e, the might or
delicacy of form, the splendor and subtlety of color, the magic of
sound, the satisfying virtue of harmony in whatever embodiment, all
the beauty of nature, all the significance of human life. And this
appreciation is to be won largely by the very experience of it. The
more we feel, the greater becomes our power for deeper feeling.
Every emotion to which we thrill is the entrance into larger capacity
of emotion. We may allow for growth and trust to the inevitable
working of its laws. In the appreciation of both life and art the
individual may be his own teacher by experience.

The qualities of objects with their inherent emotional values
constitute the raw material of art, to be woven by the artist into a
fabric of expressive form and texture. Equipped with a knowledge of
the terms of any art, the layman has yet to understand something of
the ways in which the terms may be combined. Every artist has his
idiom or characteristic style. Rembrandt on the flat surface of his
canvas secures the illusion of form in the round by a system of light
and shade; modeling is indicated by painting the parts in greater
relief in light and the parts in less relief in shadow. Manet renders
the relief of form by a system of "values," or planes of more and less
light. The local color of objects is affected by the amount of light
they receive and the distance an object or part of an object is from
the eye of the spectator. Manet paints with degrees of light, and he
wins his effects, not by contrasts of color, but by subtle modulations
within a given hue. Landscape painters before the middle of the
nineteenth century, working with color in masses, secured a total
harmony by bringing all their colors, mixed upon the palette, into
the same key. The "Luminarists," like Claude Monet, work with
little spots or points of color laid separately upon the canvas; the
fusion of these separate points into the dominant tone is made by the
eye of the beholder. The characteristic effect of a work of art is
determined by the way in which the means are employed. Some
knowledge, therefore, of the artist's aims as indicated in his method
of working is necessary to a full understanding of what he wants to
say.

In his effort to understand for his own purposes of appreciation what
the artist has accomplished by his technique, the layman may first of
all distinguish between processes and results. A landscape in nature
is beautiful to the behold