is Olympian majesty made visible, and in its presence we feel
that we too are august. The symphony is a resolution of the struggle
of our own tangled lives, a purification, and the experience of joy.

Art is the expression of experience, whether the experience enacts
itself within the spirit of the artist or derives from his contact with
the external world. So by the same token, art is finally to be received
as experience. The ultimate meaning of a work of art to the
appreciator is what it wakens in him of emotion. It is the artist's
business, by the manipulation of his materials and his elements, by
the choice of motive and the rendering, by the note and pitch of his
color, the ordering of his line, the disposition of his masses, to
compel the direction of the emotion; he must not allow the
solemnity and awe with which his night invests the Palisades to be
mistaken by the beholder for terror or for mere obscurity. But the
quality and the intensity of the emotion depend upon the temper of
the appreciator's sensibilities and the depth and range of his
experience of life. Art is not fixed and invariable in its effect.
"Vanity Fair" is a great novel. One man may read it for the sake of
the story, and in his amusement and interest in following the
succession of incident, he may for a while forget himself. A possible
use to put one's reading to; yet for that man the book is not art.
Another may be entertained by the spectacle of the persons as they
exhibit themselves in Thackeray's pages, much as he might stop a
moment on the curbstone and watch a group of children at play in
the street. Here he is a looker-on, holding himself aloof; and for him,
again, the book is not art. Still a third may find in "Vanity Fair" a
record of the customs and manners of English people at the
beginning of the nineteenth century; and he adds this much to his
stock of information. Still for him the book is not art. Not one of the
three has touched in vital contact the essential meaning of "Vanity
Fair." But the man who sees in the incidents of the book a situation
possible in his own life, who identifies himself with the personages
and acts out with them their adventures, who feels that he actually
knows Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp, Jo Sedley, Dobbin, and
Amelia, and understands their character and personality better here
than in the actual world about him by force of Thackeray's greater
insight and power of portraiture, who sees in English m