st's
personal vision of the fact, exactly as idealism or romanticism or
impressionism is personal. For after all, what is the reality? A
chance newsboy is offering his papers on a crowded street corner.
The fine lady recoils from his filth and from all contact with him;
the philanthropist sees in him a human being to help and to redeem;
the philosopher regards him dispassionately as a "social factor," the
result of heredity and environment; the artist cries out in joy as his
eye lights upon good stuff to paint. But all the while, which of these
conceptions figures the "real" newsboy? Not one. For he is all these
together; and the single observer, whatever his bias, cannot
apprehend him at every point. Any attempt to represent him involves
selection and interpretation, the suppression of some traits in order
to emphasize others, which are the special aspects that have
impressed the given observer. So there is no essential realism. The
term applies to the method of those who choose to render what is
less comforting in life, who insist on those characteristics of things
which men call ugly. In realism, just as truly as in any other kind of
treatment, is expressed the personality of the artist, his own peculiar
way of envisaging the world.

A work of art is born of the artist's desire to express his joy in some
new aspect of the universal harmony which has been disclosed to
him. The mission of art is through interpretation to reveal. It
happens sometimes that a visitor at an exhibition of paintings is
shocked by a picture which seems to him for the moment impossible,
because so far beyond the range of his experience; yet withal he
finds himself attracted by it and he returns to study it. It is not many
days before his glance is arrested by that very effect in nature, and
he says, "Why, that is like that picture!" It was the artist who first
saw it and who taught him to see it for himself. When one observes
an effect in nature or in life that one calls "a Corot" or "a Whistler,"
one means that to Corot or to Whistler is due the glory of
discovering that fuller beauty and revealing it. Browning makes Fra
Lippo Lippi say:

"We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted--better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that."

This revealing power of art is not restricted to the