picturesque: their presence at the exhibition is evidence of that. In life they like to see a bowl of flowers, a sunny landscape, a beautiful woman in beautiful surroundings; and naturally they are interested in that which represents and recalls the reality. At once it is plain, however, that to different individuals the various pictures appeal in different measure and for differing reasons. To one the very fact of representation is a mystery and fascination. To another the important thing is the subject; the picture must represent what he likes in nature or in life. To a third the subject itself is of less concern than what the painter wanted to say about it: the artist saw a beauty manifested by an ugly beggar, perhaps, and he wanted to show that beauty to his fellows, who could not perceive it for themselves.

The special interest in pictures of each of these three men is not without its warrant in experience. What man is wholly indifferent to the display of human skill? Who is there without his store of pleasurable associations, who is not stirred by any call which rouses them into play? What lover of beauty is not ever awake to the revelation of new beauty? Indeed, upon these three principles together, though in varying proportion, depends the full significance of a great work of art.

As the lover of pictures looks back over the period of his conscious interest in exhibitions and galleries, it is not improbable that his earliest memories attach themselves to those paintings which most closely resembled the object represented. He remembers the great wonder which he felt that a man with mere paint and canvas could so reproduce the reality of nature. So it is that those paintings which are perhaps the first to attract the man who feels an interest in pictures awakening are such as display most obviously the painter's skill. Whatever the subject imitated, the fascination remains; that such illusion is possible at all is the mystery and the delight.

But as his interest in pictures grows with indulgence, as his experience widens, the beholder becomes gradually aware that he is making a larger demand. After the first shock of pleasurable surprise is worn away, he finds that the repeated exhibition of the painter's dexterity ceases to satisfy him; these clever pieces of deception manifest a wearying sameness, after all; and the beholder begins now to look for something more than mere expertness. Thinking on his experience, he concludes that the subjects which can be imitated deceptively are limited in range and interest; he has a vague, disquieting sense that somehow these pictures do not mean anything. Yet he is puzzled. Art aims to represent, he tells himself, and it should follow that the best art is that which represents most closely and exactly. He recalls, perhaps, the legend of the two Greek painters, one with his picture of the fruit which the birds flew down to peck at, the other with his painting of a veil which deceived his very rival. The imitative or "illusionist" picture pleads its case most plausibly. A further experience of such pictures, however, fails to bring the beholder beyond his simple admiration of the painter's skill; and that skill, he comes gradually to realize, does not differ essentially from the adroitness of the juggler who keeps a billiard ball, a chair, and a silk handkerchief rotating from hand to hand.

Conscious, then, of a new demand, of an added interest to be satisfied, the amateur of pictures turns from the imitative canvas to those paintings which appeal more widely to his familiar experience. Justly, he does not here forgo altogether his delight in the painter's cunning of hand, only he requires further that the subjects represented shall be pleasing. It must be a subject whose meaning he can recognize at once: a handsome or a strong portrait, a familiar landscape, some little incident which tells its own story. The spectator is now attracted by those pictures which rouse a train of agreeable associations. He stops before a canvas representing a bit of rocky coast, with the ocean tumbling in exhilaratingly. He recognizes the subject and finds it pleasing; then he wonders where the picture was painted. Turning to his catalogue, he reads: "37. On the Coast of Maine." "Oh, yes," he says to himself, "I was on the coast of Maine last summer, and I remember what a glorious time I had sitting on the rocks of an afternoon, with some book or other which the ocean was too fine to let me read. I like that picture." If the title had read "Massachusetts Coast," it is to be feared he would not have liked the canvas quite so well. The next picture which he notices shows, perhaps, a stately woman sumptuously attired. It is with a slight shock of disappointment that the visitor finds recorded in his catalogue: "41. Portrait of a Lady." He could see that much for himself. He hoped it was going to be the painter's mother or somebody's wife,—a person he ought to know about. But the pictures which appeal to him most surely are those which tell some little story,—"The Lovers," "The Boy leaving Home," "The Wreck." Here the subject, touching some one of the big human emotions, to which no man is wholly insensible, calls out the response of immediate interest and sympathy. It is something which he can understand.

At length there comes a day when the visitor stops before a landscape which seems to him more beautiful than anything he has ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a strength of character or radiates a charm of personality which he has seldom met with in life. Whence comes this beauty, this strength, this graciousness? Can it be that the painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new significance in human life? The spectator's previous experience of pictures has familiarized him in some measure with the means of expression which the painter employs. More sensitive now to the appeal of color and form, he sees that what the artist cares to present on his canvas is just his peculiar  sense of the beauty in the world, a beauty that is best symbolized and made manifest through the medium of color and form. Before he understood this eloquent language which the painter speaks, he misinterpreted those pictures whose significance he mistook to be literary and not pictorial. He early liked the narrative picture because here was a subject he could understand; he could rephrase it in his own terms, he could retell the story to himself in words. Now words are the means of expression of every-day life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as its medium is the art which comes nearest to being universally understood, namely, literature. The other arts use each a medium which it requires a special training to understand. Without some sense of the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds,—a sense which can be cultivated,—one is necessarily unable to grasp the full and true meaning of picture, statue, or musical composition. One must realize further that the artist thinks and feels in his peculiar medium; his special meaning is conceived and expressed in color or form or sound. The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to receive the artist's message in the same terms in which it was conceived. The tendency is inevitable, however, to translate the meaning of the work into words, the terms in which men commonly phrase their experience. A parallel tendency is manifest in one's efforts to learn a foreign language. The English student of French at first thinks in English and laboriously translates phrase for phrase into French; and in hearing or reading the foreign language, he translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue before he can understand its sense: he has mastered the language only when he has reached that point where English is no longer present to his consciousness: he thinks in French and understands in French. Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that are foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for example, in words, is to fail of its essential, true significance. The import of music is