y or carpet, it may be statue, picture, poem, symphony, or
cathedral--is that which most closely responds to his idea, the form
which most truly manifests and represents it.

All art, as the expression of the artist's idea, is in a certain definite
sense representative. Not that all art reproduces an external reality,
as it is said that painting or literature represents and music does not;
but every work of art, in painting, poetry, music, or in the handiwork
of the craftsman, _represents_ in that it is the symbol of the creator's
ideal. To be sure, the painter or sculptor or dramatist draws his
symbols from already existing material forms, and these symbols are
like objects in a sense in which music is not But line and color and
the life of man, apart from this resemblance to external reality, are
representative or symbolic of the artist's idea precisely as the
craftsman's key, the designer's pattern, or the musician's symphony.
The beautifully wrought key, the geometric pattern of oriental rug or
hanging, the embroidered foliation on priestly vestment, are works
of art equally with the landscape, the statue, the drama, or the
symphony, in that they are one and all the sensuous manifestation of
some new beauty spiritually conceived.

The symbolic character of a work of art must not be lost from sight,
for it is the clue to the interpretation of pictures, as it is of all art.
The painter feels his way through the gamut of his palette to a
harmony of color just as truly as the musician summons the notes of
his scale and marshals them into accord. The painter is moved by
some sweep of landscape; it wakens in him an emotion. When he
sets himself to express his emotion in the special medium with
which he works, he represents by pigment the external aspect of the
landscape, yes; but not in order to imitate it or reproduce it: he
represents the landscape because the colors and the forms which he
registers upon the canvas express for him the emotions roused by
those colors and those forms in nature. He does not try to match his
grays with nature's grays, but this nuance which he gropes for on his
palette, and having found it, touches upon his canvas, expresses for
him what that particular gray in nature made him feel. His one
compelling purpose is in all fidelity and singleness of aim to
"translate the impression received." The painter's medium is just as
symbolic as the notes of the musician's nocturne or the words of the
p