ts and its
burden of practical needs, the appreciator turns to art with its power
to chasten and to tranquillize. In art, he finds the revelation in fuller
measure of a beauty which he has felt but vaguely. He realizes that
underlying the external chaos of immediate practical experience
rests a supreme and satisfying order. Of that order he can here and
now perceive but little, hemmed in as he is by the material world,
whose meaning he discerns as through a glass, darkly. Yet he keeps
resolutely on his way, secure in his kinship with the eternal spirit,
and rewarded by momentary glimpses of the "broken arcs" which he
knows will in the end take their appointed places in the "perfect
round."

V

THE ARTIST

Out of chaos, order. Man's life on the earth is finite and fragmentary,
but it is the constant effort of his spirit to bring the scattering details
of momentary experience into an enduring harmony with his
personality and with that supreme unity of which he is a part.

The man who out of the complex disarray of his little world effects a
new harmony is an artist. He who fashioned the first cup, shaping it
according to his ideal,--for no prototype existed,--and in response to
his needs; he who, taking this elementary form, wrought upon it
with his fingers and embellished it according to his ideal and in
response to his need of expressing himself; he, again, who out of the
same need for expression adds to the cup anything new: each of
these workmen is an artist. The reproduction of already existing
forms, with no modification by the individual workman, is not art.
So, for example, only that painter is an artist who adds to his
representation of the visible world some new attribute or quality
born of his own spirit Primitive artisan, craftsman, painter, each
creates in that he reveals and makes actual some part, which before
was but potential, of the all-embracing life.

As the artist, then, wins new reaches of experience and brings them
into unity, he reveals new beauty, new to men yet world-old. For the
harmony which he effects is new only in the sense that it was not
before perceived. As, in the physical universe, not an atom of matter
through the ages is created or destroyed, so the supreme spiritual life
is constant in its sum and complete. Of this life individuals partake
in varying measure; their growth is determined by how much of it
they make their own. The growth of the soul in this sense is not
diff