PLEASURE IN PICTURES 163 



analyze our experience of their works intensifies it and clarifies our 

 vision. So in viewing any portrayal of character it is not our conscious 

 reading of it that is significant ; rather it is our subconscious imitation 

 of the character that counts, bringing out some latent quality of our 

 own — some quality which we feel to be good, agreeable because it is 

 life-giving. 



Again : in portraiture, great painters give us an insight into essen- 

 tial life beyond that which we ordinarily have. While waiting for a 

 train in a railway station we may spend our time " studying life," but 

 how many of us, with or without great effort, can ever penetrate be- 

 neath the thinnest superficialities? Not only are we unpractised; we 

 are bound by the accepted judgments of society, and the most we can 

 do is to pigeonhole the several types. But these great painters present 

 to us a person we have never before seen, and give us an immediate and 

 strong sense of his personality. Even though we disagree about him, 

 we do so rather less than we do about our friends; for in relation to 

 our neighbor our sight is distorted by a hundred influences. Eules of 

 dress, etiquette and morals have blinded us to the eternal man who lives 

 behind and above what we can see of him. Man strives . outwardly to 

 appear as his own society would have him, the perfect type of provin- 

 cial—the New Yorker of 1914, the Parisian of such and such a period, 

 or whatever; while within him is a life at once unique and universal. 

 The illustrator gives us the provincial man. But the great character- 

 painters show us through imperfections and through struggles, a life 

 based on the everlasting instincts of the race and the principles that 

 never change with our mutable standards; through unsymmetrical 

 development and through wreckage, we see supreme man. We put off 

 our blinding limitations and discern clearly. 



Where this heightened vision is combined with the emotions which 

 nature has made us to enjoy because they are creative, our experience 

 is one of abounding life. 



III. Harmony 



Every picture, and indeed every work of art, is like a song in that it 

 consists of words and music — a statement and the sound, or form, 

 through which the idea is conveyed. Half the world listens to the 

 words and is more or less affected in mood by the music; the other 

 half listens to the music and receives the words only as a suggestion to 

 make definite the spirit of the music. It is not an analogy but a 

 translation to say that the sensuous elements of a picture — lines, colors, 

 lights — are visual music. 



Michael Angelo's fresco "The Creation of the Sun and Moon" 

 gives us a feeling of overwhelming power. A titanic figure, accom- 

 panied by a whirl of cherubim and preceded by a speeding seraph, 



