"

But to the artist

"The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

And it is these thoughts that he cares to express and not the visible
truth about the flower. A writer was walking along the streets of
Paris on a day in early March.

"It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I
had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon
a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of
desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness
destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of
the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great
or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what
secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless
beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this
immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will
contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it
would seem that nature has not made."

And if Senancour had set himself to paint his jonquil as he has
written about it, how that tender flower would have been
transfigured and glorified!

What the artist aims to render is not the rose but the beauty of the
rose, his sense of one chord in the universal harmony which the rose
sounds for him, not that only, but the beauty of all roses that ever
were or ever shall be; and inevitably he will select such colors and
such lines as bring that special and interpreted beauty into relief, and
so make manifest to the beholder what was revealed to his own
higher vision, by virtue of which, and not because of any
exceptional technical skill, he is an artist.

IV

ART AND APPRECIATION

It may be that some reader of the foregoing pages will attempt to
apply the principles therein set forth to the pictures shown in the
next exhibition he happens to attend. It is more than probable that in
his first efforts he will be disappointed. For the principles discussed
have dealt with art in its authentic manifestations; and not every
painter is an artist, not every picture is a work of art.

At the very outset it should be said that an exhibition of paintings as
ordinarily made up is confusing and wholly illogical. We may
suppose that a volume to be read through in one sitting of two hours
is placed in the hands of an intelligent reader. The book consists