nstead of trying to
discover in the picture what the artist has seen in the landscape and
felt in its presence, letting it speak to me in its own language, I allow
my thoughts to wander from the canvas, and I enjoy the landscape in
terms of my own knowledge and remembrance of it. The artist's
work becomes simply a point of departure, whereas it should be not
only the beginning but also the end and fulfillment of the complete
experience. What is, then, we may ask, the relation of the fact of the
subject to the beauty and final message of the work?

The pleasure which attends the recognition of the subject is a
legitimate element in our enjoyment of art. But the work should
yield a delight beyond our original delight in the subject as it exists
in nature. The significance of a work of representative art depends
not upon the subject in and of itself, but upon what the artist has to
say about it. A rose may be made to reveal the cosmos; a mountain
range or cloud-swept spaces of the upper air may be niggled into
meanness. The ugly in practical life may be transfigured by the
artist's touch into supreme beauty. _"Il faut pouvoir faire servir le
trivial a l'expression du sublime, c'est la vraie force,"_ said one who
was able to invest a humble figure with august dignity. Millet's
peasants reveal more of godlike majesty than all the array of
personages in the pantheon of post-Raphaelite Italy and the classic
school of France. Upon his subject the artist bases that harmony of
relations which constitutes the beauty and significance of his work.
Brought thus into a harmony, the object represented is made more
vivid, more intensely itself, than it is in nature, with the result that
we receive from the representation a heightened sense of reality and
of extended personality. The importance of the subject, therefore, is
measured by the opportunity it affords the artist, and with him his
appreciators, to share in the beauty of nature and life. A picture
should not "standout" from its frame, but should go back into it,
reaching even into infinity. Our own associations attaching to the
subject lose themselves as they blend with the artist's revelation of
the fuller beauty of his object; and finally all becomes merged in the
emotional experience.

Eliminating the transient and accidental, a work of art presents the
essential and eternal. Art appeals not to the intellect and the reason,
but to the imagination and the emotions. The singl