ABSTRACT
Art is here taken in its broader sense as including poetry, rhetoric, eloquence, painting, and sculpture—all those means, in short, whereby an idea wins peculiar force through its form of expression. Art arouses the passions. Early art is seen in the direct service of corporate excitement. It supplies aids and symbols by which at gatherings and assemblies the individual is spurred to a common emotion. The artist, like Le Sage's Asmodeus, waves aside all roofs. He shows us in another sex, class, lot, group, race, or age the old passions, longings, hopes, fears, and sorrows we have so often supped and bedded with. Not all art is sociable. Conventional art, ornamental art, art that interprets nature — these aim to please rather than to elevate. Art, with its strong human impulse, strives always to make pearls of man's drops of sweat.
