acrifices in
the scope of its material. Michelangelo uses as his subject David, the
shepherd-boy; but the person, the mere name, does not signify. What
his work embodies is triumphant youth, made visible and
communicable. When Millet shows us the peasant, it is not what the
peasant is feeling that the artist represents, but what Millet felt about
him. The same landscape will be rendered differently by different
men. Each selects his details according to the interest of his eye and
mind and feeling, and he brings them into a dominant harmony
which stands to him for the meaning of the landscape. None of the
pictures is an accurate statement of the facts as they are, off there in
nature; all are true to the integrating inner vision. The superficial
observer sees only the accidents, and he does not distinguish relative
importance. The artist, with quicker sensibilities and a trained mind,
analyzes, discovers the underlying principle, and then makes a
synthesis which embodies only the essential; he seizes the
distinctive aspect of the object and makes it salient. There may be,
of course, purely descriptive representation, which is a faithful
record of the facts of appearance as the painter sees them, without
any feeling toward them; here he works as a scientist, not as an artist.
Merely imitative painting falls short of artistic significance, for it
embodies no meaning beyond the external fact. It is the
expressiveness of the object that the true artist cares to represent; it
is its expressiveness, its value for the emotions, that constitutes its
beauty.

To achieve beauty the representative artist bases his work upon the
truth of nature. It is nature that supplies him with his motive,--some
glimpse, some fragment, which reveals within itself a harmony. It
may be a form, as a tree, a man, a mountain range, the race of clouds
across the sky; it may be a color-harmony or "arrangement," in
which color rather than form is the dominant interest, as with a
landscape or an interior; it may be the effects of light, as the
sunshine playing over golden haystacks, or the glint of light on
metal, or the sheen of lovely fabrics. Out of the complex of interests
and appeals which an object offers, what is the _truth_ of the object?
The truth of nature resides not in the accidents of surface but in the
essential relations, of which the surface is the manifestation. A birch
tree and an apple tree are growing side by side. Their roots strike