There comes a day when a visitor stops before a landscape which seems to her more beautiful than anything she has ever seen in nature; or some portrait discloses a strength of character or radiates a charm of personality which she has seldom met in “real life.” Where does this beauty, this strength, this graciousness come from? Is it that the painter has seen a new wonder in nature, a new significance in human life? The spectator’s previous experiences of art have familiarized her in some measure with the painter’s methods and abilities, but this is something new.

More sensitive now to the appeal of color and form, she sees that what the artist cares to present on his canvas is just his peculiar sense of the beauty in the world, a beauty that is best symbolized and made manifest through the medium of color and form. However, before she understood this eloquent language which the painter speaks, it is possible that she misinterpreted those pictures whose significance she mistook to be literary and not pictorial.

Initially, she may have enjoyed the narrative picture because there was a subject she could understand; she could rephrase it in her own terms, she could retell the story to herself in words. Now words are the means of expression of everyday life. Because of this fact, the art which employs words as its medium is the art which comes nearest to being universally understood, namely, literature. The other arts each use a medium which requires special training to understand. Without some sense of the expressiveness of color, line, form, and sounds — a sense which can be cultivated — one is unable to grasp the full and true meaning of picture, statue, or musical composition.

The task of the appreciator, correspondingly, is to receive the artist’s message in the same terms in which it was conceived. The tendency is inevitable, however, to translate the meaning of the work into words, the terms in which we most commonly phrase our experiences. A parallel tendency is manifest in one’s efforts to learn a foreign language. The English student of French at first thinks in English and laboriously translates phrase for phrase into French; and in hearing or reading the foreign language, he translates the original, word for word, into his native tongue before he can understand its sense. He has mastered the language only when he has reached that point where English is no longer present to his consciousness, when he thinks in French and understands in French.

Similarly, to translate the message of any art into terms that are foreign to it, to phrase the meaning of music or painting, for example, in words, is to fail to appreciate its essential, true significance. The importance of music is musical; the meaning of pictures is not literary but pictorial. In the understanding of this truth, then, the spectator penetrates to the artist’s real intention; and she becomes aware that when she used the picture as the peg whereon to hang her own reflections and ideas, she missed the meaning of the artist’s work.

“As I look at this canvas,” she tells herself, “it is not what I know of the coast of Maine that is of concern, but what the painter has seen and felt of its beauty and wants to reveal to me.” Able at last to interpret the painter’s medium, the appreciator comes to seek in pictures not primarily an exhibition of the craftsman’s skill, not even a recall of her own pleasurable experiences, but rather, beyond all this, a fuller visible revelation of beauty.

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