e truth and of likeness to
external fact. Toward the understanding of the total scope of a
picture or a statue, and by inference and application of the principles,
toward the understanding of literature as well, it may help us if we
determine the relation of beauty to truth and the function and value
of the subject in representative art.

The final significance of a work of art is beauty, received as
emotional experience. Nature becomes beautiful to us at the point
where it manifests a harmony to which we feel ourselves attuned. At
the moment of enjoyment we unconsciously project our personality
into this harmony outside of us, identifying ourselves with it and
finding it at that instant the expression of something toward which
we reach and aspire. When we come consciously to reason about our
experience, we see that the harmony external to us which we feel as
the extension of ourselves does not stop with the actual material
itself of nature, but emanates from it as the expression of nature's
spirit. The harmony is a harmony of relations, made visible through
material, and significant to us and beautiful in the measure that we
respond to it.

It is the beauty of the object, its significance for the spirit, that
primarily moves the artist to expression. Why one landscape and not
another impels him to render it upon his canvas is not to be
explained. This impulse to immediate and concrete utterance is
inspiration. And inspiration would seem to be a confluence of forces
outside of the individual consciousness or will, focused at the instant
into desire, which becomes the urge to creation. "The mind in
creation," says Shelley, "is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness;
this power rises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades
and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our
natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure." The
artist does not say, "Lo, I will paint a landscape; let me find my
subject!" The subject presents itself. There it is, by chance almost,--a
sudden harmony before him, long low meadows stretching away to
the dark hills, the late sun striking on the water, gold and green
melting into a suffusing flush of purple light, a harmony of color and
line and mass which his spirit leaps out to meet and with which it
fuses in a larger unity. In the moment of contact all consciousness of
self as a se