nd
questions which must be answered. Life is a continuous striving. Nothing
is an end in itself and therefore nothing is a source of complete rest.
Everything is a stimulus to new wishes, a source of new uneasiness which
longs for new satisfaction in the next and again the next thing. Life
pushes us forward. Yet sometimes a touch of nature comes to us; we are
stirred by a thrill of life which awakens plenty of impulses but which
offers satisfaction to all these impulses in itself. It does not lead
beyond itself but contains in its own midst everything which answers the
questions, which brings the desires to rest.

Wherever we meet such an offering of nature, we call it beautiful. We
speak of the beautiful landscape, of the beautiful face. And wherever we
meet it in life, we speak of love, of friendship, of peace, of harmony.
The word harmony may even cover both nature and life. Wherever it
happens that every line and every curve and every color and every
movement in the landscape is so harmonious with all the others that
every suggestion which one stirs up is satisfied by another, there it is
perfect and we are completely happy in it. In the life relations of love
and friendship and peace, there is again this complete harmony of
thought and feeling and will, in which every desire is satisfied. If our
own mind is in such flawless harmony, we feel the true happiness which
crowns our life. Such harmony, in which every part is the complete
fulfillment of that which the other parts demand, when nothing is
suggested which is not fulfilled in the midst of the same experience,
where nothing points beyond and everything is complete in the offering
itself, must be a source of inexhaustible happiness. To remold nature
and life so that it offers such complete harmony in itself that it does
not point beyond its own limits but is an ultimate unity through the
harmony of its parts: this is the aim of the isolation which the artist
alone achieves. That restful happiness which the beautiful landscape or
the harmonious life relation can furnish us in blessed instants of our
struggling life is secured as a joy forever when the painter or the
sculptor, the dramatist or the poet, the composer or the
photoplaywright, recomposes nature and life and shows us a unity which
does not lead beyond itself but is in itself perfectly harmonious.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MEANS OF THE VARIOUS ARTS

We have sought the aim which underlies all artist