in the
design itself, is not the same as our pleasure in the skill that
produced the work. The design, with the message that it carries, not
the making of it, is the end of art.

Too great preoccupation with technique conflicts with full
appreciation. To fix the attention upon the manner of expression is
to lose the meaning. A style which attracts notice to itself is in so far
forth bad style, because it defeats its own end, which is expression;
but beyond this, our interest in technical execution is purely
intellectual, whereas art reaches the emotions. At the theatre a critic
sits unmoved; dispassionately he looks upon the personages of the
drama, as they advance, retreat, and countermarch, little by little
yielding up their secret, disclosing all the subtle interplay of human
motives. From the heights of his knowledge the critic surveys the
spectacle; with an insight born of his learning, he penetrates the
mysteries of the playwright's craft. He knows what thought and skill
have gone into this result; he knows the weary hours of toil, the
difficulties of invention and selection, the heroic rejections, the
intricacies of construction, the final triumph. He sees it all from the
point of view of the master-workman, and sympathetically he
applauds his success; his recognition of what has been accomplished
is his pleasure. But all the while he has remained on the outside. Not
for a moment has he become a party to the play. He brings to it
nothing of his own feeling and power of response. There has been
no union of his spirit with the artist's spirit,--that union in which a
work of art achieves its consummation. The man at his side, with no
knowledge or thought of how the effect has been won, surrenders
himself to the illusion. These people on the stage are more intensely
and vividly real to him than in life itself; the artist has distilled the
significance of the situation and communicates it to him as emotion.
The man's reaction is not limited to the exercise of his intellect,--he
gives himself. In the experience which the dramatist conveys to him
beautifully, shaping discords into harmony and disclosing their
meaning for the spirit, he lives.

A true artist employs his medium as an instrument of expression;
and he values his own technical skill in the handling of it according
to the measure that he is enabled thereby to express himself more
effectively. On the layman's part so much knowledge of technique is
necessary