ry, "Ah!" Consciousness surges
back over me, and turning to my friend, I exclaim, "See the line of
those hills over there across the tender sky and those clouds
tumbling above them; see how the hills dip down into the meadows;
look at the lovely group of willows along the bank of the river, how
graciously they come in, and then that wash of purple light over
everything!" My simple cry, "Ah!" was the expression of emotion,
the unconscious, involuntary expression; it was not art. It did not
formulate my emotion definitely, and although it was an expression
of emotion, it had no power to communicate the special quality of it.
So soon, however, as I composed the elements in the landscape,
which stimulated my emotion, into a distinct and coherent whole
and by means of that I tried to convey to my friend something of
what I was feeling, my expression tended to become art. My
medium of expression happened to be words. If I had been alone and
wanted to take home with me a record of my impression of the
landscape, a pencil-sketch of the little composition might have
served to indicate the sources of my feeling and to suggest its
quality. Whether in words or in line and mass, my work would be in
a rudimentary form a work of representative art. The objective fact
of the landscape which I point out to my friend engages his interest;
his pleasure derives from those aspects of it which my emotion
emphasizes and which constitute its beauty; and something of the
same emotion that I felt he realizes in his own experience.

The impulse to expression which fulfills itself in a work of art is
directed in general by one of two motives,--the motive of
representation and the motive of pure form. These two motives are
coexistent with human activity itself. The earliest vestiges of
prehistoric races and the remains of the remotest civilizations are
witnesses of man's desire to imitate and record, and also of his
pleasure in harmony of form. Certain caves in France, inhabited by
man some thousands of years before history begins, have yielded up
reindeer horns and bones, carved with reliefs and engraved with
drawings of mammoths, reindeer, and fish. On the walls and roofs of
these caves are paintings in bright colors of animals, rendered with
correctness and animation. Flint axes of a still remoter epoch "are
carved with great dexterity by means of small chips flaked off the
stone, and show a regularity of outline which testifies to the delight