oes the
artist render the beauty which this landscape happens to express for
him: he charges these colors and forms with the beauty of all
landscape. Corot painted _at_ Ville d'Avray; _what_ he painted
was God's twilight or dawn enwrapping tree and pool. In gratitude
and worship he revealed to men the tender, ineffable poetry of gray
dawns in all places and for all time. Millet's peasants were called
John and Peter and Charles, and they tilled the soil of France; but on
their bowed shoulders rests the universal burden; these dumb figures
are eloquent of the uncomplaining, hopeless "peasanthood" of the
world. In the actual to discern the ideal, in the appearance to
penetrate to the reality, without taking leave of the material to reveal
the spiritual,--this is the mystery and vocation of the artist, and his
achievement is art.

III

THE WORK OF ART AS BEAUTIFUL

Just as nature and life are significant as the material manifestation of
spiritual forces and relations, so a work of art is in its turn the
symbol by which the artist communicates himself; it is his revelation
to men of the beauty he has perceived and felt.

Beauty is not easy to define. That conception which regards beauty
as the power to awaken merely agreeable emotions is limited and in
so far false. Another source of misunderstanding is the confusion of
beauty with moralistic values. It is said that beauty is the Ideal; and
by many the "Ideal" is taken to mean ideal goodness. With
righteousness and sin as such beauty has no concern. Much that is
evil in life, much that offends against the moral law, must be
regarded as beautiful in so far as it plays its necessary part in the
universal whole. Clearing away these misconceptions, then, an
approximate definition would be that the essence of beauty is
harmony. So soon as a detail is shown in its relation to a whole, then
it becomes beautiful because it is expressive of the supreme unity. A
discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is isolated; when it
takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the
symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing
in his tank at the Zoo, is wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall
say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native rivers, he is not the
beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of blacks,
the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be
monstrous. The smoking factory, sordid and hideous,