n, the painter may see in
these things the expression for him of a harmony which he can
manifest by the arrangement of line and color, and he so disposes his
material as to make that harmony visible. It is, then, not the crude
fact which the artist transcribes, but rather some feeling he has
toward the fact. By selection, by adjustment, he gives this special
aspect of the fact emphasis and relief. In virtue of his interpretation
the picture acquires a significance that is new; it gives the beholder a
pleasure which the fact itself did not give, and thus it passes over
into the domain of art.

The purpose of art is not the reproduction of a beautiful object, but
the expression in objective form of a beautiful idea. A plaster cast of
a hand, however comely the hand may be, is not a work of art. As
with the photograph, the work involves only incidentally the
exercise of human skill. But that is not all. In order to render the
work in the spirit of art, the sculptor must model, not the hand, but
his sense of the hand; he must draw out and express its character, its
significance. To him it is not a certain form in bone and flesh; to him
it means grace, delicacy, sensitiveness, or perhaps resolution,
strength, force. As the material symbol of his idea of the hand, he
will select and make salient such lines and contours as are
expressive to him of that character.

Indeed, so little depends upon the exact subject represented and so
much upon the artist's feeling toward it, so much depends upon the
spirit of the rendering, that the representation of a subject
uninteresting or even "ugly" in itself may be beautiful. In the art of
literature, the _subject_ is drawn from the life of man. The material
of the poem, the novel, the drama, is furnished by man's total
experience, the sum of his sensations, impressions, emotions, and
the events in which he is concerned. But experience crowds in upon
him at every point, without order and without relation; the daily
round of living is for most men a humdrum thing. Yet it is just this
rudimentary and undistinguished mass of experience which is
transmuted into literature; by the alchemy of art the representation
of that which is without interest becomes interesting. And it happens
on this wise. Life is humdrum only in so far as it is meaningless;
men can endure any amount drudgery and monotony provided that it
lead somewhere, that they perceive its relation to a larger unity
which is the t