es of technique, as the
goal of historical study and the purpose of his recourse to criticism,
stands the work itself with its power to attract and charm. Here is
Millet's painting of the "Sower." In the actual presence of the picture
the appreciator's experience is complex. Analysis resolves it into
considerations of the material form of the work, involving its
sensuous qualities and the processes of execution, considerations
also of the subject of the picture, which gathers about itself many
associations out of the beholder's own previous knowledge of life.
But the clue to the final meaning of the work, its meaning both to
the artist and to the appreciator, is contained in the answer to the
question, Why did Millet paint this picture? And just what is it
designed to express?

Art is born out of emotion. Though the symbols it may employ to
expression, the forms in which it may manifest itself, are infinitely
various in range and character, essentially all art is one. A work of
art is the material bodying forth of the artist's sense of a meaning in
life which unfolds itself to him as harmony and to which his spirit
responds accordantly. It may be a pattern he has conceived; or he
adapts material to a new use in response to a new need: the artist is
here a craftsman. He is stirred by the tone and incident of a
landscape or by the force or charm of some personality: and he puts
brush to canvas. He apprehends the complex rhythms of form: and
the mobile clay takes shape under his fingers. He feels the
significance of persons acting and reacting in their contact with one
another: and he pens a novel or a drama. He is thrilled by the
emotion attending the influx of a great idea; philosophy is touched
with feeling: and the thinker becomes a poet. The discords of
experience resolve themselves within him into harmonies: and he
gives them out in triumphant harmonies of sound. The particular
medium the artist chooses in which to express himself is incidental
to the feeling to be conveyed. The stimulus to emotion which impels
the artist to create and the essential content of his work is _beauty._
As beauty, then, is the very stuff and fibre of art, inextricably bound
up with it, so in our effort to relate art to our experience we may
seek to know something of the nature of beauty and its place in
common life.

During a visit in Philadelphia I was conducted by a member of the
firm through the great Locomotive Works in that city.