anners here
represented the interpretation of his own surroundings, so that as a
result of it all, his own experience becomes richer for his having
lived out the life of the fictitious persons, his own acquaintances
have revealed themselves more fully, his own life becomes more
intelligible,--for him at last the book is a work of art. So any work
may be a mirror which simply reflects the world as we know it; it
may be a point of departure, from which tangentially we construct
an experience of our own: it is truly art only in the degree that it is
revelation.

A work of art, therefore, is to be received by the individual
appreciator as an added emotional experience. It appeals to him at
all because in some way it relates itself to his own life; and its value
to him is determined by the measure in which it carries him out into
wider ranges of feeling. There are works whose absolute greatness
he recognizes but yet which do not happen at the moment to find
him. Constable comes to him as immensely satisfying; Turner,
though an object of great intellectual interest, leaves him cold. He
knows Velasquez to be supreme among painters, but he turns away
to stand before Frans Hals, whose quick, sure strokes call such very
human beings into actuality and rouse his spirit to the fullest
response. Why is it that of two works of equal depth of insight into
life, of equal scope of feeling, of the same excellence of technical
accomplishment, one has an appeal and a message for him and not
the other? What is the bridge of transition between the work and the
spirit of the appreciator by which the subtle connection is
established?

It comes back to a matter of harmony. Experience presents itself to
us in fragments; and in so far as the parts are scattering and
unrelated, it is not easy for us to guess the purpose of our being here.
But so soon as details, which by virtue of some selecting principle
are related to one another, gather themselves into a whole, chaos is
resolved into order, and this whole becomes significant, intelligible,
and beautiful. Instinctively we are seeking, each in his own way, to
bring the fragments of experience into order; and that order stands to
each of us for what we are, for our individual personality, the self.
We define thus our selecting principle, by which we receive some
incidents of experience as related to our development and we reject
others as not related to it. Thus the individual life achieves its