REPRESENTATION

BEFORE me is a little bowl of old Satsuma. As I look at it there

wakens in me a responsive rhythm, and involuntarily my fingers

move as if to caress its suave and lovely lines. The rich gold and

mingled mellow browns of its surface pattern intricately woven are a

gracious harmony and a delight. Gradually, as I continue to look on

it, a feeling is communicated to me of the maker's own joy in his

work; and the bowl, its harmonies and rhythms, and all that it

expresses, become part of me. There it is, complete in itself,

gathering up and containing within itself the entire experience. My

thoughts, 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 the

figure of a youth. His left hand holds a sling drawn across his

shoulder; his right arm hangs by his side, his hand grasping a pebble

close to his thigh; calm and confident, his head erect, his strength

held 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 an

accordant rhythm; I feel in myself something of what youthful

courage, life, and conscious power mean. But my experience does

not stop there. The statue is not only presentation but representation.

It figures forth a youth, David, the Hebrew shepherd-boy, and he

stands awaiting the Philistine. I have read his story, I have my own

mental image of him, and about his personality cluster many

thoughts. To what Michelangelo shows me I add what I already

know. Recognition, memory, knowledge, facts and ideas, a whole

store of associations allied with my previous experience, mingle

with my instant emotion in its presence. The sculptor, unlike the

potter, has not created his own form; the subject of his work exists

outside of him in nature. He uses the subject for his own ends, but in

his treatment of it he is bound by certain responsibilities to external

truth. His work as it stands is not completely self-contained, but is

linked with the outer world; and my appreciation of it is affected by

this reference to extrinsic fact.

An artist is interested in some scene in nature or a personality or

situation in human life; it moves him. As the object external to him

is the stimulus of his emotion and is associated with it, so he uses

the object as the symbol of his experience and means of expression

of his emotion. Here, then, the feeling, to express which the work is

created, gathers about a subject, which can be recognized

intellectually, and the fact of the subject is received as in a measure

separate from the feeling which flows from it. In a painting of a

landscape, we recognize as the basis of the total experience the fact

that it is a landscape, so much water and field and sky; and then we

yield ourselves to the _beauty_ of the landscape, the emotion with

which the artist suffuses the material objects and so transfigures

them. Into representative art, therefore, there enters an element not

shared by the arts of pure form, the element of _the subject,_

carrying with it considerations of objective truth and of likeness to

external fact. Toward the understanding of the total scope of a

picture or a statue, and by inference and application of the principles,

toward the understanding of literature as well, it may help us if we

determine the relation of beauty to truth and the function and value

of the subject in representative art.

The final significance of a work of art is beauty, received as

emotional experience. Nature becomes beautiful to us at the point

where it manifests a harmony to which we feel ourselves attuned. At

the moment of enjoyment we unconsciously project our personality

into this harmony outside of us, identifying ourselves with it and

finding it at that instant the expression of something toward which

we reach and aspire. When we come consciously to reason about our

experience, we see that the harmony external to us which we feel as

the extension of ourselves does not stop with the actual material

itself of nature, but emanates from it as the expression of nature's

spirit. The harmony is a harmony of relations, made visible through

material, and significant to us and beautiful in the measure that we

respond to it.

It is the beauty of the object, its significance for the spirit, that

primarily moves the artist to expression. Why one landscape and not

another impels him to render it upon his canvas is not to be

explained. This impulse to immediate and concrete utterance is

inspiration. And inspiration would seem to be a confluence of forces

outside of the individual consciousness or will, focused at the instant

into desire, which becomes the urge to creation. "The mind in

creation," says Shelley, "is as a fading coal, which some invisible

influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;

this power rises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades

and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our

natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure." The

artist does not say, "Lo, I will paint a landscape; let me find my

subject!" The subject presents itself. There it is, by chance almost,--a

sudden harmony before him, long low meadows stretching away to

the dark hills, the late sun striking on the water, gold and green

melting into a suffusing flush of purple light, a harmony of color and

line and mass which his spirit leaps out to meet and with which it

fuses in a larger unity. In the moment of contact all consciousness of

self as a separate individuality is lost. Out of the union of the two

principles, 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. Experience

is a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy of

immediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment,

which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, the

artist rises out of the domain of feeling into that of thought. The

landscape has compelled him; it is now he who must compel the

landscape. To the shaping of his work he must bring to bear all his

conscious power of selection and organization and all his knowledge

of the capabilities and resources of his means. Art springs out of

emotion; painting is a science. The artist's command of his subject

as the symbol of his idea derives from the stern and vigorous

exercise of mind. The rightness of his composition is determined by

a logic more flexible, perhaps, but no less exacting than the laws of

geometry. 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 wants

it 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 the

cosmos within the frame and nothing outside of it. The principles of

perspective have been worked out with a precision that entitles them

to rank as a science. Color has its laws, which, again, science is able

to formulate. These processes and formulas and laws are not the

whole of art, but they have their place. The power to feel, the

imaginative vision, and creative insight are not to be explained. But

knowledge too, acquired learning and skill, plays its part, and to

recognize its function and service is to be helped to a fuller

understanding of the achievement of the artist.

Gifted with a vibrant, sensitive temperament, endowed with

discriminating and organizing power of mind, equipped with a

knowledge of the science and the mechanics of his craft, and trained

to skill in manual execution, the artist responds to the impulse of his

inspiration. His subject is before him. But what is his subject? A

scene in nature furnishes him the objective base of his picture, but

properly his work is the expression of what he feels. A storm may

convey to different men entirely different impressions. In its

presence one man may feel himself overwhelmed with terror. These

wild, black skies piling in upon him, the hilltops that seem to race

through the clouds, the swaying, snapping trees, the earth caught up

in the mad grasp of the tempest, may smite his soul with the

pitilessness of nature and her inexorable blind power. Another thrills

with joy in this cosmic struggle, the joy of conflict which he has

known 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 the

strong, though it is not the final triumph but the present struggle that

makes the joy. In rendering the "subject" upon his canvas, by the

manipulation of composition and line and mass and color, he makes

the 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 impression

and harmony of relations which the artist has perceived and to which

he has thrilled in the world external to him. He presents not the facts

themselves but their spirit, that something which endows the facts

with their significance and their power to stir him. As the meaning

of nature to the beholder is determined by the effect it produces on

his mind and temperament, so the artist, in the expression of this

meaning, aims less at a statement of objective accuracy of exterior

appearance than at producing a certain effect, the effect which is the

equivalent of the meaning of nature to him. Thus the painter who

sees beyond the merely intellectual and sensuous appeal of his

subject and enters into its spirit, tries to render on his canvas, not the

actual color of nature, but the sensation of color and its value for the

emotions. With the material splendor of nature,--her inexhaustible

lavish wealth of color, the glory of life which throbs through

creation, the mystery of actual movement,--art cannot compete. For

the hues and tones of nature, infinite in number and subtlety, the

painter has only the few notes within the poor gamut of his palette.

How can he quicken his dull paint with the life-beat of palpitating

flesh, or the sculptor animate the rigid marble with the vibrations of

vivid motion? But where nature is infinite in her range she is also

scattering in her effects. By the concentration of divergent forces, art

gains in intensity and directness of impression what it sacrifices in

the scope of its material. Michelangelo uses as his subject David, the

shepherd-boy; but the person, the mere name, does not signify. What

his work embodies is triumphant youth, made visible and

communicable. When Millet shows us the peasant, it is not what the

peasant is feeling that the artist represents, but what Millet felt about

him. The same landscape will be rendered differently by different

men. Each selects his details according to the interest of his eye and

mind and feeling, and he brings them into a dominant harmony

which stands to him for the meaning of the landscape. None of the

pictures is an accurate statement of the facts as they are, off there in

nature; all are true to the integrating inner vision. The superficial

observer sees only the accidents, and he does not distinguish relative

importance. The artist, with quicker sensibilities and a trained mind,

analyzes, discovers the underlying principle, and then makes a

synthesis which embodies only the essential; he seizes the

distinctive aspect of the object and makes it salient. There may be,

of course, purely descriptive representation, which is a faithful

record of the facts of appearance as the painter sees them, without

any feeling toward them; here he works as a scientist, not as an artist.

Merely imitative painting falls short of artistic significance, for it

embodies no meaning beyond the external fact. It is the

expressiveness of the object that the true artist cares to represent; it

is its expressiveness, its value for the emotions, that constitutes its

beauty.

To achieve beauty the representative artist bases his work upon the

truth of nature. It is nature that supplies him with his motive,--some

glimpse, some fragment, which reveals within itself a harmony. It

may be a form, as a tree, a man, a mountain range, the race of clouds

across the sky; it may be a color-harmony or "arrangement," in

which color rather than form is the dominant interest, as with a

landscape or an interior; it may be the effects of light, as the

sunshine playing over golden haystacks, or the glint of light on

metal, or the sheen of lovely fabrics. Out of the complex of interests

and 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 the

essential relations, of which the surface is the manifestation. A birch

tree and an apple tree are growing side by side. Their roots strike

down 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 tree

is always lithe and gracious and feminine; the apple tree is always

bent and sternly gnarled like the hand of an old man. The life-force

which impels the tree to growth is distinctive to each kind. Within

all natural objects, then, a crystal, a tree, a man, there is a shaping

principle which determines their essential form. But no two

individual apple trees are precisely alike; from the essential form of

the tree there are divergences in the single manifestations. Though

subject to accident and variation, however, every tree exhibits a

characteristic, inviolate _tendency,_ and remains true to the inner

life-principle of its being. The "truth" of the apple tree is this

distinctive, essential form, by virtue of which it is an apple tree and

not some other kind, the form which underlies and allows for all

individual variations. What the painter renders on his canvas is not

the 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, for

this organic, shaping principle of things, expressed in colored

myriad forms throughout the endless pageantry of nature, is

apprehended by the spirit of man as a harmony; and in the

experience of the artist truth identifies itself with beauty.

The distinction between the accidental surface of things and the

significance that may be drawn out of them is exemplified by the

difference between accuracy and truth in representation. Accurate

drawing is the faithful record of the facts of appearance as offered to

the eye. Truth of drawing is the rendering in visible terms of the

meaning and spirit of the object, the form which the object takes not

simply for the eye but for the mind. A pencil sketch by Millet shows

a man carrying in each hand a pail of water. The arms are drawn

inaccurately, in that they are made too long. What Millet wanted to

express, however, was not the physical shape of the arms, but the

feeling of the burden under which the man was bending; and by

lengthening the arms he has succeeded in conveying, as mere

accuracy could not express it, the sensation of weight and muscular

strain. In Hals' picture of the "Jester" the left hand is sketched in

with a few swift strokes of the brush. But so, it "keeps its place" in

relation to the whole; and it is more nearly right than if it had been

made the centre of attention and had been drawn with the most

meticulous precision. The hand is not accurate, but it is true.

Similarly, size is an affair not of physical extent but of proportion. A

figure six inches high may convey the same value as a figure six feet

high, if the same proportions are observed. A statue is the

presentation, not of the human body, but of the human form, and

more than that, of what the form expresses. When I am talking with

my friend I am aware of his physical presence detaching itself from

the background of the room in which we are. But I feel in him

something more. And that something more goes behind the details

of his physical aspect. His eyes might be blue instead of brown, his

nose crooked rather than straight; he might be maimed and

disfigured by some mishap. These accidents would not change for

me what is the reality. My friend is not his body, though it is by his

body 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 facts

of his appearance at that moment. The eye and the mind of the artist

discern the truth which underlies the surface; the artist feels his sitter

not as a face and a figure, a mere body, but as a personality; and the

portrait expresses a man.

As grasped by our finite minds, there are partial truths and degrees

of truth. There are, for example, the facts of outer appearance,

modified in our reception of them by what we know as distinct from

what we really see. Thus a tree against the background of hill or sky

seems to have a greater projection and relief than is actually

presented 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 its

frame." Habitually in our observation of objects about us, we note

only so much as serves our practical ends; and this is the most

superficial, least essential aspect. Projection is a partial truth, and to

it many painters sacrifice other and higher truths. Manet, recovering

the "innocence of the eye" and faithful to it, has penetrated the

secrets and won the truth of light. Botticelli saw the world as

sonorous undulations of exquisite line; and his subtly implicated,

evanescent patterns of line movement, "incorrect" as they may be

superficially in drawing, caress the eye as music finds and satisfies

the soul. When such is his power over us, it is difficult to say that

Botticelli had not some measure of the truth. The world of the

Venetians sang full-sounding harmonies of glorious color.

Velasquez saw everything laved around with a flood of silver quiet

atmosphere. All in their own way have found and shown to us a

truth.

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 particular

aspect of truth, which has impressed him, from all accidents in its

manifestation. To make this dominant character salient beyond

irrelevant circumstance, art works by selection. Art is necessarily a

compromise. It isolates some elements and sacrifices others; but it is

none the less true on that account. The mere material of the object is

more or less fixed, but the relations which the object embodies are

capable of many combinations and adjustments, according to the

mind 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 and

distinctive qualities of things, purged of accident.

Art does not compete with nature; it is a statement of the spirit and

intention of nature in the artist's own terms. The test of the work is

not apparent and superficial likeness, but truth. Art idealizes in the

measure that it disengages the truth. In this aspect of it the work is

ideal as distinct from merely actual. There is a practice in art which

draws its standard of beauty, its ideal, not from nature but from

other art, and which seeks to "improve nature" by the combination

of arbitrarily chosen elements and by the modification of natural

truth to fit a preconceived formula. The Eclectics of Bologna, in the

seventeenth century, sought to combine Raphael's perfection of

drawing and composition, Michelangelo's sublimity and his mastery

of the figure, and Correggio's sweet sentiment and his supremacy in

the rendering of light and shade, fondly supposing thus that the sum

of excellent parts is equivalent to an excellence of the whole. This is

false idealism. The Greeks carried their research for certain truths of

the human form to the point of perfection and complete realization.

The truth of the Greeks was mistaken by the pseudo-classicists and

misapplied. Thus Delacroix exclaimed ironically, "In order to

present an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as

far as possible the profile of Antinöus, and then say, 'We have done

our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful,

then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of

nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the

eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it

more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is

more heroically an athlete, the negro more vividly a negro. True

idealism seeks to express the tendency by virtue of which an object

is what it is. The abstraction which art effects is not an unreality but

a higher reality. It is not the mere type, that art presents, for the type

as such does not exist in nature. The individual is not lost but

affirmed by this reference to the inner principle of its being. A good

portrait has in it an element of caricature; the difference between

portraiture and caricature is the difference between emphasis and

exaggeration. Art is not the falsification of nature, but the fuller

realization of it. It is the interpretation of nature's truth, the

translation of it, divined by the artist, into simpler terms to be read

and understood by those of less original insight. The deeper the

penetration into the life-force and shaping principle of nature, the

greater 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 his

own experience. A work of art is the statement of the artist's insight

into nature, moulded and suffused by the emotion attending his

perception. Of the object, he uses that aspect and that degree of truth

which serve him for the expression of his feeling toward it. What is

called "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 is

the effect he sets himself to produce by his picture, and he paints

according to his impression. He renders not the object itself but his

mental image of it; and that image is the result of his way of seeing

and 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 a

monstrosity; he is obliged to refer to the external world for his

symbols. The impressionist, who concerns himself with the play of

light over surfaces in nature, is seeking for truth, and he cares to

paint at all because that play of light, seemingly so momentary and

so merely sensuous, has a value for his spirit of which he may or

may not be wholly conscious; and these shifting effects are the

realization of his ideal. Unwitting at the moment of contact itself of

the significance that afterwards is to flow articulately from his work,

the artist, in the presence of his object, knows only that he is

impelled to render it. As faithfully as possible he tries to record what

he sees, conscious simply that what he sees gives him delight. His

vision wakens his feeling, and then by reaction his feeling

determines his vision, controlling and directing his selection of the

details of aspect. When Velasquez, engaged on a portrait of the king,

saw the maids of honor graciously attending on the little princess, he

did not set about producing a _picture,_ as an end in itself. In the

relation of these figures to one another and to the background of the

deep and high-vaulted chamber in which they were standing, each

object and plane of distance receiving its just amount of light and

fusing in the unity of total impression, were revealed to him the

wonder and the mystery of nature's magic of light. This is what he

tried to render. His revelation of natural truth, wrung from nature's

inmost latencies and shown to us triumphantly, becomes a thing of

beauty.

So the differences among the various "schools" in art are after all

largely differences of emphasis. The choice of subject or motive, the

angle from which it is viewed, and the method of handling, all are

determined by the artist's kind of interest; and that interest results

from what the man is essentially by inheritance and individual

character, and what he is moulded into by environment, training, and

experience. It may happen that the external object imposes itself in

its integrity upon the artist's mind and temperament, and he tries to

express it, colored inevitably by his feeling toward it, in all

faithfulness to the feet as he sees it. Millet said, "I should never paint

anything that was not the result of an impression received from the

aspect of nature, whether in landscape or figures." Millet painted

what he saw, but he painted it as only he saw it. Or again it happens

that an artist imposes his feeling upon nature. Thus Burne-Jones said,

"I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that

never was, never will be--in a light better than any that ever shone--in

a land no one can define or remember, only desire." Whether true

to nature or true to the creative inner vision, the work of both men

embodies truth. Sometimes an artist effaces entirely his own

individuality, as in Greek sculpture and Gothic architecture, and the

mere name of the creator does not signify. George Frederick Watts

is reported to have said, "If I were asked to choose whether I would

like to do something good, as the world judges popular art, and

receive personally great credit for it, or, as an alternative, to produce

something which should rank with the very best, taking a place with

the art of Pheidias or Titian, with the highest poetry and the most

elevating music, and remain unknown as the perpetrator of the work,

I should choose the latter." Sidney Lanier wrote, "It is of little

consequence whether _I_ fail; the _I_ in the matter is small

business. . . . Let my name perish,--the poetry is good poetry and the

music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it

will find it." Or on the contrary, a work may bear dominantly, even

aggressively, the impress of the distinctive individuality of its

creator, as with Carlyle's prose and Browning's poetry. Whistler

seems 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 art

is personal, as with Velasquez or Frans Hals, Whistler's art becomes

egotistical. He does not say, "Lo, how mysterious is this dusk

river-side, how tenderly serene this mother, how wistful and mighty is this

prophet-seer!" He exclaims rather, "Note how subtly I, Whistler,

have seen. Rejoice with me in my powers of vision and of

execution." There is no single method of seeing, no one formula of

expression and handling. The truth both of nature and of art is great

and infinitely various. For art, like nature, is organic, allowing for

endless modifications, while remaining true to the inner principle of

its being.

The judgment of truth is a delicate business. To test the truth of a

work of art by reference to the truth of nature is to presuppose that

our power of perception is equal to the artist's power, and that our

knowledge of the object represented is equal to his knowledge of it.

The ordinary man's habitual contact with the world is practical, and

his knowledge of natural fact, based upon the most superficial aspect

of it and used for practical purposes, tends to falsify his vision. The

artist's contact with the world, in his capacity as artist, is one of

feeling; he values life, not for its material rewards and satisfactions,

but for what it brings to him of emotional experience. The ordinary

man uses nature for his own workaday ends. The artist loves nature,

and through his love he understands her. His knowledge of natural

fact, instead of falsifying his vision, reinforces it. He studies the

workings of nature's laws as manifested in concrete phenomena

around him,--the movement of storms, the growth of trees, the

effects of light,--penetrating their inmost secrets, that he may make

them more efficient instruments of expression. He uses his

understanding of anatomy, of earth-structure, of the laws of color, as

the means to a fuller and juster interpretation. As he receives the

truth of nature with reverence and joy, so he transmutes truth into

beauty.

An artist's interest in the truth of nature is not the scientist's

interest, an intellectual concern with knowledge for the sake of

knowledge. The artist receives nature's revelation of herself with

emotion. The deeper he penetrates into her hidden ways, the greater

becomes her power to stir him. The artist values his "subject,"

therefore, as the stimulus of emotion and as the symbol by means of

which he expresses his emotion and communicates it. The value of the

subject to the appreciator, however, is not immediately clear. It is

not easy for us to receive the subject purely as the artist shows it

to us and independently of our own knowledge of it. About it already

gather innumerable associations, physical, practical, intellectual,

sentimental, and emotional, all of them or any of them, which result

from our previous contact with it in actual life. Here is a portrait of

Carlyle. I cannot help regarding the picture first of all from the point

of view of its likeness to the original. This is a person with whom I

am acquainted, an individual, by name Carlyle. And my reaction on

the picture is determined, not by what the artist has to say about a

great personality interpreted through the medium of color and form,

but by what I already know about Carlyle. Or here a painting shows

me a landscape with which I am familiar. Then instead of trying to

discover in the picture what the artist has seen in the landscape and

felt in its presence, letting it speak to me in its own language, I allow

my thoughts to wander from the canvas, and I enjoy the landscape in

terms of my own knowledge and remembrance of it. The artist's

work becomes simply a point of departure, whereas it should be not

only the beginning but also the end and fulfillment of the complete

experience. What is, then, we may ask, the relation of the fact of the

subject to the beauty and final message of the work?

The pleasure which attends the recognition of the subject is a

legitimate element in our enjoyment of art. But the work should

yield a delight beyond our original delight in the subject as it exists

in nature. The significance of a work of representative art depends

not upon the subject in and of itself, but upon what the artist has to

say about it. A rose may be made to reveal the cosmos; a mountain

range or cloud-swept spaces of the upper air may be niggled into

meanness. The ugly in practical life may be transfigured by the

artist's touch into supreme beauty. _"Il faut pouvoir faire servir le

trivial à l'expression du sublime, c'est la vraie force,"_ said one who

was able to invest a humble figure with august dignity. Millet's

peasants reveal more of godlike majesty than all the array of

personages in the pantheon of post-Raphaelite Italy and the classic

school of France. Upon his subject the artist bases that harmony of

relations which constitutes the beauty and significance of his work.

Brought thus into a harmony, the object represented is made more

vivid, more intensely itself, than it is in nature, with the result that

we receive from the representation a heightened sense of reality and

of extended personality. The importance of the subject, therefore, is

measured by the opportunity it affords the artist, and with him his

appreciators, to share in the beauty of nature and life. A picture

should not "standout" from its frame, but should go back into it,

reaching even into infinity. Our own associations attaching to the

subject lose themselves as they blend with the artist's revelation of

the fuller beauty of his object; and finally all becomes merged in the

emotional experience.

Eliminating the transient and accidental, a work of art presents the

essential 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 transcends

the particularities of limited place and individual name. We must

distinguish between the abstractly typical and the universal. The

representative artist does not conceive an abstraction and then seek

to 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. The

artist receives his inspiration and stimulus from some actual

concrete bit of nature, a woodland wrapt in tender mists of green, a

meadow gold and softly white with blossoms, a shimmering gauze

of sun touched air, moist and vibrating, enfolding it. That is what he

paints. But he paints it so that it is spring, and instinct with the spirit

of all springs. Michelangelo does not intellectually conceive youth

and then carve a statue. Some boy has revealed to him the beauty of

his young strength, and the sculptor moves to immediate expression.

He calls his statue David, but the white form radiates the rhythm and

glory of all youth. And as we realize youth in ourselves, more

poignantly, more abundantly, the mere name of the boy does not

matter. The fact that the portrait shows us Carlyle is an incident.

Carlyle is the "subject" of the picture, but its meaning is the twilight

of a mighty, indomitable mind, made visible and communicable. His

work is done; the hour of quiet is given, and he finds rest. Into this

moment, eternal in its significance, into this mood, universal in its

appeal, we enter, to realize it in ourselves. The subject of picture or

statue is but the means; the end is life. Objective fact is transmuted

into living truth. Art is the manifestation of a higher reality than we

alone have been able to know. It begins with the particular and then

transcends it, admitting us to share in the beauty of the world, the

cosmic harmony of universal experience.

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