head of art, the very works themselves as
gathered in the galleries; they have tried to remember what they
have read and to do what they have been told; and now they are left
still perplexed and unsatisfied.

The difficulty is that these earnest seekers after knowledge of art
have laid hold on partial truths, but they have failed to see these
partial truths in their right relation to the whole. The period in which
an artist lived means something. His way of thinking and feeling
means something. The quality of his color means something. But
what does his _picture_ mean? These people have not quite found
the key by which to piece the fragments of the puzzle into the
complete design. They miss the central fact with regard to art; and as
a consequence, the ways of approach to the full enjoyment of art,
instead of bringing them nearer the centre, become for them a
network of by-paths in which they enmesh themselves, and they are
left to wander helplessly up and down and about in the blind-alleys
of the labyrinth. The central fact with regard to art is this, that a
work of art is the expression of some part of the artist's experience
of life, his vision of some aspect of the world. For the appreciator,
the work takes on a meaning as it becomes for him in his turn the
expression of his own actual or possible experience and thus relates
itself by the subtle links of feeling to his own life. This is the central
fact; but there are side issues. Any single work of art is in itself
necessarily finite. Because of limitations in both the artist and the
appreciator the work cannot express immediately and completely of
itself all that the author wished to convey; it can present but a single
facet of his many-sided radiating personality. What is actually said
may be reinforced by some understanding on the beholder's part of
what was intended. In order to win its fullest message, therefore, the
appreciator must set the work against the large background out of
which it has proceeded.

A visitor in the _Salon Carre_ of the Louvre notes that there are
arrayed before him pictures by Jan van Eyck and Memling, Raphael
and Leonardo, Giorgione and Titian, Rembrandt and Metsu, Rubens
and Van Dyck, Fouquet and Poussin, Velasquez and Murillo. Each
one bears the distinctive impress of its creator. How different some
of them, one from another,--the Virgin of Van Eyck from the
Virgin of Raphael, Rembrandt's "Pilgrimsat Emmaus" from the
"Entombment"