself to the imagination as design, forthis organic, shaping principle of things, expressed in coloredmyriad forms throughout the endless pageantry of nature, isapprehended by the spirit of man as a harmony; and in theexperience of the artist truth identifies itself with beauty. 

The distinction between the accidental surface of things and thesignificance that may be drawn out of them is exemplified by thedifference between accuracy and truth in representation. Accuratedrawing is the faithful record of the facts of appearance as offered tothe eye. Truth of drawing is the rendering in visible terms of themeaning and spirit of the object, the form which the object takes notsimply for the eye but for the mind. A pencil sketch by Millet showsa man carrying in each hand a pail of water. The arms are drawninaccurately, in that they are made too long. What Millet wanted toexpress, however, was not the physical shape of the arms, but thefeeling of the burden under which the man was bending; and bylengthening the arms he has succeeded in conveying, as mereaccuracy could not express it, the sensation of weight and muscularstrain. In Hals' picture of the "Jester" the left hand is sketched inwith a few swift strokes of the brush. But so, it "keeps its place" inrelation to the whole; and it is more nearly right than if it had beenmade the centre of attention and had been drawn with the mostmeticulous precision. The hand is not accurate, but it is true. Similarly, size is an affair not of physical extent but of proportion. Afigure six inches high may convey the same value as a figure six feethigh, if the same proportions are observed. A statue is thepresentation, not of the human body, but of the human form, andmore than that, of what the form expresses. When I am talking withmy friend I am aware of his physical presence detaching itself fromthe background of the room in which we are. But I feel in himsomething more. And that something more goes behind the detailsof his physical aspect. His eyes might be blue instead of brown, hisnose crooked rather than straight; he might be maimed anddisfigured by some mishap. These accidents would not change forme what is the reality. My friend is not his body, though it is by hisbody that he exists; the reality of my friend is what he essentially is, what he is of the spirit. A photograph of a man registers certain factsof his appearance at that moment. The eye and the mind of the artistdiscern the truth which underlies the surface; the artist feels his sitternot as a face and a figure, a mere body, but as a personality; and theportrait expresses a man. 

As grasped by our finite minds, there are partial truths and degreesof truth. There are, for example, the facts of outer appearance, modified in our reception of them by what we know as distinct fromwhat we really see. Thus a tree against the background of hill or skyseems to have a greater projection and relief than is actuallypresented to the eye, because we _know_ the tree is round. Manet's"Girl with a Parrot, " which appears to the ordinary man to be too flat, is more true to reality than any portrait that "seems to come out of itsframe. " Habitually in our observation of objects about us, we noteonly so much as serves our practical ends; and this is the mostsuperficial, least essential aspect. Projection is a partial truth, and toit many painters sacrifice other and higher truths. Manet, recoveringthe "innocence of the eye" and faithful to it, has penetrated thesecrets and won the truth of light. Botticelli saw the world assonorous undulations of exquisite line; and his subtly implicated, evanescent patterns of line movement, "incorrect" as they may besuperficially in drawing, caress the eye as music finds and satisfiesthe soul. When such is his power over us, it is difficult to say thatBotticelli had not some measure of the truth. The world of theVenetians sang full-sounding harmonies of glorious color. Velasquez saw everything laved around with a flood of silver quietatmosphere. All in their own way have found and shown to us atruth. 

To render what he has seen and felt in the essence and meaning of it, the artist seeks to disengage the shaping principle of the particularaspect of truth, which has impressed him, from all accidents in itsmanifestation. To make this dominant character salient beyondirrelevant circumstance, art works by selection. Art is necessarily acompromise. It isolates some elements and sacrifices others; but it isnone the less true on that account. The mere material of the object ismore or less fixed, but the relations which the object embodies arecapable of many combinations and adjustments, according to themind and temperament of the individual artist who is moved by it. All art is in a certain sense abstraction; all art in a measure idealizes. It is abstraction in the sense that it presents the intrinsic anddistinctive qualities of things, purged of accident. 

Art does not compete with nature; it is a statement of the spirit andintention of nature in the artist's own terms. The test of the work isnot apparent and superficial likeness, but truth. Art idealizes in themeasure that it disengages the truth. In this aspect of it the work isideal as distinct from merely actual. There is a practice in art whichdraws its standard of beauty, its ideal, not from nature but fromother art, and which seeks to "improve nature" by the combinationof arbitrarily chosen elements and by the modification of naturaltruth to fit a preconceived formula. The Eclectics of Bologna, in theseventeenth century, sought to combine Raphael's perfection ofdrawing and composition, Michelangelo's sublimity and his masteryof the figure, and Correggio's sweet sentiment and his supremacy inthe rendering of light and shade, fondly supposing thus that the sumof excellent parts is equivalent to an excellence of the whole. This isfalse idealism. The Greeks carried their research for certain truths ofthe human form to the point of perfection and complete realization. The truth of the Greeks was mistaken by the pseudo-classicists andmisapplied. Thus Delacroix exclaimed ironically, "In order topresent an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble asfar as possible the profile of Antinöus, and then say, 'We have doneour utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak ofnature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to theeyes. '" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making itmore intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete ismore heroically an athlete, the negro more vividly a negro. Trueidealism seeks to express the tendency by virtue of which an objectis what it is. The abstraction which art effects is not an unreality buta higher reality. It is not the mere type, that art presents, for the typeas such does not exist in nature. The individual is not lost butaffirmed by this reference to the inner principle of its being. A goodportrait has in it an element of caricature; the difference betweenportraiture and caricature is the difference between emphasis andexaggeration. Art is not the falsification of nature, but the fullerrealization of it. It is the interpretation of nature's truth, thetranslation of it, divined by the artist, into simpler terms to be readand understood by those of less original insight. The deeper thepenetration into the life-force and shaping principle of nature, thegreater is the measure of truth. 

In representative art the truth of nature is the work's objective base. What the artist finally expresses is the relation of the object to hisown experience. A work of art is the statement of the artist's insightinto nature, moulded and suffused by the emotion attending hisperception. Of the object, he uses that aspect and that degree of truthwhich serve him for the expression of his feeling toward it. What iscalled "realism" is one order of truth, one way of seeing. "Impressionism" is another order of truth. "Idealism" is still another. But all three elements blend in varying proportion in any work. Even the realist, who "paints what he sees, " has his ideal, which isthe effect he sets himself to produce by his picture, and he paintsaccording to his impression. He renders not the object itself but hismental image of it; and that image is the result of his way of seeingand feeling, his habit of mind, his interest, and his store of memories. The idealist must base his work upon some kind of reality, or it is amonstrosity; he is obliged to refer to the external world for hissymbols. The impressionist, who concerns himself with the play oflight over surfaces in nature, is seeking for truth, and he cares topaint at all because that play of light, seemingly so momentary andso merely sensuous, has a value for his spirit of which he may ormay not be wholly conscious; and these shifting effects are therealization of his ideal. Unwitting at the moment of contact itself ofthe significance that afterwards is to flow articulately from his work, the artist, in the presence of his object, knows only that he isimpelled to render it. As faithfully as possible he tries to record whathe sees, conscious simply that what he sees gives him delight. Hisvision wakens his feeling, and then by reaction his feelingdetermines his vision, controlling and directing his selection of thedetails of aspect. When Velasquez, engaged on a portrait of the king, saw the maids of honor graciously attending on the little princess, hedid not set about producing a _picture, _ as an end in itself. In therelation of these figures to one another and to the background of thedeep and high-vaulted chamber in which they were standing, eachobject and plane of distance receiving its just amount of light andfusing in the unity of total impression, were revealed to him thewonder and the mystery of nature's magic of light. This is what hetried to render. His revelation of natural truth, wrung from nature'sinmost latencies and shown to us triumphantly, becomes a thing ofbeauty. 

So the differences among the various "schools" in art are after alllargely differences of emphasis. The choice of subject or motive, theangle from which it is viewed, and the method of handling, all aredetermined by the artist's kind of interest; and that interest resultsfrom what the man is essentially by inheritance and individualcharacter, and what he is moulded into by environment, training, andexperience. It may happen that the external object imposes itself inits integrity upon the artist's mind and temperament, and he tries toexpress it, colored inevitably by his feeling toward it, in allfaithfulness to the feet as he sees it. Millet said, "I should never paintanything that was not the result of an impression received from theaspect of nature, whether in landscape or figures. " Millet paintedwhat he saw, but he painted it as only he saw it. Or again it happensthat an artist imposes his feeling upon nature. Thus Burne-Jones said, "I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something thatnever was, never will be--in a light better than any that ever shone--ina land no one can define or remember, only desire. " Whether trueto nature or true to the creative inner vision, the work of both menembodies truth. Sometimes an artist effaces entirely his ownindividuality, as in Greek sculpture and Gothic architecture, and themere name of the creator does not signify. George Frederick Wattsis reported to have said, "If I were asked to choose whether I wouldlike to do something good, as the world judges popular art, andreceive personally great credit for it, or, as an alternative, to producesomething which should rank with the very best, taking a place withthe art of Pheidias or Titian, with the highest poetry and the mostelevating music, and remain unknown as the perpetrator of the work, I should choose the latter. " Sidney Lanier wrote, "It is of littleconsequence whether _I_ fail; the _I_ in the matter is smallbusiness. . . . Let my name perish, --the poetry is good poetry and themusic is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs itwill find it. " Or on the contrary, a work may bear dominantly, evenaggressively, the impress of the distinctive individuality of itscreator, as with Carlyle's prose and Browning's poetry. Whistlerseems at times to delight less in the beauty of his subject than in the_exercise_ of his own power of refinement. Where another man's artis personal, as with Velasquez or Frans Hals, Whistler's art becomesegotistical. He does not say, "Lo, how mysterious is this duskriver-side, how tenderly serene this mother, how wistful and mighty is thisprophet-seer!" He exclaims rather, "Note how subtly I, Whistler, have seen. Rejoice with me in my powers of vision and ofexecution. " There is no single method of seeing, no one formula ofexpression and handling. The truth both of nature and of art is greatand infinitely various. For art, like nature, is organic, allowing forendless modifications, while remaining true to the inner principle ofits being. 

The judgment of truth is a delicate business. To test the truth of awork of art by reference to the truth of nature is to presuppose thatour power of perception is equal to the artist's power, and that ourknowledge of the object represented is equal to his knowledge of it. The ordinary man's habitual contact with the world is practical, andhis knowledge of natural fact, based upon the most superficial aspectof it and used for practical purposes, tends to falsify his vision. Theartist's contact with the world, in his capacity as artist, is one offeeling; he values life, not for its material rewards and satisfactions, but for what it brings to him of emotional experience. The ordinaryman uses nature for his own workaday ends. The artist loves nature, and through his love he understands her. His knowledge of naturalfact, instead of falsifying his vision, reinforces it. He studies theworkings of nature's laws as manifested in concrete phenomenaaround him, --the movement of storms, the growth of trees, theeffects of light, --penetrating their inmost secrets, that he may makethem more efficient instruments of expression. He uses hisunderstanding of anatomy, of earth-structure, of the laws of color, asthe means to a fuller and juster interpretation. As he receives thetruth of nature with reverence and joy, so he transmutes truth intobeauty. 

An artist's interest in the truth of nature is not the scientist'sinterest, an intellectual concern with knowledge for the sake ofknowledge. The artist receives nature's revelation of herself withemotion. The deeper he penetrates into her hidden ways, the greaterbecomes her power to stir him. The artist values his "subject, "therefore, as the stimulus of emotion and as the symbol by means ofwhich he expresses his emotion and communicates it. The value of thesubject to the appreciator, however, is not immediately clear. It isnot easy for us to receive the subject purely as the artist shows itto us and independently of our own knowledge of it. About it alreadygather innumerable associations, physical, practical, intellectual, sentimental, and emotional, all of them or any of them, which resultfrom our previous contact with it in actual life. Here is a portrait ofCarlyle. I cannot help regarding the picture first of all from the pointof view of its likeness to the original. This is a person with whom Iam acquainted, an individual, by name Carlyle. And my reaction onthe picture is determined, not by what the artist has to say about agreat personality interpreted through the medium of color and form, but by what I already know about Carlyle. Or here a painting showsme a landscape with which I am familiar. Then instead of trying todiscover in the picture what the artist has seen in the landscape andfelt in its presence, letting it speak to me in its own language, I allowmy thoughts to wander from the canvas, and I enjoy the landscape interms of my own knowledge and remembrance of it. The artist'swork becomes simply a point of departure, whereas it should be notonly the beginning but also the end and fulfillment of the completeexperience. What is, then, we may ask, the relation of the fact of thesubject to the beauty and final message of the work?

The pleasure which attends the recognition of the subject is alegitimate element in our enjoyment of art. But the work shouldyield a delight beyond our original delight in the subject as it existsin nature. The significance of a work of representative art dependsnot upon the subject in and of itself, but upon what the artist has tosay about it. A rose may be made to reveal the cosmos; a mountainrange or cloud-swept spaces of the upper air may be niggled intomeanness. The ugly in practical life may be transfigured by theartist's touch into supreme beauty. _"Il faut pouvoir faire servir letrivial à l'expression du sublime, c'est la vraie force, "_ said one whowas able to invest a humble figure with august dignity. Millet'speasants reveal more of godlike majesty than all the array ofpersonages in the pantheon of post-Raphaelite Italy and the classicschool of France. Upon his subject the artist bases that harmony ofrelations which constitutes the beauty and significance of his work. Brought thus into a harmony, the object represented is made morevivid, more intensely itself, than it is in nature, with the result thatwe receive from the representation a heightened sense of reality andof extended personality. The importance of the subject, therefore, ismeasured by the opportunity it affords the artist, and with him hisappreciators, to share in the beauty of nature and life. A pictureshould not "standout" from its frame, but should go back into it, reaching even into infinity. Our own associations attaching to thesubject lose themselves as they blend with the artist's revelation ofthe fuller beauty of his object; and finally all becomes merged in theemotional experience. 

Eliminating the transient and accidental, a work of art presents theessential and eternal. Art appeals not to the intellect and the reason, but to the imagination and the emotions. The single work, therefore, is concrete and immediate. But universal in its scope, it transcendsthe particularities of limited place and individual name. We mustdistinguish between the abstractly typical and the universal. Therepresentative artist does not conceive an abstraction and then seekto find a symbol for it. That is the method of allegory, where spring, for example, is figured as a young woman scattering flowers. Allegory is decorative rather than representative in intention. Theartist receives his inspiration and stimulus from some actualconcrete bit of nature, a woodland wrapt in tender mists of green, ameadow gold and softly white with blossoms, a shimmering gauzeof sun touched air, moist and vibrating, enfolding it. That is what hepaints. But he paints it so that it is spring, and instinct with the spiritof all springs. Michelangelo does not intellectually conceive youthand then carve a statue. Some boy has revealed to him the beauty ofhis young strength, and the sculptor moves to immediate expression. He calls his statue David, but the white form radiates the rhythm andglory of all youth. And as we realize youth in ourselves, morepoignantly, more abundantly, the mere name of the boy does notmatter. The fact that the portrait shows us Carlyle is an incident. Carlyle is the "subject" of the picture, but its meaning is the twilightof a mighty, indomitable mind, made visible and communicable. Hiswork is done; the hour of quiet is given, and he finds rest. Into thismoment, eternal in its significance, into this mood, universal in itsappeal, we enter, to realize it in ourselves. The subject of picture orstatue is but the means; the end is life. Objective fact is transmutedinto living truth. Art is the manifestation of a higher reality than wealone have been able to know. It begins with the particular and thentranscends it, admitting us to share in the beauty of the world, thecosmic harmony of universal experience. 

X

THE PERSONAL ESTIMATE

ART starts from life and in the end comes back to it. Art is born outof the stirring of the artist's spirit in response to his need ofexpression, and it reaches its fulfillment in the spirit of theappreciator as it answers his need of wider and deeper experience. Midway on its course from spirit to spirit it traverses devious paths. The emotion out of which art springs and of which it is theexpression is controlled and directed by the shaping force of mind, and it embodies itself in material form. This material form, by virtueof its qualities, has the power to delight our senses; the skill whichwent into the fashioning of it, so far as we can recognize theprocesses of execution, gives us pleasure; the harmony which thework of art must manifest satisfies the mind and makes it possiblefor us to link the emotion with our own experience. 

These paths which a work of art traverses in its course from itsorigin to its fulfillment I have tried to follow in their ramifications, and I have tried to trace them to their issue in appreciation. Somelovers of art may linger on the way and rest content with thedistance they have come, without pressing forward to the end. Awork of art is complex in its appeal; and it is possible to stop withone or another of its elements. Thus we may receive the workintellectually, recognizing its subject, and turning the artist'semotion into our thought and translating it from his medium of colorand form or sound into our own medium of words. Here is a portraitof Carlyle; and Carlyle we _know_ as an author and as a man. Thislandscape is from the Palisades, where we have roamed in leisurehours. Before us is a statue of Zeus, whom our classical reading hasmade a reality to us. This symphony gathers about a day in thecountry, suggesting an incident in our own experience of which wehave pleasant remembrances. Intellectually, also, we enjoy theevidence of the artist's skill which the work exhibits. Or we maypass beyond the simple exercise of the intellect, and with arefinement of perception we may take a sensuous delight in thequalities of the material in which the work is embodied. This portraitis a subtle harmony of color and exquisite adjustment of line andmass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemnmighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye thatfollows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderfulwave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerseshimself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art isnot to be received apart from its form, but the form is more thanmerely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and thecomposition of the portrait are but the point of meeting where wetouch in energizing contact a powerful personality. Our spirit goesout into the night of these Palisades and dilates into immensity. Thisstatue is Olympian majesty made visible, and in its presence we feelthat we too are august. The symphony is a resolution of the struggleof our own tangled lives, a purification, and the experience of joy. 

Art is the expression of experience, whether the experience enactsitself within the spirit of the artist or derives from his contact withthe external world. So by the same token, art is finally to be receivedas experience. The ultimate meaning of a work of art to theappreciator is what it wakens in him of emotion. It is the artist'sbusiness, by the manipulation of his materials and his elements, bythe choice of motive and the rendering, by the note and pitch of hiscolor, the ordering of his line, the disposition of his masses, tocompel the direction of the emotion; he must not allow thesolemnity and awe with which his night invests the Palisades to bemistaken by the beholder for terror or for mere obscurity. But thequality and the intensity of the emotion depend upon the temper ofthe appreciator's sensibilities and the depth and range of hisexperience of life. Art is not fixed and invariable in its effect. "Vanity Fair" is a great novel. One man may read it for the sake ofthe story, and in his amusement and interest in following thesuccession of incident, he may for a while forget himself. A possibleuse to put one's reading to; yet for that man the book is not art. Another may be entertained by the spectacle of the persons as theyexhibit themselves in Thackeray's pages, much as he might stop amoment on the curbstone and watch a group of children at play inthe street. Here he is a looker-on, holding himself aloof; and for him, again, the book is not art. Still a third may find in "Vanity Fair" arecord of the customs and manners of English people at thebeginning of the nineteenth century; and he adds this much to hisstock of information. Still for him the book is not art. Not one of thethree has touched in vital contact the essential meaning of "VanityFair. " But the man who sees in the incidents of the book a situationpossible in his own life, who identifies himself with the personagesand acts out with them their adventures, who feels that he actuallyknows Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp, Jo Sedley, Dobbin, andAmelia, and understands their character and personality better herethan in the actual world about him by force of Thackeray's greaterinsight and power of portraiture, who sees in English manners hererepresented the interpretation of his own surroundings, so that as aresult of it all, his own experience becomes richer for his havinglived out the life of the fictitious persons, his own acquaintanceshave revealed themselves more fully, his own life becomes moreintelligible, --for him at last the book is a work of art. So any workmay be a mirror which simply reflects the world as we know it; itmay be a point of departure, from which tangentially we constructan experience of our own: it is truly art only in the degree that it isrevelation. 

A work of art, therefore, is to be received by the individualappreciator as an added emotional experience. It appeals to him atall because in some way it relates itself to his own life; and its valueto him is determined by the measure in which it carries him out intowider ranges of feeling. There are works whose absolute greatnesshe recognizes but yet which do not happen at the moment to findhim. Constable comes to him as immensely satisfying; Turner, though an object of great intellectual interest, leaves him cold. Heknows Velasquez to be supreme among painters, but he turns awayto stand before Frans Hals, whose quick, sure strokes call such veryhuman beings into actuality and rouse his spirit to the fullestresponse. Why is it that of two works of equal depth of insight intolife, of equal scope of feeling, of the same excellence of technicalaccomplishment, one has an appeal and a message for him and notthe other? What is the bridge of transition between the work and thespirit of the appreciator by which the subtle connection isestablished?

It comes back to a matter of harmony. Experience presents itself tous in fragments; and in so far as the parts are scattering andunrelated, it is not easy for us to guess the purpose of our being here. But so soon as details, which by virtue of some selecting principleare related to one another, gather themselves into a whole, chaos isresolved into order, and this whole becomes significant, intelligible, and beautiful. Instinctively we are seeking, each in his own way, tobring the fragments of experience into order; and that order stands toeach of us for what we are, for our individual personality, the self. We define thus our selecting principle, by which we receive someincidents of experience as related to our development and we rejectothers as not related to it. Thus the individual life achieves itsintegrity, its unity and significance. This, too, is the process of art. Alandscape in nature is capable of a various, interpretation. Bybringing its details into order and unity, the artist creates its beauty. His perception of the harmony which his imagination compels out ofthe landscape is attended with emotion, and the emotion flowsoutward to expression in a form which is itself harmonious. Thisform is a work of art. Art, therefore, is the harmonizing ofexperience. Appreciation is an act of fusion and identification. Inspirit we _become_ the thing presented by the work of art and wemerge with it in a larger unity. The individual harmony which awork of art manifests becomes significant to us as we can make it anharmonious part of our own experience and as it carries us in thedirection of our development. 

But how to determine, each man for himself, what is the direction ofour development? A life becomes significant to itself so soon as it isconscious of its purpose, and it becomes harmonious as it makes allthe details of experience subserve that purpose. The purpose of theindividual life, so far as we can guess it, seems to be that the lifeshall be as complete as possible, that it shall fulfill itself and providethrough its offspring for its continuance. It is true that no life isisolated; as every atom throughout the universe is bound to everyother atom by subtlest filaments of influence, so each human lifestands related to all other lives. But the man best pays his debt ofservice to others who makes the most of that which is given him towork with; and that is his own personality. We must begin at thecentre and work outwards. My concern is with my own justice. If Iworry because my friend or another is not just, I not only do notmake him more just, but I also fail of the highest justice I canachieve, which is my own. We must be true to ourselves. We helpone another not by precept but by _being;_ and what we arecommunicates itself. As physical life propagates and thus continuesitself, so personality is transmitted in unconscious innumerable ways. The step and carriage of the body, the glance of the eye, the work ofour hands, our silences no less than our speech, all express what weare. As everything follows upon what we are, so our responsibility isto _be, _ to be ourselves completely, perfectly. 

A tender shoot pushes its way out of the soil into light and air, andwith the years it grows into a tree. The tree bears fruit, whichcontains the seed of new manifestations of itself. The fruit falls tothe ground and rots, providing thus the aliment for the seed out ofwhich other trees are to spring. From seed to seed the life of the treeis a cycle, without beginning and without end. At no one point in thecycle can we say, Here is the purpose of the tree. Incidentally thetree may minister to the needs and comfort and pleasure of man. Thetree delights him to look upon it; its branches shade him from thenoonday sun; its trunk and limbs can be hewn down and turned toheat and shelter; its fruit is good to eat. The primary purpose of thefruit, however, is not to furnish food to man, but to provide theenvelope for the transmission of its seed and the continuance of itsown life. Seen in its cosmic bearing and scope, the purpose of thetree is to be a tree, as fit, as strong, as beautiful, as complete, astree-like, as it can be. The leaf precedes the flower and may be thoughton that account to be inferior to it in the scale of development. If aleaf pines and withers in regret that it is not a flower, it not onlydoes not become a flower, but it fails of being a good leaf. Everything in its place and after its own kind. In so far as it isperfectly itself, a leaf, a blossom, a tree, a man, does it contribute tothe well-being of others. Man has subdued all things under his feetand turned them to his own uses. By force of mind he is thestrongest creature, but it is not to be inferred that he is therefore theaim and end of all creation. Like everything else, he has his place;like everything else he has the right to live his own life, triumphingover the weaker and in his turn going down before a mightier whenthe mightier shall come; like everything else he is but a part in theuniversal whole. Only a part; but as we recognize our relation toother parts and through them our connection with the whole, oursense of the value of the individual life becomes infinitely extended. We must get into the rhythm, keeping step with the beat of theuniversal life and finding there our place, our destiny, the meaningof our being here, and joy. The goods which men set beforethemselves as an end are but by-products after all. If we pursuehappiness we overtake it not. If we do what our hands find to do, devotedly and with our might, then, some day, if we happen to stopand make question of it, we discover that happiness is already there, in us, with us, and around us. The aim of a man's life in the world, asit would seem, is to be perfectly a man, and his end is to fulfillhimself; as part of this fulfillment of himself, he provides for thecontinuance of his life in other lives, and transmitting his characterand influence, he enriches other lives because of what he is. Thepurpose of seeing is that we may see more, and the eye is everstriving to increase its power; the health of the eye is growth. Thepurpose of life is more life, individual in the measure that it lieswithin a man's power to develop it, but cosmic in its sources and itsinfluence. 

As the harmony which a work of art presents finds a place in thatharmony of experience and outward-reaching desire whichconstitutes our personality, art becomes for us an entrance into morelife. In the large, art is a means of development. But as any workembraces diverse elements and is capable of a various appeal, it maybe asked in what sense the appreciation of art is related to educationand culture. Before we can answer the question intelligently, wemust know what we mean by our terms. By many people educationis regarded as they regard any material possession, to be classedwith fashionable clothes, a fine house, a carriage and pair, ortouring-car, or steam yacht, as the credential and card of entrée towhat is called good society. Culture is a kind of ornamental furniture, maintained to impress visitors. Of course we ourselves do not thinkso, but we know people who do. Nor do we believe--as somebelieve--that education is simply a means of gaining a moreconsiderable livelihood. It is pathetic to see young men in collegestruggling in desperate, uncomplaining sacrifice to obtain aneducation, and all the while mistaking the end of their effort. Not allthe deeds of daring in a university course are enacted on the athleticfield; the men I am thinking of do not have their pictures publishedin the newspapers, --the unrecorded heroisms of college life are verymoving to those who know. But the tragedy I have in mind is this--fortragedy consists not in sacrifice itself but in needless and futilesacrifice--that some of these young men suppose _there_ is a magicvirtue in education for its own sake, that it is the open-sesame to allthe wealth and beauty of life. With insufficient ability to start with, they are preparing to be unfit professional men, when they might beexcellent artisans. The knowledge of books is in no sense the wholestory nor the only means of education. In devotion to some craft orin the intelligent conduct of some business they might find the trueeducation, which is the conscious discipline of one's powers. Theman who can do things, whether with his hands or with his brain, provided intelligence govern the exercise of hand and brain, andwho finds happiness in his work because it is the expression ofhimself, is an educated man. The end of education is the building ofpersonality, the making of human power, and its fruit is wisdom. 

Wisdom, however, does not consist in the most extensive knowledgeof facts. Oftentimes information overweights a man and snuffs outwhat personal force there might otherwise have been. On the futilityof mere learning there is abundant testimony. Walt Whitman, as wemight expect from his passion for the vital and the human, has said:"You must not know too much and be too precise and scientificabout birds and trees and flowers and watercraft. A certain freemargin, perhaps ignorance, credulity, helps your enjoyment of thesethings and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river or marinenature generally. I repeat it--don't want to know too exactly or thereasons why. " Even Ruskin, whose learning was extensive andvarious, bears witness to the same effect. He notes "the diminutionwhich my knowledge of the Alps had made in my impression ofthem, and the way in which investigation of strata and structurereduces all mountain sublimity to mere debris and wall-building. " Inthe same spirit he planned an essay on the Uses of Ignorance. Fromthe midst of his labors in Venice he wrote: "I am sure that peoplewho work out subjects thoroughly are disagreeable wretches. Oneonly feels as one should when one doesn't know much about thematter. " In other words, we are not to let our knowledge comebetween us and our power to feel. In thus seeming to assaileducation I am not seeking to subvert or destroy; I want simply toadjust the emphasis. The really wise man is he who knows how tomake life yield him its utmost of true satisfaction and furnish himthe largest scope for the use of his powers and the expression ofhimself. In this sense a newsboy in the streets may be wiser than auniversity professor, in that one may be the master of his life and theother may be the servant of his information. Education should havefor its end the training of capacities and powers, the discipline andcontrol of the intelligence, the quickening of the sympathies, thedevelopment of the ability to live. No man is superior to his fellowsbecause of the fact of his education. His education profits him onlyin so far as it makes him more of a man, more responsive becausehis own emotions have been more deeply stirred, more tolerantbecause his wider range has revealed more that is good, moregenerous to give of his own life and service because he has moregenerously received. It is not what we know nor what we have thatmarks our worth, but what we are. No man, however fortunate andwell-circumstanced he may be, can afford to thank God that he isnot as other men are. In so far as his education tends to withdrawhim from life and from contact with his fellows of whatever station, in so far as it fosters in him the consciousness of class, so far it is anevil. Education should lead us not to judge lives different from ourown, but to try to understand and, to appreciate. The educated man, above all others, should thank God that there are diversity of giftsand so many kinds of good. 

Art is a means of culture, but art rightly understood and received. Art does not aim to teach. It may teach incidentally, tangentially toits circle, but instruction, either intellectual or ethical, is not itspurpose. It fulfills itself in the spirit of the appreciator as it enableshim in its presence to become something that otherwise he had notbeen. It is not enough to be told things; we must make trial of themand live them out in our own experience before they become true forus. As appreciation is not knowledge but feeling, so we must liveour art. It is well to have near us some work that we want to be_like. _ We get its fullest message only as we identify ourselves withit. If we are willing to be thought ignorant and to live our lives asseems good to us, I believe it is better to go the whole way with afew things that can minister to us abundantly and so come to the endof them, than to touch in superficial contact a great many lesserworks. The lesser works have their place; and so far as they cancarry us beyond the point where we are, they can serve us. In ahurried touch-and-go, however, there is danger of scattering;whereas true appreciation takes time, for it is less an act than awhole attitude of mind. This is an age of handbooks and short cuts. But there is no substitute for life. If for one reason or another theopportunity to realize art in terms of life is not accorded us, it isbetter to accept the situation quite frankly and happily, and not try tocheat ourselves with the semblance. But if it is indeed the reality, then we maybe content with the minutes of experience, though weare denied the hours or the years. "The messages of great poems, "says Whitman, "to each man and woman are, Come to us on equalterms; only then can you understand us. " The power of responsemust be in us, and that power is the fruit of experience. The onlymystery of art is the mystery of all life itself. In nature the artistfinds the manifestation of a larger self toward which he aspires, andthis is what his work expresses. Alone with his spirit, he cries to usfor that intimate mystic companionship which is appreciation, andour response gives back the echo of his cry. He reaches out acrossthe distance to touch other and kindred spirits and draw them tohimself. Says the poet, --

 "Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I, Therefore for thee the following chants. "

We appreciate the artist's work as in it we live again and doubly. 

Thus art links itself with life. The message of art to the individualdefines itself according to his individual needs. Life rises with eachman, to him a new opportunity and a new destiny. We create ourown world; and life means to us what we are in ourselves. In art weare seeking to find ourselves expressed more fully. The works thatwe care for, if we consider it a moment, are the works weunderstand; and we understand them because they phrase for us ourown experience. Life and the truth of life are relative. Truth is not inthe object but in our relation to it. What is true for me may or maynot be true for another. This much is true for me, namely, whatevertallies with my experience and reveals to me more of the underlyingpurpose of the universe. We are all, each in his own way, seekingthe meaning of life; and that meaning is special and personal to theindividual, each man deciding for himself. By selection here, byrejection there, we are trying to work toward harmony. The detailsof life become increasingly complex with the years, but living growssimpler because we gradually fix a selecting and unifying principle. When we have truly found ourselves, we come to feel that theexternal incidents do not signify; which chance happens, whetherthis or that, is indifferent. It is the spirit in which the life is livedthat determines its quality and value. The perception of purpose in theparts brings them into order and gives them meaning. A man's life isan expanding circle, the circumference of which is drawn around anorder or interplay and adjustment of part with part. Whatever lieswithout the circle does not pertain to the individual--as yet. So soonas any experience reveals its meaning to us and we feel that it takesits place in our life, then it belongs to us. Whatever serves to bringdetails, before scattering and unrelated, into order, is for thatmoment true. Art has a message for us as it tallies with what wealready know about life; and, quickening our perceptions, disclosingdepths of feeling, it carries us into new ranges of experience. 

In this attitude toward life lies the justice of the personal estimate. The individual is finally his own authority. To find truth we returnupon our own consciousness, and we seek thus to define our"original relation" to the universal order. So as one stands before theworks of the Italian painters and sculptors, for example, in theendeavor rightly to appreciate what they have achieved, one may ask:How much of life has this artist to express to me, of life as I know itor can know it? Has the painter through these forms, however crudeor however accomplished, uttered what he genuinely and for himselfthought and felt? The measure of these pictures for me is the degreeof reality, of vital feeling, which they transmit. Whether it be springor divine maternity or the beauty of a pagan idea, which Botticellirenders, the same power is there, the same sense of gracious life. Whether it be Credi's naïve womanhood, or Titian's abounding, glorious women and calm and forceful men, or Delia Robbia'sjoyous children and Donatello's sprites, the same great meaning isexpressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of alllife. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a manwho thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turnstoward the past. At the moment, as the world closes in about him, his spirit, dulled by the attrition of daily use and wont, is unable todiscern the beauty and significance of the present life around him. For a time his imagination finds abundant nourishment in the mightypast. Many spirits are content there to remain. But life is of thepresent. To live greatly is to live now, inspired by the past, correctedand encouraged by it, impelled by "forward-looking thoughts'" andproviding for the future, but living in to-day. Life is neitherremembrance nor anticipation, neither regret nor deferment, butpresent realization. Often one feels in a gallery that the people aremore significant than the pictures. Two lovers furtively holdinghands and stopping before a canvas to press closer together, shoulder to shoulder; a young girl erect and firm, conscious of heryoung womanhood and rejoicing in it, radiating youth and life; anold man, whose years are behind him yet whose interest reveals hiseager welcome of new experience, unconsciously rebuking the jadedand indifferent: here is reality. Before it the pictures seem to recedeand become dimmed. Our appreciation of these things makes thesignificance of it all. Only in so far as art can communicate thissensation, this same impression of the beauty and present reality oflife, has it a meaning for us. The painter must have registered hisappreciation of immediate reality and must impart that to us until itbecomes, heightened and intensified, our own. The secret ofsuccessful living lies in compelling the details of our surroundingsto our own ends. Michelangelo lived his life; Leonardo lived his;neither could be the other. A man must paint the life that he knows, the experience into which he enters. So we must live our livesimmediately and newly. We have penetrated the ultimate mystery ofart when we realize the inseparable oneness of art with life. 

Art is a call to fuller living. Its real service is to increase ourcapacity for experience. The pictures, the music, the books, whichprofit us are those which, when we have done with them, make usfeel that we have lived by just so much. Often we purchaseexperience with enthusiasm; we become wise at the expense of ourpower to enjoy. What we need in relation to art is not moreknowledge but greater capability of feeling, not the acquisition ofmore facts but the increased power to interpret facts and to applythem to life. In appreciation it is not what we know about a work ofart, it is not even what we actually see before us, that constitutes itssignificance, but what in its presence we are able to feel. Theparadox that nature imitates art has in it this much of truth, that art isthe revelation of the possibilities of life, and we try to make thesepossibilities actual in our own experience. Art is not an escape fromlife and a refuge; it is a challenge and reënforcement. Its action isnot to make us less conscious but more; in it we are not to loseourselves but to find ourselves more truly and more fully. Its effectis to help us to a larger and juster appreciation of the beauty andworth of nature and of life. 

Art is within the range of every man who holds himself open to itsappeal. But art is not the final thing. It is a means to an end; its endis personality. There are exalted moments in the experience of us allwhich we feel to be finer than any art. Then we do not need to turnto painting, music, literature, for our satisfaction. We are living. Artis aid and inspiration, but its fulfillment and end is life. 

"We live, " says Wordsworth, "by admiration, hope, and love. "Admiration is wonder and worship, a sense of the mystery and thebeauty of life as we know it now, and thankfulness for it, and joy. Hope is the vision of things to be. And love is the supreme enfoldingunity that makes all one. Art is life at its best, but life is the greatestof the arts, --life harmonious, deep in feeling, big in sympathy, thelife that is appreciation, responsiveness, and love.