e apprehension
of the fluent tracing of a pattern, a form, or a structure,
is intrinsically delightful. The pattern of a tapestry
design is as striking and suggestive as the colors themselves.
When musical taste has passed from a sentimental intoxication
with the sensuous beauty of the sounds themselves, the
beauty we admire is primarily beauty of form or structure.
The musical connoisseur likes to trace the recurrence of a
theme in a symphony, its deviations and disappearances, its
distribution in the various choirs of wood-wind, brass, and
strings, its interweaving with other themes, its resilient,
surprising, and apposite emergences, its pervasive penetration of
the total scheme.

The aesthetic experience, indeed, as specifically aesthetic,
rather than merely sensuous or intellectual, is, it might be
said, almost wholly a matter of form. It is the artist's function,
as it is occasionally his achievement, to give satisfying,
determinate forms to the indeterminate and miscellaneous
materials at his command. Formlessness is for the creator of
beauty the unpardonable sin. To give clarity and coherence
to the vague ambiguous scintillations of sound, to chisel a
specific perfection out of the indefinite inviting possibilities
of marble, to form precise and consecutive suggestions out of
the random and uncertain music of words, is to achieve, in so
far, success in art. Nor does form mean formality. Experience
is so various and fertile, and so far outruns the types under
which human invention and imagination can apprehend
it, that inexhaustible novelty is possible. Novelty, on the
other hand, does not mean formlessness. The artist must, if
he is to be successful, always remain something of an artisan.
However beautiful his vision, he must have sufficient command
of the technical resources to his craft to give a specific
and determinate embodiment to his ideal.

Every one has haunting premonitions of beauty; it is the
business of the artist to give realization in form to the hints of
the beautiful which are present in matter as we meet it in
experience, and to the imaginative longings which they provoke.

In which forms different individuals will find satisfaction
depends on all the circumstances which go to make one individual
different from another. There cannot be in the case of
art, any more than in any other experience, absolute standards.
We can be pleased only with those arrangements of sound
or color to which