Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/198

166 of a stupid external world. With him one may live vicariously the whole stream of the free spirit not dulled and depressed by the drab monotony of everyday affairs. The other world he takes us into is this world enriched by his vision. We see the aesthetic strand in all its fabrics, that runs through all experience, that we ignore in the real world. He shows us that there is an ideal world in which we would thrive in peace did we but see it aright. The residuum of our stay in his world.is the conviction of the intrinsic justification of life itself: a moral value the legitimate offspring of an aesthetic one. If the day-dream is short-lived, it is none the less real and vital and is capable of infinite and amplified repetitions; he continues to make good.

Renoir proves that life is fundamentally and chiefly a matter of feeling. He painted everything in life as we live it; he was preoccupied with the homely, everyday things, and he made them momentous, as they really are. Every subject is impregnated with its own essential and delightful feeling; his flowers are voluptuous, his fruit glows as in nature, his people at work or play are intent, his nudes are suffused with a high beauty which bars even the suggestion of sensuality. By his magic he endows every subject with its specific characteristics, vitalizes their associations, gives the feeling of delight that we experience when we know that life is good. No painter ever more successfully converted material reality into what it is in its essence, the expression of the ideal. His perceptions instinctively adjust that proper amount of emotion to each object, which the fine intelligence demands: he is never literal or prosaic and never sentimental. He makes the non-material side of the subject the most momentous part of it.

Renoir's work was the reconstruction of the objects of sense, and that makes it per se of universal interest, with an intrinsic aesthetic appeal. There can be no beauty except that objectified and no aesthetic interest that is not based upon a taste for existing things in the real world: mere emotion is the nature in a vacuum which calls for the psychiatrist. Renoir's creative genius reveals itself in the penetrating eye that sees to the core of the structure of things and in the skilled hand that reproduces them so that they reawaken the intellectual content of the perceptions and bring to life their exciting associations which we call feeling. It is because "to poets and philosophers, real things are themselves symbols" that