pleteness. As the
landscape which an artist paints is the landscape visioned in
imagination, though composed of forms given in nature, so life
furnishes us the elements of experience, and out of these elements
we construct a meaning, each for himself. To one man an object or
incident is commonplace and blank; to another it may be charged
with significance and big with possibilities of fuller living. "In every
object." says Carlyle, "there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees
in it what it brings means of seeing." To _see_ is not merely to
receive an image upon the retina. The stimulation of the visual organ
becomes sight properly only as the record is conveyed to the
consciousness. When I am reading a description of a sunset, there is
an image upon my retina of a white page and black marks of
different forms grouped in various combinations. But what I see is
the sunset. Momentarily to rest the eye upon a landscape is not
really to see it, for our mind may be quite otherwhere. We see the
landscape only as it becomes part of our conscious experience. The
beauty of it is in us. A novelist conceives certain characters and
assembles them in action and reaction, but it is we who in effect
create the story as we read. We take up a novel, perhaps, which we
read five years ago; we find in it now new significances and appeals.
The book is the same; it is we who have changed. We bring to it the
added power of feeling of those five years of living. Art works not
by information but by evocation. Appreciation is not reception but
response. The artist must compel us to feel what he has felt,--not
something else. But the scope of his message, with its overtones and
subtler implications, is limited by the rate of vibration to which we
are attuned.

"All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of
the arches and cornices?)
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by
the instruments."

And again Whitman says, "A great poem is no finish to a man or
woman, but rather a beginning." The final significance of both life
and art is not won by the exercise of the intellect, but unfolds itself
to us in the measure that we feel.

To illustrate the nature of appreciation and the power from which
appreciation derives, the power to project ourselves into the world
external to us, I spoke of the joy of living peculiar