matched the perfect plastic beauty of the Disk-thrower, and no Italian woman ever symbolized cruel, sphinx-like loveliness as does the Mona Lisa. Corot's nature is grayer and softer and more harmonious than ever existed on earth. And such songs as Schumann's «Ich Grolle Nicht» and Tschaïkowsky's «Nur Wer die Sehnsucht Kennt» pulsate with a passion as intense but far less torn and fragmentary than that by which they were inspired. This serene perfection, which wraps like a mantle all works of genuine art, results from harmonious organization, and is attained only by excluding the irrelevancies always present in nature. Whistler is wise as well as witty when he exclaims that «to ask the painter to copy nature as he sees it is to invite the pianist to sit on the keyboard.» Were there, to be sure, a perfect adjustment between nature and our faculties, were we able to discern the unity that must exist even in the infinitely complex Whole of the world, then such a dictum would be outgrown, and selection would cease to be the procedure of art. But until we have grown to possess universal synthetic power art will have its solacing mission and its selective method as now. Meanwhile it will have also, of course, its inevitable limitations. If it be more orderly than nature, it will be far less rich and various; effects that nature presents in a bewildering drench of experience, a work of art will have to isolate and develop alone. A pictured landscape, however perfect, is but one phase of the reality; in nature there is ceaseless play and change, mood succeeds mood, and the charm is more than half in the wayward flux and transformation. A portrait shows but one character; a human face is a whole gallery of personalities. The wealth of experience excites even while it bewilders us, and when we turn to the work of art we unconsciously adopt a narrower standard. Primitive art especially impresses us as bare and denuded, because the primitive artist has neither technical skill nor synthetic power of thought to combine more than a few elements. Thus early painting and sculpture, in dealing with the human figure, carry delineation little further than to show man with head and body, two legs and two arms. Refinements of contour and proportion are left to be observed by later artists. Similarly the folk ballads in which poetry takes its origin confine themselves to elementary incidents and emotions. In general, rudimentary art is always so far behind nature as to seem to have hardly any connection with it at all.