Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/421

Rh the other elements already mentioned, and to think of them as lying outside the field of art proper. But the artists who are of the broader view readily admit the importance in painting of these extra-artistic features. From the point of view of craft, of technical skill in painting, these matters of line, and color, and light and shade, and arrangement, and method of applying paint, all are of great importance. But only with the craftsman who is unduly interested in the question of skill do these purely artistic matters seem of greater importance than the factors of enjoyment already mentioned.

If I have been right in this analysis of the pleasures gained from pictures, we may describe the picture-gazing of the average person somewhat as follows: He likes the color; he likes to look because others look; he likes to look because he enjoys seeing an old friend; because he has the habit of looking; because he enjoys seeing the curious; because he enjoys the sympathy with his fellows which comes from enjoying the same objects with them; because he enjoys the story of the picture; because the picture renews for him an incident in history; because considered simply as a design the picture is to his thinking well made and he finds agreeable the relation of its lines and its colors and their arrangement, their harmonies and their contrasts; and because, having skill as a painter, or knowing of that skill, he is interested in the manner in which the artist in question laid on his paint.

These remarks on some of the simpler elements of esthetic emotion as shown in picture-gazing may seem commonplace, may seem too obvious to be worth the saying. But the obvious and the commonplace—these very often escape us. They are particularly ready to do so when we speak of beauty, art and esthetics. In this field words are very often merely counters, not real coin. All of us have our pleasurable emotions when we look upon beautiful things, else why do we call them beautiful? And the very words in which we speak of things of beauty seem themselves to have a power to move us; and we ascribe to them meanings when in fact they are often only meaningless echoes, faint, but still able to stir our emotions.

Beauty as a factor in the pleasures of picture-gazing, this I have not named. Yet the whole discussion is concerning it. For, if a picture, or any other object gives us the pleasure described it must possess the subtle quality of beauty. That quality itself cannot be described. When we see a beautiful thing we know it. What more can be said? If experts, who are careful observers of the things which people say they find beautiful, if experts in esthetics say the beauty of a certain object is of the better kind, their statement is worthy of attention. It is difficult to say of beauty and the critics more than this.