as makes it possible for him to understand the artist's
language and the added expressiveness wrought out of language by
the artist's cunning use of it. And such knowledge is not beyond his
reach.

In order to understand the meaning of any language we must first
understand the signification of its terms, and then we must know
something of the ways in which they may be combined into
articulate forms of expression. The terms of speech are words; in
order to speak coherently and articulately we must group words into
sentences according to the laws of the tongue to which they belong.
Similarly, every art has its terms, or "parts of speech," and its
grammar, or the ways in which the terms are combined. The terms
of painting are color and form, the terms of music are tones. Colors
and forms are brought together into harmony and balance that by
their juxtaposition they may be made expressive and beautiful.
Tones are woven into a pattern according to principles of harmony,
melody, and rhythm, and they become music. When technique is
turned to such uses, not for the vainglory of a virtuoso, but for the
service of the artist in his earnest work of expression, then it
identifies itself with art.

A knowledge of the signification of the terms of art the layman may
win for himself by a recognition of the expressive power of all
material and by sensitiveness to it. The beholder will not respond to
the appeal of a painting of a landscape unless he has himself felt
something of the charm or glory of landscape in nature; he will not
quicken and expand to the dignity or force caught in rigid marble
triumphantly made fluent in statue or relief until he has realized for
himself the significance of form and movement which exhales from
every natural object. Gesture is a universal language. The mighty
burden of meaning in Millet's picture of the "Sower" is carried by
the gesture of the laborer as he swings across the background of
field and hill, whose forms also are expressive; here, too, the
elemental dignity of form and movement is reinforced by the
solemnity of the color. Gesture is but one of nature's characters
wherewith she inscribes upon the vivid, shifting surface of the world
her message to the spirit of man. A clue to the understanding of the
terms of art, therefore, is found in the layman's own appreciation of
the emotional value of all objects of sense and their multitudinous
power of utterance,--the sensitive decision of lin