Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/162

158 led forward by delight in mental facility, and the primary pleasure in any clear narrative is the sense of unusual ease in realizing and correlating objects, figures, persons and their experiences.

In proportion as a picture surpasses the usual in the clarity with which it presents its contents—things, thoughts and their relations—do we react to it, feel its force in our own enhanced physical and mental vision. Before a great work our powers seem so much more than adequate that limitation vanishes, and we have a glimpse of the infinite.

The largest part of our pleasure in pictures is to see clearly and without effort, but still it makes a difference what we see. A painter, preoccupied with his craft, may care little about the subject, and a critic not infrequently assumes the artisan's viewpoint; but the people have decided wishes. They require pleasantness, and their preference is the result not of stupidity but of instinct. To them an unpleasant subject forcefully portrayed is but the more revolting; their aversion is reflex, and based upon a principle they do not need to understand in order to feel. It is as true in art as it is in nature, that the normally pleasant is what is constructive of life, and the unpleasant is the destructive. Nature's encouragements and warnings which have prevented the animal kingdom from being wiped off the earth ages ago and which have developed man, have been at work also in art among all peoples at all times, producing similar results in absolutely unconnected schools.

Individual tastes may be warped or even perverted by prejudice of education or other accident of time or place, but underneath is the broad principle that men like what they feel is life-giving. The more life we can get at the least expenditure of effort, the better we like it; decadents and degenerates are in this respect only abnormally near-sighted, looking constantly for bargains in experience, though it shortly kill them. Mere suffering, for example, is an art subject for a decadent; the intensest experience may be had for little effort, but is inevitably followed by a loss of vitality, or by a hardening of the sensibilities, which means enfeebled capacity for life. On the other hand, suffering as a necessary condition of heroism may produce an experience of genuine life. It is less popular than the obviously pleasant only because it requires greater art to make the heroism easily distinguishable as superior to the suffering and because it requires greater intellectual vision to see it. In such art the principle is more subtly used, but it is not ignored.

We may see this most plainly in dramatic paintings. This "Pietà" "left unfinished by Titian was reverently completed by Palma," as Palma himself has inscribed it. It may stand as the type of the