elf overwhelmed with terror. These
wild, black skies piling in upon him, the hilltops that seem to race
through the clouds, the swaying, snapping trees, the earth caught up
in the mad grasp of the tempest, may smite his soul with the
pitilessness of nature and her inexorable blind power. Another thrills
with joy in this cosmic struggle, the joy of conflict which he has
known in his own life, the meeting of equal forces in fair fight,
where the issue is still doubtful and victory will fall at last upon the
strong, though it is not the final triumph but the present struggle that
makes the joy. In rendering the "subject" upon his canvas, by the
manipulation of composition and line and mass and color, he makes
the storm ominous and terrible, or glorious, according as he feels.
The import of his picture is not the natural fact of the storm itself,
but its significance for the emotions.

A work of representative art is the rendering of a unity of impression
and harmony of relations which the artist has perceived and to which
he has thrilled in the world external to him. He presents not the facts
themselves but their spirit, that something which endows the facts
with their significance and their power to stir him. As the meaning
of nature to the beholder is determined by the effect it produces on
his mind and temperament, so the artist, in the expression of this
meaning, aims less at a statement of objective accuracy of exterior
appearance than at producing a certain effect, the effect which is the
equivalent of the meaning of nature to him. Thus the painter who
sees beyond the merely intellectual and sensuous appeal of his
subject and enters into its spirit, tries to render on his canvas, not the
actual color of nature, but the sensation of color and its value for the
emotions. With the material splendor of nature,--her inexhaustible
lavish wealth of color, the glory of life which throbs through
creation, the mystery of actual movement,--art cannot compete. For
the hues and tones of nature, infinite in number and subtlety, the
painter has only the few notes within the poor gamut of his palette.
How can he quicken his dull paint with the life-beat of palpitating
flesh, or the sculptor animate the rigid marble with the vibrations of
vivid motion? But where nature is infinite in her range she is also
scattering in her effects. By the concentration of divergent forces, art
gains in intensity and directness of impression what it s