Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/169

Rh should seem to be supporting the central one, we should begin to be interested. As the complexity increases the eye finds exercise; as the simplicity increases the eye finds ease: it is the comparative simplicity of the exercise that is our experience of harmony. When our perception of this simplicity is so effortless as to give us a sense of unused capacity we feel an influx of life which we call an esthetic experience; its cause we call harmony.

We may consider the work of art as a fraction in which the denominator is the number and variety of the elements presented to us, and the numerator is the simplicity of their relationship; the effectiveness varies as the value of the fraction. Of course each of the elements of the harmony must in its turn be considered as a fraction, and so on.

When in place of an influx or life we have from harmony the pleasurable languor of an artificial nervous fatigue, the design will certainly at some time be called decadent. I once went in to the Alhambra in company with a keen-minded physician. For a moment he looked about the sensuously lovely court, and then said, "Dope; that is the explanation of all this. The delight of those old sultans was in the nervous fatigue caused by this infinite, inextricable, beautiful detail. We have the same effect in certain modern music.

"But after all this talk about harmony," says some student of theory, "the effectiveness of this picture by Michael Angelo is caused as much by rhythm." Rhythm is one form of harmony. We find it simplest in a swinging walk or easy run, in which we feel that the left foot treads stronger than the right. A child makes the form clearer by elaboration when he puts in a little shuffling hop after each step, and calls the movement "skipping." Rhythm is no more nor less than harmony between groups of impulses. The principle is the same in the simplest drum-beat and the most elaborate rhythms of Richard Straus, Botticelli, Isadora Duncan, or Shakespeare; the feeling of it communicated to you through your ear, your eye, physical action, or pure thought. The excitement of movement is changed to the stimulation of rhythm by the principle of harmony.

As with rhythm, so with all harmony—it may be expressed in lines, colors, sounds, ideas. Different systems of harmony in these and other realms, are caused by the thought-habits of their authors; and so with the different theories which explain conflicting systems. We have most of us had this difference between senses of order brought home to us. Our books and papers are arranged according to their contents; the maid comes in to clean; when we return we find everything nicely arranged according to size and color. There is some such difference between the classical painter and the impressionist; both are right and neither can hope to enjoy the harmony of the other.

But the design in "The Creation of the Sun and Moon" is not