The art ideal is one of joyous self-expression. It appeals to the imagination because it seeks to bring in a higher freedom by making our activity individual and creative. There is nothing more inspiring, I think, than the lives of brave artists; they seem the pioneers of a better civilization. I am delighted to know that Ruysdael, by love and devotion, put himself into his landscapes and expressed things which others delight to find there. Indeed, I care much less for the landscapes than for this fact of personal self-realization: it gives me a breath of hope and joy, and encourages me in the practice of an art of my own. The pleasure of creative work and the sharing of this by those who appreciate the product is in fact an almost unlimited source of possible joy. Unlike the pleasure of possessing things we win from others, it increases the more we share it, taking us out of the selfish atmosphere of every-day competition. A work of art is every man’s friend and benefactor, and when we hear a good violinist, or see a good play, or read a good book, we are not punished for our pleasure by the sense of having had it at some one else’s expense. The artist seems the divine man; he is free and creative, like God, and gives without taking away. It is everywhere the nature of art to show us order and beauty in life. It takes the confused and distracting reality and, by omitting the irrelevant and giving life and color to the significant, enables us to see the real as the ideal. In every-day reality we are like ants in the grass for the bigness of detail: in art we see the landscape. It enlarges, supples, generalizes the mind, giving us life in selected and simplified impressions. Thus almost any genuine art cheers and composes the spirit. One of Millet’s peasants, “The Sower,” for example, or one of Thomas Hardy’s people, differs from anything of the sort we might see more directly as a mournful song differs from the jangle of actual grief: it “reveals man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics,” and deepens our sense of life. So in these noisy and unrestful times people flock to the motion-picture shows, or buy cheap fiction, in an eager quest of the ideal. How idle it is to deprecate, justly or otherwise, the poor taste of the masses, as if art were a matter of mere refinement, and not of urgent need!