Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/170

166 merely beautiful; it is also strongly expressive. This is so partly because when we are given the right suggestion for our feelings by the subject and by the great physical and spiritual power of the Creator and the rushing host of heaven, our sense of these things and of the mood they suggest is vastly increased by the inrush of life we experience from the harmony. Many a painter has used the same color scheme for a Nativity and a Crucifixion. But in this fresco of Michael Angelo's the lines have a tremendous sweep; we do not merely judge them appropriate; as our eye swings through them, meeting successive shocks from the cross movements, our nervous reaction is similar to that which we have in watching a stormy surf on the rocks. The expressiveness of lines and colors in a picture is in the awakening of physical reaction similar to that accompanying the moods of real life. More; if we accept the modern theory that the feeling of reflex physical reaction constitutes emotion, we must find this method of expression even more direct than that of statement, which has to pass through our intellect before we feel it. The physical causation of emotion is a separate principle from that of harmony, though the two are interactive.

In Nos. I. and II. I have tried to show that the most universal enjoyment of pictures is in the enhancement of life felt in a heightened power of vision when we see any object presented with compelling clarity; that a general element in our experience of narrative pictures is simply an enlargement of this principle to the mental perception of persons and their actions; that a further extension is found in the increased spiritual vision given us in the portrayal of character; and again in the relation of characters and events in dramatic painting. The principle of harmony is based on the same evolutionary fact—the sense of abundant life resulting from enhanced perception. It is a powerful factor in leading mankind beyond the mechanical vision of logic into the unfathomable relations of the universe.