makes her companionable to him in her
ruggedness and strength?

As the hidden forces of nature control man yet bend to his
bidding--electricity, air, steam, etc.--so do the open and obvious ones
which the painter deals with. They dictate all the conditions and yet
somehow--he governs. The different ways in which he does this gives to art
its variety and enables us to form a scale of relative values.

The work of art which attracts us excites two emotions; pleasure in the
subject; admiration for the artist. Exhibitions of strength and skill
claim our interest not so much for the thing done, which often perishes
with the doing, as for the doer. The poet with a hidden longing to
express or a story to tell, who binds himself to the curious limitations
of the Italian sonnet, in giving evidence of his powers, excites greater
admiration than though he had not assumed such conditions.

It is the personal element which has established photography and given it
art character. Says J. C. Van Dyke, "a picture is but an autobiographical
statement; it is the man and not the facts that may awaken our admiration;
for, unless we feel his presence and know his genius the picture is
nothing but a collection of incidents. It is not the work but the worker,
not the mould but the moulder, not the paint but the painter."

Witness it in the work of Michel Angelo, in both paint and marble. How we
feel _the man of it_ in Franz Hals, in Rembrandt, in Rubens, Van Dyck,
Valasquez, Ribera and Goya, in Watteau and Teniers, in Millet and Troyon,
in Rousseau and Rico, in Turner, Constable and Gainsborough, in Fildes and
Holl, in Whistler, in Monet, in Rodin and Barnard, in Inness, in Wyant and
Geo. Fuller.

Like religion, art is not a matter of surfaces.

Its essence is to be spiritually discerned. It is the spirit of the
artist you must seek;--find the man.

Back of the canvas that throbs, the painter is hinted and
hidden;
Into the statue that breathes the soul of the sculptor is
bidden;
Under the joy that is felt lie the infinite issue of feeling;
Crowning the glory revealed is the glory that crowns the
revealing.
Great are the symbols of being, but that which is symboled is
greater;
Vast the create and beheld, but vaster the inward creator;
Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift stands