t meaning--the qualities of energy, force,
aspiration, life--manifest and expressed in objects do those objects
become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had
when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty
must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same
idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime,
creative of essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain
of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse
he sings:--

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the
phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as
when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the
landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the
artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.

The artist is impelled to embody concretely his perception of beauty,
and so to communicate his emotion, because the emotion wakened
by the perception of new harmony in things is most fully possessed
and enjoyed as it comes to expression. Thus to make real his ideal
and find the expression of himself is the artist's supreme Happiness.
A familiar illustration of the twin need and delight of expression
may be found in the handiwork produced in the old days when every
artisan was an artist. It may be, perhaps, a key which some
craftsman of Nuremberg fashioned. In the making of it he was not
content to stop with the key which would unlock the door or the
chest It was his key, the work of his hands; and he wrought upon it
lovingly, devotedly, and made it beautiful, finding in his work the
expression of his thought or feeling; it was the realization for that
moment of his ideal. His sense of pleasure in the making of it
prompted the care he bestowed upon it; his delight was in creation,
in rendering actual a new beau which it was given him to conceive.

In its origin as a work of art the key does not differ from a landscape
by Inness, an "arrangement" by Whistler, a portrait by Sargent. The
artist, whether craftsman or painter, is deeply stirred by some
passage in his experience, a fair object or a true thought: it is the
imperious demand of his nature, as it is his supreme pleasure, to
give his feeling expression. The form which his expression takes--it
may be ke