e expressive power of an individual work is conditioned
originally by the amount of feeling that enters into the making of it.
Every phrase of a Beethoven symphony is saturated with emotion,
and the work leads us into depths and up to heights of universal
experience, disclosing to us tortuous ways and infinite vistas of the
possibilities of human feeling. A simple earthen jug may bear the
impress of loving fingers, and the crudely turned form may be
eloquent of the caress of its maker. So we come to value even in the
humblest objects of use this autographic character, which is the gate
of entrance into the experience of the men who fashioned them.
Every maker strives toward perfection, the completest realization of
his ideal within his power of execution. But the very shortcomings
of his work are significant as expressive of what he felt and was
groping after; they are so significant that by a curious perversion,
machinery, which in our civilized day has supplanted the craftsman,
tries by mechanical means to reproduce the roughness and supposed
imperfections of hand work. Music is the consummate art, in which
the form and the content are one and inextricable; its medium is the
purest, least alloyed means of expression of instant emotion.
Architecture, in its harmonies and rhythms, the gathering up of
details into the balanced and perfect whole, partakes of the nature of
music. But the arts of use and decoration also have their message for
the spirit. There is no object fashioned by the hand of man so
humble that it may not embody a true thought and a sincere delight.
There is no pattern or design so simple and so crude that it may not
be the overflow of some human spirit, a mind and heart touched to
expression.

IX

REPRESENTATION

BEFORE me is a little bowl of old Satsuma. As I look at it there
wakens in me a responsive rhythm, and involuntarily my fingers
move as if to caress its suave and lovely lines. The rich gold and
mingled mellow browns of its surface pattern intricately woven are a
gracious harmony and a delight. Gradually, as I continue to look on
it, a feeling is communicated to me of the maker's own joy in his
work; and the bowl, its harmonies and rhythms, and all that it
expresses, become part of me. There it is, complete in itself,
gathering up and containing within itself the entire experience. My
thoughts, sensations, feelings do not go beyond the bowl.

Another time I am standing in the hall o