n hearing or reading the foreign language, he
translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue before
he can understand its sense: he has mastered the language only when
he has reached that point where English is no longer present to his
consciousness: he thinks in French and understands in French.
Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that are
foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for
example, in words, is to fail of its essential, true significance. The
import of music is musical; the meaning of pictures is not literary
but pictorial. In the understanding of this truth, then, the spectator
penetrates to the artist's real intention; and he becomes aware that
when he used the picture as the peg whereon to hang his own
reflections and ideas, he missed the meaning of the artist's work. "As
I look at this canvas," he tells himself, "it is not what I know of the
coast of Maine that is of concern, but what the painter has seen and
felt of its beauty and wants to reveal to me." Able at last to interpret
the painter's medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not
primarily an exhibition of the craftsman's skill, not even a recall of
his own pleasurable experiences, but rather, beyond all this, a fuller
visible revelation of beauty.

The essential significance of art, that art is revelation, is illustrated
not only by painting but by the other arts as well. In music, to take
but a single example, are present the same elements that constitute
the appeal of pictures,--skill in the rendering, a certain
correspondence with experience, and the power of imaginative
interpretation of the facts of life. The music-hall performer who
wins the loudest and heartiest applause is he who does the greatest
number of pyrotechnic, wonderful things on the piano, or holds a
high note on the cornet for the longest time. His success, as with the
painter whose aim is to create illusion, rests upon men's instinctive
admiration for the exhibition of skill. Again, as the imitative picture
involves not only the display of dexterity, but also likeness to the
thing represented and the consequent possibility of recognizing it
immediately, so in the domain of music there is an order of
composition which seems to aim at imitation,--the so-called
"descriptive" music. A popular audience is delighted with the "Cats'
Serenade," executed on the violins with overwhelming likeness to
the reality, or wit