ne temper finds shock, excitement, and a meaning in the vertical.
Yet the significance of forms is not determined necessarily by
contrasts. A quiet spirit sees its own expression, a harmony of self
with external form, in the even lines and flat spaces of some Dutch
etching. Or a vigorous, hardy mind takes fresh stimulus and courage
from the swirling clouds of Turner or the wind-torn landscapes of
Constable. An object is beautiful, not because of the physical ease
with which the eye follows its outlines, but in so far as it has the
power to communicate to us the feeling of larger life, to express and
complete for us a harmony within our emotional experience.

Our senses report to us the material world; we see, we hear, we
touch and taste and smell. But we recognize also that nature has a
value for the emotions; it can delight and thrill and uplift, taking us
out of ourselves and carrying us beyond the confines of the little
circle of our daily use and wont. As I look from my window I see
against the sky a pear tree, radiant with blossom, an explosion of
light and sensation. Its green and white, steeped in sunshine and
quivering out of rain-washed depths of blue, are good to behold. But
for me, as my spirit goes out to meet it, the tree is spring! In this I do
not mean to characterize a process of intellectual deduction,--that as
blossoms come in the spring, so the flowering of the tree is evidence
that spring is here. I mean that by its color and form, all its outward
loveliness, the tree communicates to me the spirit of the new birth of
the year. In myself I feel and live the spring. My joy in the tree,
therefore, does not end with the sight of its gray trunk and
interwoven branches and its gleaming play of leaves: there my joy
only begins, and it comes to its fulfillment as I feel the life of the
tree to be an expression and extension of the life that is in me. My
physical organism responds harmoniously in rhythm with the form
of the tree, and so far the tree is pleasing. But, finally, a form is
beautiful because it is expressive. "Beauty," said Millet, "does not
consist merely in the shape or coloring of a face. It lies in the
general effect of the form, in suitable and appropriate action. . . .
When I paint a mother, I shall try and make her beautiful simply by
the look she bends upon her child. Beauty is expression." Beauty
works its effect through significance, a significance which is not
always to be phrased in wo