To illustrate this truth by a few homely examples. A farmer looking
out on his fields of tossing wheat, drenched in golden sunlight,
exclaims, "Look, isn't that beautiful!" What he really means is: "See
there the promise of a rich harvest, and it is mine." If the fields
belonged to his neighbor, his feelings towards them would be quite
different. No, their _beauty_ is to be seen and felt only by him
whose mind is free of thoughts of personal enrichment and who thus
can perceive the harmony with life of golden sunshine and nature's
abundant gifts. The farmer could not see beyond the material and its
value to him as material. But beauty lies deeper than that, for it is
the expression of spiritual relations.
Two men are riding together in a railway carriage. As the train
draws into a city, they pass a little group of tumble-down houses,
brown and gray, a heap of corners thrown together. One man thinks:
"What dreary lives these people must lead who dwell there." The
other, with no such stirring of the sympathy, sees a wonderful
"scheme" in grays and browns, or an expressive composition or
ordering of line. Neither could think the thoughts of the other at the
same time with his own. One feels a practical and physical reaction,
and he cannot therefore at that moment penetrate to the meaning of
these things for the spirit; and that meaning is the harmony which
they express.
From the tangle of daily living with its conflict of interests and its
burden of practical needs, the appreciator turns to art with its power
to chasten and to tranquillize. In art, he finds the revelation in fuller
measure of a beauty which he has felt but vaguely. He realizes that
underlying the external chaos of immediate practical experience
rests a supreme and satisfying order. Of that order he can here and
now perceive but little, hemmed in as he is by the material world,
whose meaning he discerns as through a glass, darkly. Yet he keeps
resolutely on his way, secure in his kinship with the eternal spirit,
and rewarded by momentary glimpses of the "broken arcs" which he
knows will in the end take their appointed places in the "perfect
round."
V
THE ARTIST
Out of chaos, order. Man's life on the earth is finite and fragmentary,
but it is the constant effort of his spirit to bring the scattering details
of momentary experience into an enduring harmony with his
personality and with that supreme unity of which he is a part.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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