the personality of the artist, his own peculiar way of envisaging the world.

A work of art is born of the artist's desire to express his joy in some new aspect of the universal harmony which has been disclosed to him. The mission of art is through interpretation to reveal. It happens sometimes that a visitor at an exhibition of paintings is shocked by a picture which seems to him for the moment impossible, because so far beyond the range of his experience; yet withal he finds himself attracted by it and he returns to study it. It is not many days before his glance is arrested by that very effect in nature, and he says, "Why, that is like that picture!" It was the artist who first saw it and who taught him to see it for himself. When one observes an effect in nature or in life that one calls "a Corot" or "a Whistler," one means that to Corot or to Whistler is due the glory of discovering that fuller beauty and revealing it. Browning makes Fra Lippo Lippi say:

          "We're made so that we love
     First when we see them painted, things we have passed
     Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
     And so they are better, painted—better to us,
     Which is the same thing. Art was given for that."

This revealing power of art is not restricted to the individual appreciator. It is said that the French are an artistic people and that Americans are not. The explanation is that for generations the artists of France have been discovering to their countrymen the beauty that is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate it. The Americans will be an artistic people when our artists shall have done the like for us. When there shall have been for generations a truly native American art, there will be a public to understand and to appreciate. So it is that everywhere the high function of art is to reveal. As a friend, more sensitive and more enthusiastic, with whom we are strolling, points out to us many beauties by the wayside or in trees and sky, so the artist takes us by the hand and leads us out into life, indicating for us a harmony to which we were blind before. Burdened with affairs and the daily round, we had not thought to look off and out to the spreading meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into the blue heaven beyond.

The beauty thus revealed is a beauty which the artist has apprehended in spirit and which he would make actual. A work of art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude and tawdry images of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in so far as they are expressive of what those poor, devout souls who fashioned them felt of worship and of love. After all, the difference is that Giotto felt more than they, Raphael was endowed with more accomplished powers of expression. The work receives its import as it is the faithful utterance of him who shaped it, as it is genuinely the realization of his ideal. "The gift without the giver is bare." But it is no less true that the gift without the receiver is sterile and void, for art involves not only its creator's intention but also its message to him whom the work reaches. In a book, it is not only what the writer says that makes its significance but also what the reader thinks as he reads. In so far as any man finds in picture or poem or song a new beauty, a fuller sense of harmony than was his before, for him that is a work of art.

Thus the standard by which art is to be tried is relative. For its creator, the work is art in that it embodies a perception of new harmony that is peculiarly his. In the material result, this special character is imparted to the work by the artist's instinctive selection. No two painters, though equipped with equal technical skill and perhaps of like tastes and preferences, would or indeed could render the same sweep of landscape in precisely similar fashion. Obviously, to set down everything were at once an impossibility and an untruth, for the detail of nature is infinite and the beholder does not see everything. Each is bound to select such details as impress him, and his selection will be determined by the way in which he as a unique personality, an individual different from every other man in the whole wide universe, feels about the bit of nature before him. In expressing by his special medium what he feels about the landscape, he aims, in the selection of material form and color, to detach and render visible what of essential truth the landscape means to him, to purge it of accidents, and register its eternal beauty. The painter will not attempt, then, to reproduce the physical facts of nature,—the topography, geology, botany, of the landscape,—but rather through those facts in terms of color and form he tries to render its expression: its quality, as brilliance, tenderness; its mood, as joy, mystery, setting down those salient aspects of it which combine to give it character and meaning. For landscape—to recall the exposition of a preceding page—has its expression as truly as the human face. A man knows his friends not by the shape of the nose or the color of the eyes, but by the character which these features express, the personality which shines in the face and radiates from it This effluence of the soul within is the essential man; people call it the "expression." As with human life, so with the many aspects of nature. External traits are merged in the spiritual meaning. The material forms have the power of affecting the spirit thus or so; and in man's reaction on his universe they come to take on a symbolic emotional significance. Each manifestation of nature arouses in the artist, more or less consciously on his part, some feeling toward it: he cares, then, to represent these external material forms, whether a flower, a landscape, a human face, only because there is in them something in which he delights; he fashions the work of art in praise of the thing he loves. To the clever technician who imitatively paints the flower as he knows it to be,

     "A primrose on the river's brim
     A yellow primrose is to him
          And it is nothing more."

But to the artist

          "The meanest flower that blows can give
     Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible truth about the flower. A writer was walking along the streets of Paris on a day in early March.

"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."

And if Sénancour had set himself to paint his jonquil as he has written about it, how that tender flower would have been transfigured and glorified!

What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the rose, his sense of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose sounds for him, not that only, but the beauty of all roses that ever were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select such colors and such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own higher vision, by virtue of which, and not because of any exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.