ruit, art strikes its roots deep
down into human need, and draws its impulse and its sustenance
from the very sources of life itself. In the wide range from the hut in
the wilderness to a Gothic cathedral, from the rude scratches
recorded on the cave walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities of
the Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort and
aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist,
so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be
passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day that
art has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few;
in consequence artists have become a kind of class. But essentially
the possibilities of art lie within the scope of any man, given the
right conditions. So too the separation of the "useful arts" from the
"fine arts" is unjust to art and perversive of right appreciation.
Whatever the form in which it may manifest itself, from the lowest
to the highest, the art spirit is one, and it may quicken in any man
who sets mind and heart to the work of his hand. That man is an
artist who fashions a new thing that he may express himself in
response to his need.

Art is creation. It is the combination of already existing material
elements into new forms which become thus the realization of a
preconceived idea. Both hut and picture rose in the imagination of
their makers before they took shape as things. The material of each
was given already in nature; but the form, as the maker fashioned it,
was new. Commonly we think of art as the expression and
communication of emotion. A picture, a statue, a symphony we
recognize as the symbol of what the artist has felt in some passage
of his experience and the means by which he conveys his feeling to
us. Art _is_ the expression of emotion, but all art springs out of need.
The sense of need which impels expression through the medium of
creation is itself an emotion. The hut which the traveler built for
himself in the wilderness--shaping it according to the design which
his imagination suggested, having reference to his need and to the
character of his materials--was a work of creation; the need which
prompted it presented itself to him as emotion. The picture which
the other wayfarer painted of the storm-swept landscape, a harmony
which his imagination compelled out of discords, was a work of
creation; the emotion which inspired the work was attended by ne