are able to bring more
and more details into order, and correspondingly fuller and richer
our life becomes.

The mental perception of order in the parts gives the whole its
significance. This quick grasp of the whole is like the click of the
kaleidoscope which throws the tumbling, distorted bits into a design.
The conduct of practical life on the mental plane is the process also
of art on the plane of the emotions. Not only does experience offer
itself to us as the subject of thought; our contact with the world is
also the stimulus of feeling. In my account of the visit to the
Locomotive Works I have set down but a part and not the sum of my
reaction. After I had come away, I fell to thinking about what I had
seen, and intellectually I deduced certain abstract principles with
regard to unity and significance. But at the moment of experience
itself I simply felt. I was overwhelmed by the sense of unloosened
power. The very confusion of it all constituted the unity of
impression. The emotion roused in me by the roar and riotous
movement and the vast gloom torn by fitful yellow gleams from
opened furnaces and shapes of glowing metal was the emotion
appropriate to the experience of chaos. That I can find a single word
by which to characterize it, is evidence that the moment had its
harmony for me and consequent meaning. All the infinite universe
external to us is everywhere and at every instant potentially the
stimulus to emotion. But unless feeling is discriminated, it passes
unregarded. When the emotion gathers itself into design, when the
moment reveals within itself order and significance, then and not till
then the emotion becomes substance for expression in forms of art.

If I were able to phrase what I saw and what I felt in the Locomotive
Works, so that by means of presenting what I saw I might
communicate to another what I felt and so rouse in him the same
emotion, I should be an artist. Whistler or Monet might picture for
us the murk and mystery of this pregnant gloom. Wagner might
sound for us the tumultuous, weird emotions of this Niebelungen
workshop of the twentieth century. Dante or Milton might phrase
this inferno and pandemonium of modern industry and leave us
stirred by the sense of power in the play of gigantic forces. Whether
the medium be the painter's color, the musician's tones, or the poet's
words, the purpose of the representation is fulfilled in so far as the
work expresses the emotion which the