dy of biography, however, the man must not be mistaken
for the artist; his acts are not to be confounded with his message. "A
man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he
became." We must summon forth the spirit of the man from within
the wrappages of material and accident. In our preoccupation with
the external details of a man's familiar and daily life it is easy to lose
sight of his spiritual experience, which only is of significance.
Whistler, vain, aggressive, quarrelsome, and yet so exquisite and so
subtle in extreme refinement, is a notable example of a great spirit
and a little man. Wagner wrote to Liszt: "As I have never felt the
real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of
my dreams, in which from beginning to end that love shall be
thoroughly satiated." Not the Wagner of fact, but the Wagner of
dreams. Life lived in the spirit and imagination may be different
from the life of daily act. So we should transcend the material,
trying through that to penetrate to the spiritual. It is not a visit to the
artist's birthplace that signifies, it is not to do reverence before his
likeness or cherish a bit of his handwriting. All this may have a
value to the disciple as a matter of loyalty and fine piety. But in the
end we must go beyond these externals that we may enter
intelligently and sympathetically into the temper of his mind and
mood and there find disclosed what he thought and felt and was able
only in part to express. It is not the man his neighbors knew that is
important. His work is the essential thing, what that work has to tell
us about life in terms of emotional experience.

Studies in the history of art and in biography are avenues of
approach to the understanding of a work of art; they do not in
themselves constitute appreciation. Historical importance must not
be mistaken for artistic significance. In reading about pictures we
may forget to look at them. The historical study of art in its various
divisions reduces itself to an exercise in analysis, resolving a given
work into its elements. But art is a synthesis. In order to appreciate a
work the elements must be gathered together and fused into a whole.
A statue or a picture is meant not to be read about, but to be looked
at; and its final message must be received through vision. Our
knowledge will serve us little if we are not sensitive to the appeal of
color and form. There is danger that preoccupation with the