ome one of the big human emotions, to which
no man is wholly insensible, calls out the response of immediate
interest and sympathy. It is something which he can understand.

At length there comes a day when the visitor stops before a
landscape which seems to him more beautiful than anything he has
ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a strength of character
or radiates a charm of personality which he has seldom met with in
life. Whence comes this beauty, this strength, this graciousness? Can
it be that the painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new
significance in human life? The spectator's previous experience of
pictures has familiarized him in some measure with the means of
expression which the painter employs. More sensitive now to the
appeal of color and form, he sees that what the artist cares to present
on his canvas is just his peculiar sense of the beauty in the world, a
beauty that is best symbolized and made manifest through the
medium of color and form. Before he understood this eloquent
language which the painter speaks, he misinterpreted those pictures
whose significance he mistook to be literary and not pictorial. He
early liked the narrative picture because here was a subject he could
understand; he could rephrase it in his own terms, he could retell the
story to himself in words. Now words are the means of expression of
every-day life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as
its medium is the art which comes nearest to being universally
understood, namely, literature. The other arts use each a medium
which it requires a special training to understand. Without some
sense of the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds,--a sense
which can be cultivated,--one is necessarily unable to grasp the full
and true meaning of picture, statue, or musical composition. One
must realize further that the artist thinks and feels in his peculiar
medium; his special meaning is conceived and expressed in color or
form or sound. The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to
receive the artist's message in the same terms in which it was
conceived. The tendency is inevitable, however, to translate the
meaning of the work into words, the terms in which men commonly
phrase their experience. A parallel tendency is manifest in one's
efforts to learn a foreign language. The English student of French at
first thinks in English and laboriously translates phrase for phrase
into French; and i