happens, whether
this or that, is indifferent. It is the spirit in which the life is lived
that determines its quality and value. The perception of purpose in the
parts brings them into order and gives them meaning. A man's life is
an expanding circle, the circumference of which is drawn around an
order or interplay and adjustment of part with part. Whatever lies
without the circle does not pertain to the individual--as yet. So soon
as any experience reveals its meaning to us and we feel that it takes
its place in our life, then it belongs to us. Whatever serves to bring
details, before scattering and unrelated, into order, is for that
moment true. Art has a message for us as it tallies with what we
already know about life; and, quickening our perceptions, disclosing
depths of feeling, it carries us into new ranges of experience.

In this attitude toward life lies the justice of the personal estimate.
The individual is finally his own authority. To find truth we return
upon our own consciousness, and we seek thus to define our
"original relation" to the universal order. So as one stands before the
works of the Italian painters and sculptors, for example, in the
endeavor rightly to appreciate what they have achieved, one may ask:
How much of life has this artist to express to me, of life as I know it
or can know it? Has the painter through these forms, however crude
or however accomplished, uttered what he genuinely and for himself
thought and felt? The measure of these pictures for me is the degree
of reality, of vital feeling, which they transmit. Whether it be spring
or divine maternity or the beauty of a pagan idea, which Botticelli
renders, the same power is there, the same sense of gracious life.
Whether it be Credi's naive womanhood, or Titian's abounding,
glorious women and calm and forceful men, or Delia Robbia's
joyous children and Donatello's sprites, the same great meaning is
expressed, the same appreciation of the goodness and beauty of all
life. This beauty is for me, here, to-day. In the experience of a man
who thinks and feels, there is a time when his imagination turns
toward the past. At the moment, as the world closes in about him,
his spirit, dulled by the attrition of daily use and wont, is unable to
discern the beauty and significance of the present life around him.
For a time his imagination finds abundant nourishment in the mighty
past. Many spirits are content there to remain. But life is of the