called forth imprecations. Now we are used to them. What made the public of the eighties object? This, and only this, that we never see the real. We see in it but that which tradition has taught us, made for us easy to see. Seeing the trees green is but an abstraction like seeing shadows black. It saves effort. It is also a form of abbreviation, the stenography of a long-hand we shall never write. It is a current language. Violet shadows were studio slang when they first struck the eye of the public. They have now acquired significant value in that flow of meanings which forms language, an activity which for most of us, unhappily, became reduced to the spoken word.

Just as certain phonetic sounds form the words expressing intuitions, so can color, and light, and line, and planes, those aspects of the real upon which style fastens itself, be selected to form images and signs. Thus again can certain definite aspects of the real assume that language-forming quality. The nude is, at the hands of Michelangelo, a language expressive of humanistic ideals. He knew enough to make the human body do that which it never does, and we accept it. This we can also take from a Rodin. To Claude and Turner landscape was a language. An artist paints what he wants to say, not what he sees. Finally we get to see what he painted. The nocturnes of Whistler, so utterly arbitrary, so exasperating to the excellent Ruskin, are now to be found in the suburbanite home.

Now language expresses reality and that is truth. Truth is nothing more. Truth is not reality. There cannot be language without an attempt at clarification of experience. Reality does not carry any such concern. That clarified experience is truth. Variations occur along two lines, either in content or form. To supply variations in form is the special function of design. To appreciate reality through changes of content is a practical, not an aesthetic activity. When the practical uses the aesthetic for its satisfaction we have sentimentality. We also have lying. But the artist never lies. He is above the practical as artist, though often as a man he may resort to tricks. On the practical plane,

At his

travel enables us to feel ourselves as distinct from reality, as apprehending reality anew. Art may be transformed into a substitute for travel. Cheap Japanese prints have frequently an humble and irresistible appeal: they embody an aspect of the real to which we are not used. They assert themselves as distinct from our own experience of the real. Venice, thus, for a long time attracted painters.. It was easy to paint. It was already abstracted from reality, as obviously paintable as a sunset. It has become the most difficult thing to paint. We now know what can be done with it. Let a Whistler tackle it: we still come around and look. hands it reassumes aesthetic instead of purely material significance. Form is extracted again. The spirit obtains. A meaning is brought up. Language flows. Reality, once more, has been forced from its dumb formlessness into the magic of a sign. Venice as it is, however, still retains its usefulness to honeymooning couples. Let those couples use a cheap print as a substitute for Venice and you have sentimentality. Let them read Baudelaire and Swinburne as the immature youth reads them and you have sentimentality. Sometimes trouble ensues. But those who understand form will never run foul of the activity depicted. There is something baffling, however, about this form, for if you carry it from the gorgeousness of Venice to a tenement house in all its drabness there is no difference. But watch out for the aesthete. He lives on the pretense of form.

What have we here in last analysis? Abstraction, pure and simple, as the term is understood in studios, that is, design. There is not one superior, scientific, intellectual type of abstraction. All art is abstraction. Abstraction is the mode of the aesthetic function. No expression is possible without abstraction. It can, however, proceed along different lines, as we have seen, through disjoining and simplification of parts of the object of the object as with the primitive, or through stylistic means involving the whole, as in modern art, a line drawing of Matisse as against the letter aleph. There is abstraction as soon as a meaning is aimed at, and there is no art without meaning. (There is plenty of meaningless

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"art." That is another matter. Let us not discuss the word art.) The ways of abstraction are innumerable and primitive man is a master of it. We fumble about it because our means for apprehending the real are infinitely greater; we are, so to speak, technically pampered, and we are trying to make our intellect guide a tool that was devised only to express meanings. For art and language vastly antedate the time when man was able to think by concepts. But even then he had something to say. On the other hand we cannot help feeling sorry for the physicist who must perforce express concepts through images, that is, signs not abstract like those of mathematics or logic, but each one carrying a particular content, each one expressing an intuition, not a relation. Nevertheless, and this is a major point-even in Neolithic times man must have felt the behest of the relation. His intellect was already at work. The form of the concept was on him, only his experience lacking. The road was laid, traffic had not been released on it. It is then that he must have tried, in a clumsy way, to express a universal in terms of a magnified particular, the whole in terms of the conspicuous part, the killer-whale through the fin, the bird as a wing, the ox by its head. And we know that such is the way writing started both in the old and the new world. But it took an artist to see the thing as significant, whereas every man-jack of science can tell us all there is to know about everything. He tells us only that. But when a scientist arrives at meaning he is an artist.

The writer therefore inclines very much to see in primitive man as an artist, not any evidence of a special mentality, but simply an assertion of the capacity for design far in advance of cultural development. There has been no sharp break between primitive man and us. And even in the days when man had not turned his intellect to the apprehension of the real, but spiritedly externalized his personality, when he saw everything in terms of meanings, not actuality, even then, man was a great artist. His first achievement as

2 Central American ruins lend their testimony to this view. Interest in art seems there to have been paramount while coupled with an almost childish ignorance of elementary architectural principles.