In order to seize the real meaning of art it is necessary to strip the word beauty of all the wrappings of customary associations and the accretions of tradition and habit. As the word is current in ordinary parlance, the attribute of beauty is ascribed to that which is pleasing, pretty, graceful, comely; in fine, to that which is purely agreeable. But surely such is not the beauty which Rembrandt saw in the filthy, loathsome beggar. To Rembrandt the beggar was expressive of some force or manifestation of the supreme universal life, wherein all things work together to a perfect harmony. Beauty is the essential quality belonging to energy, character, significance. A merely agreeable object is not beautiful unless it is expressive of a meaning; whatever, on the other hand, is expressive of a meaning, however shocking it may be in itself, however much it may fail to conform to conventional standards, is beautiful. Beauty does not reside in the object. No; it is the artist's sense of the great meaning of things; and in proportion as he finds that meaning--the qualities of energy, force, aspiration, life--manifest and expressed in objects do those objects become beautiful. Such was the conception of beauty Keats had when he wrote in a letter: "What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth--whether it existed before or not,--for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty." And similarly; "I can never feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its Beauty." It his verse he sings:-- "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." When it is said here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the artist an idea he has conceived of some aspect of the universal life.