o his knowledge of it.
The ordinary man's habitual contact with the world is practical, and
his knowledge of natural fact, based upon the most superficial aspect
of it and used for practical purposes, tends to falsify his vision. The
artist's contact with the world, in his capacity as artist, is one of
feeling; he values life, not for its material rewards and satisfactions,
but for what it brings to him of emotional experience. The ordinary
man uses nature for his own workaday ends. The artist loves nature,
and through his love he understands her. His knowledge of natural
fact, instead of falsifying his vision, reinforces it. He studies the
workings of nature's laws as manifested in concrete phenomena
around him,--the movement of storms, the growth of trees, the
effects of light,--penetrating their inmost secrets, that he may make
them more efficient instruments of expression. He uses his
understanding of anatomy, of earth-structure, of the laws of color, as
the means to a fuller and juster interpretation. As he receives the
truth of nature with reverence and joy, so he transmutes truth into
beauty.

An artist's interest in the truth of nature is not the scientist's
interest, an intellectual concern with knowledge for the sake of
knowledge. The artist receives nature's revelation of herself with
emotion. The deeper he penetrates into her hidden ways, the greater
becomes her power to stir him. The artist values his "subject,"
therefore, as the stimulus of emotion and as the symbol by means of
which he expresses his emotion and communicates it. The value of the
subject to the appreciator, however, is not immediately clear. It is
not easy for us to receive the subject purely as the artist shows it
to us and independently of our own knowledge of it. About it already
gather innumerable associations, physical, practical, intellectual,
sentimental, and emotional, all of them or any of them, which result
from our previous contact with it in actual life. Here is a portrait of
Carlyle. I cannot help regarding the picture first of all from the point
of view of its likeness to the original. This is a person with whom I
am acquainted, an individual, by name Carlyle. And my reaction on
the picture is determined, not by what the artist has to say about a
great personality interpreted through the medium of color and form,
but by what I already know about Carlyle. Or here a painting shows
me a landscape with which I am familiar. Then i