individual
appreciator. It is said that the French are an artistic people and that
Americans are not. The explanation is that for generations the artists
of France have been discovering to their countrymen the beauty that
is around them at their very door, and have taught them to appreciate
it. The Americans will be an artistic people when our artists shall
have done the like for us. When there shall have been for
generations a truly native American art, there will be a public to
understand and to appreciate. So it is that everywhere the high
function of art is to reveal. As a friend, more sensitive and more
enthusiastic, with whom we are strolling, points out to us many
beauties by the wayside or in trees and sky, so the artist takes us by
the hand and leads us out into life, indicating for us a harmony to
which we were blind before. Burdened with affairs and the daily
round, we had not thought to look off and out to the spreading
meadows tossing into hills which roll upward into the blue heaven
beyond.

The beauty thus revealed is a beauty which the artist has
apprehended in spirit and which he would make actual. A work of
art is the expression of an aspiration. The crude and tawdry images
of the Madonna Set in the roadside cross are just as truly a work of
art as the rapt saints of Giotto or the perfect Madonnas of Raphael in
so far as they are expressive of what those poor, devout souls who
fashioned them felt of worship and of love. After all, the difference
is that Giotto felt more than they, Raphael was endowed with more
accomplished powers of expression. The work receives its import as
it is the faithful utterance of him who shaped it, as it is genuinely the
realization of his ideal. "The gift without the giver is bare." But it is
no less true that the gift without the receiver is sterile and void, for
art involves not only its creator's intention but also its message to
him whom the work reaches. In a book, it is not only what the writer
says that makes its significance but also what the reader thinks as he
reads. In so far as any man finds in picture or poem or song a new
beauty, a fuller sense of harmony than was his before, for him that is
a work of art.

Thus the standard by which art is to be tried is relative. For its
creator, the work is art in that it embodies a perception of new
harmony that is peculiarly his. In the material result, this special
character is imparted to the work by the artist's in