cy with which "his gospels"
were sung--the fervency of "Aunt Sarah," who scrubbed her life away,
for her brother's ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman,
after a fourteen-hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive
five miles, through the mud and rain to "prayer meetin'"--her one
articulate outlet for the fullness of her unselfish soul--if he can
reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color
that will do all the world good. If his music can but catch that
"spirit" by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near his
ideal--and it will be American, too, perhaps nearer so than that of the
devotee of Indian or negro melody. In other words, if local color,
national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it
is a divine quality, it is a part of substance in art--not of manner.
The preceding illustrations are but attempts to show that whatever
excellence an artist sees in life, a community, in a people, or in any
valuable object or experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected
in his work, and so he himself, is, in a way, a reflected part of that
excellence. Whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is
always played, or never played--all this has nothing to do with it--it
is true or false by his own measure. If we may be permitted to leave
out two words, and add a few more, a sentence of Hegel appears to sum
up this idea, "The universal need for expression in art lies in man's
rational impulse to exalt the inner ... world (i.e., the highest ideals
he sees in the inner life of others) together with what he finds in his
own life--into a spiritual consciousness for himself." The artist does
feel or does not feel that a sympathy has been approved by an artistic
intuition and so reflected in his work. Whether he feels this sympathy
is true or not in the final analysis, is a thing probably that no one
but he (the artist) knows but the truer he feels it, the more substance
it has, or as Sturt puts it, "his work is art, so long as he feels in
doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object is akin to the
objects that true artists admire."

Dr. Griggs in an Essay on Debussy, [John C. Griggs, "Debussy" Yale
Review, 1914] asks if this composer's content is worthy the manner.
Perhaps so, perhaps not--Debussy himself, doubtless, could not give a
positive answer. He would better know how true his feeling and sympathy
was, and anyone else's pers