Why does this satisfy us?  Why is it valuable to have a part of nature or life liberated from all connection with the world?  Why does it make us happy to see anything in its perfect isolation, an isolation which real life seldom offers and which only art can give in complete perfection?  The motives which lead us to value the product of the scholar are easily recognized.  He aims toward connection.  He reshapes the world until it appears connected, because that helps us to foresee the effects of every event and teaches us to master nature so that we can use it for our practical achievements.  But why do we appreciate no less the opposite work which the artist is doing?  Might we not answer that this enjoyment of the artistic work results from the fact that only in contact with an isolated experience can we feel perfectly happy?  Whatever we meet in life or nature awakes in us desires, impulses to action, suggestions and questions which must be answered.  Life is a continuous striving.  Nothing is an end in itself and therefore nothing is a source of complete rest.  Everything is a stimulus to new wishes, a source of new uneasiness which longs for new satisfaction in the next and again the next thing.  Life pushes us forward.  Yet sometimes a touch of nature comes to us; we are stirred by a thrill of life which awakens plenty of impulses but which offers satisfaction to all these impulses in itself.  It does not lead beyond itself but contains in its own midst everything which answers the questions, which brings the desires to rest.

Wherever we meet such an offering of nature, we call it beautiful.  We speak of the beautiful landscape, of the beautiful face.  And wherever we meet it in life, we speak of love, of friendship, of peace, of harmony.  The word harmony may even cover both nature and life.  Wherever it happens that every line and every curve and every color and every movement in the landscape is so harmonious with all the others that every suggestion which one stirs up is satisfied by another, there it is perfect and we are completely happy in it.  In the life relations of love and friendship and peace, there is again this complete harmony of thought and feeling and will, in which every desire is satisfied.  If our own mind is in such flawless harmony, we feel the true happiness which crowns our life.  Such harmony, in which every part is the complete fulfillment of that which the other parts demand, when nothing is suggested which is not fulfilled in the midst of the same experience, where nothing points beyond and everything is complete in the offering itself, must be a source of inexhaustible happiness.  To remold nature and life so that it offers such complete harmony in itself that it does not point beyond its own limits but is an ultimate unity through the harmony of its parts:  this is the aim of the isolation which the artist alone achieves.  That restful happiness which the beautiful landscape or the harmonious life relation can furnish us in blessed instants of our struggling life is secured as a joy forever when the painter or the sculptor, the dramatist or the poet, the composer or the photoplaywright, recomposes nature and life and shows us a unity which does not lead beyond itself but is in itself perfectly harmonious.