present. To live greatly is to live now, inspired by the past, corrected
and encouraged by it, impelled by "forward-looking thoughts'" and
providing for the future, but living in to-day. Life is neither
remembrance nor anticipation, neither regret nor deferment, but
present realization. Often one feels in a gallery that the people are
more significant than the pictures. Two lovers furtively holding
hands and stopping before a canvas to press closer together,
shoulder to shoulder; a young girl erect and firm, conscious of her
young womanhood and rejoicing in it, radiating youth and life; an
old man, whose years are behind him yet whose interest reveals his
eager welcome of new experience, unconsciously rebuking the jaded
and indifferent: here is reality. Before it the pictures seem to recede
and become dimmed. Our appreciation of these things makes the
significance of it all. Only in so far as art can communicate this
sensation, this same impression of the beauty and present reality of
life, has it a meaning for us. The painter must have registered his
appreciation of immediate reality and must impart that to us until it
becomes, heightened and intensified, our own. The secret of
successful living lies in compelling the details of our surroundings
to our own ends. Michelangelo lived his life; Leonardo lived his;
neither could be the other. A man must paint the life that he knows,
the experience into which he enters. So we must live our lives
immediately and newly. We have penetrated the ultimate mystery of
art when we realize the inseparable oneness of art with life.

Art is a call to fuller living. Its real service is to increase our
capacity for experience. The pictures, the music, the books, which
profit us are those which, when we have done with them, make us
feel that we have lived by just so much. Often we purchase
experience with enthusiasm; we become wise at the expense of our
power to enjoy. What we need in relation to art is not more
knowledge but greater capability of feeling, not the acquisition of
more facts but the increased power to interpret facts and to apply
them to life. In appreciation it is not what we know about a work of
art, it is not even what we actually see before us, that constitutes its
significance, but what in its presence we are able to feel. The
paradox that nature imitates art has in it this much of truth, that art is
the revelation of the possibilities of life, and we try to make thes