verage man. It is the
poet who must "teach the average man the glory of his daily walk
and trade." It is not enough to be happy as children are
happy,--unconsciously. We must be happy and know it too.

The attitude of appreciation is the attitude of response,--the
projection of ourselves into new and fuller ranges of feeling, with
the resultant extension of our personality and a larger grasp on life.
We do not need to go far afield for experience; it is here and now.
To-day is the only day, and every day is the best day. "The readiness
is all." But mere contact with the surface of life is not enough.
Living does not consist in barely meeting the necessities of our
material existence; to live is to feel vibrantly throughout our being
the inner significance of things, their appeal and welcome to the
spirit. This fair world of color and form and texture is but a show
world, after all,--this world which looms so near that we can see it,
touch it, which comes to us out of the abysms of time and recedes
into infinitudes of space whither the imagination cannot follow it.
The true and vital meaning of it resides within and discovers itself to
us finally as emotion. Some of this meaning art reveals to us, and in
that measure it helps us to find ourselves. But art is only the means.
The starting-point of the appreciation of art, and its goal, is the
appreciation of life. The reward of living is the added ability to live.
And life yields its fullest opportunities, its deepest tragedies, its
highest joys, all its infinite scope of feeling, to those who enter by
the gate of appreciation.

III

TECHNIQUE AND THE LAYMAN

A PEASANT is striding across a field in the twilight shadow of a
hill. Beyond, where the fold of the hill dips down into the field,
another peasant is driving a team of oxen at a plow. The distant
figures are aglow with golden mellow light, the last light of day,
which deepens the gloom of the shadowing hillside. The sower's cap
is pulled tight about his head, hiding under its shade the unseeing
eyes. The mouth is brutal and grim. The heavy jaw flows down into
the thick, resistive neck. The right arm swings powerfully out,
scattering the grain. The left is pressed to his body; the big, stubborn
hand clutches close the pouch of seed. Action heroic, elemental; the
dumb bearing of the universal burden. In the flex of the shoulder,
the crook of the outstretched arm, the conquering onward stride, is
expressed all