esses our desires
and aspirations, that in which we recognize ourselves elevated and
idealized. In so far as we see in it the ennobled image of our own
nature, so far it has power to hold us and to stir us.

An elementary manifestation of the tendency to seek in art the
record of our own experience is seen in the popularity of those
pictures whose subjects are familiar and can be immediately
recognized. On a studio wall was once hanging a "Study of Brush,"
showing the play of sunlight through quivering leaves. A visitor
asked the painter why he did not put some chickens in the
foreground. To her the canvas was meaningless, for she had never
seen, had never really seen, the sunlight dancing on burnished leaves.
The chickens, which she had seen and could recognize, were the
element of the familiar she required in order to find any significance
in the picture.

This tendency, of which the demand for chickens is a rudimentary
manifestation, is the basis of all appreciation. The artist's revelation
of the import of life we can receive and understand only as we have
felt a little of that import for ourselves. Color is meaningless to a
blind man, music does not exist for the deaf. To him who has never
opened his eyes to behold the beauty of field and hill and trees and
sky, to him whose spirit has not dimly apprehended something of
that eternal significance of which these things are the material
visible bodying forth, to such a the work of the master is only so
much paint and canvas. The task of the appreciator, then, is to
develop his capacity to receive and enjoy.

That capacity is to be trained by the exercise of itself. Each new
harmony which he is enabled to perceive intensifies his power to
feel and widens the range of his vision. The more beauty he
apprehends in the world, so much the more of universal forces he
brings into unity with his own personality. By this extension of his
spirit he reaches out and becomes merged in the all-embracing life.

If the conception be true that a supreme unity, linking all seemingly
chaotic details, ultimately brings them into order, and that this unity,
which is spiritual, penetrates every atom of matter, fusing everything
and making all things one; then the appreciator will realize that the
significance of art is for the spirit The beauty which the artist reveals
is but the harmony which underlies the universal order; and he in his
turn must apprehend that beauty spiritually.