ART is a quality of doing and of what is done. Only outwardly, then, can it be designated by a noun substantive. Since it adheres to the manner and content of doing, it is adjectival in nature. When we say that tennis-playing, singing, acting, and a multitude of other activities are arts, we engage in an elliptical way of saying that there is art in the conduct of these activities, and that this art so qualifies what is done and made as to induce activities in those who perceive them in which there is also art. The product of art — temple, painting, statue, poem — is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties. Esthetically at least:
". . . we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment; ours her shroud."
If "art" denoted objects, if it were genuinely a noun, art objects could be marked off into different classes. Art would then be divided into genera and these subdivided into species. This sort of division was applied to animals as long as they were believed to be things fixed in themselves. But the system of classification had to change when they were discovered to be differentiation in a stream of vital activity. Classifications became genetic, designating as accurately as may be the special place of particular forms in the continuity of life on earth. If art is an intrinsic quality of activity, we cannot divide and subdivide it. We can only follow the differentiation of the activity into different modes as it impinges on different materials and employs different media.
Qualities as qualities do not lend themselves to division. It would be impossible to name the subordinate sorts of even sweet and sour. In the end such an attempt would be compelled to enumerate every thing in the world that is sweet or sour, so that the alleged classification would be merely a catalogue that idly reduplicates in the form of "qualities" what was previously known in the form of things. For quality is concrete and existential, and hence varies with individuals since it is impregnated with their uniqueness. We may indeed speak of red, and then of the red of rose or sunset. But these terms are practical in nature, giving a certain amount of direction as to where to turn. In existence no two sunsets have exactly the same red. They could not have it unless one sunset repeated the other in absolutely complete detail. For the red is always the red of the material of that experience.
Logicians for certain purposes regard qualities like red, sweet, beautiful, etc., as universals. As formal logicians, they are not concerned with existential matters which are precisely what artists are concerned with. A painter knows, therefore, that there are no two reds in a picture exactly like each other, each being affected by the infinite detail of its context in the individual whole in which it appears. "Red" when used to signify "redness" in general is a handle, a mode of approach, a delimitation of action within a given region, such as buying red paint for a barn where any red within limits will do, or for matching a sample in buying goods.
Language comes infinitely short of paralleling the variegated surface of nature. Yet words as practical devices are the agencies by which the ineffable diversity of natural existence as it operates in human experience is reduced to orders, ranks, and classes that can be managed. Not only is it impossible that language should duplicate the infinite variety of individualized qualities that exist, but it is wholly undesirable and unneeded that it should do so. The unique quality of a quality is found in experience itself; it is there and sufficiently there not to need reduplication in language. The latter serves its scientific or its intellectual purpose as it gives directions as to how to come upon these qualities in experience. The more generalized and simple the direction the better. The more uselessly detailed they are, the more they confuse instead of guiding. But words serve their poetic purpose in the degree in which they summon and evoke into active operation the vital responses that are present whenever we experience qualities.
A poet has recently said that poetry seemed to him "more physical than intellectual," and he goes on to say that he recognizes poetry by physical symptoms such as bristling of the skin, shivers in the spine, constriction of the throat, and a feeling in the pit of the stomach like Keats' "spear going through me." I do not suppose that Mr. Housman means that these feelings are the poetical effect. To be a thing and to be a sign of its presence are different modes of being. But just such feelings, and what other writers have called organic "clicks," are the gross indication of complete organic participation, while it is the fullness and immediacy of this participation that constitutes the esthetic quality of an experience, just as it is that which transcends the intellectual. For this reason, I should question the literal truth of the saying that poetry is more physical than intellectual. But that it is more than intellectual, because it absorbs the intellectual into immediate qualities that are experienced through senses that belong to the vital body, seems to me so indubitable as to justify the exaggeration contained in the saying as against the idea that qualities are universals intuited through the intellect.
The fallacy of definition is the other side of the fallacy of rigid classification, and of abstraction when it is made an end in itself instead of being used as an instrument for the sake of experience. A definition is good when it is sagacious, and it is that when it so points the direction in which we can move expeditiously toward having an experience. Physics and chemistry have learned by the inward necessity of their tasks that a definition is that which indicates to us how things are made, and in so far enables to predict their occurrence, to test for their presence and, sometimes, to make them ourselves. Theorists and literary critics have lagged far behind. They are still largely in thralls to the ancient metaphysics of essence according to which a definition, if it is "correct," discloses to us some inward reality that causes the thing to be what it is as a member of a species that is eternally fixed. Then the species is declared to be more real than an individual, or rather to be itself the true individual.
For practical purposes we think in terms of classes, as we concretely experience in terms of individuals. Thus a layman would probably suppose that it is a simple matter to define a vowel. But a phonetician is compelled by intimate contact with actual subject-matter to recognize that a strict definition, strict in the sense of marking off one class of things from others in every respect, is an illusion. There are only a number of more or less useful definitions; useful, because directing attention to significant tendencies in the continuous process of vocalization — tendencies that if carried to a limit of discreteness would yield this or that "exact" definition.
William James remarked on the tediousness of elaborate classification of things that merge and vary as do human emotions. Attempts at precise and systematic classification of fine arts seem to me to share this tediousness. An enumerative classification is convenient and for purposes of easy reference indispensable. But a cataloguing like painting, statuary, poetry, drama, dancing, landscape gardening, architecture, singing, musical instrumentation, etc., etc., makes no pretense to throwing any light on the intrinsic nature of things listed. It leaves that illumination to come from the only place it can come from — individual works of art.
Rigid classifications are inept (if they are taken seriously) because they distract attention from that which is esthetically basic — the qualitatively unique and integral character of experience of an art product. But for a student of esthetic theory they are also misleading. There are two important points of intellectual understanding in which they are confusing. They inevitably neglect transitional and connecting links; and in consequence they put insuperable obstacles in the way of an intelligent following of the historical development of any art.
One classification which has had some vogue is according to sense-organs. We shall see later what element of truth may reside in this mode of division. But taken literally and rigidly, it cannot possibly yield a coherent result. Recent writers have dealt adequately with Kant's effort to limit the material of the arts to the "higher" intellectual senses, eye and ear, and I shall not repeat their convincing arguments. But, when the range of senses is extended in the most catholic manner, it still remains true that a particular sense is simply the outpost of a total organic activity in which all organs, including the functioning of the autonomic system, participate. Eye, ear, touch, take the lead in a particular organic enterprise, but they are no more the exclusive or even always the most important agent than a sentinel is a whole army.
A particular example of the confusion worked by division into arts of the eye and ear is found in the case of poetry. Poems were once the work of bards. Poetry as far as we know had no existence outside the spoken voice appealing to the ear. It was something sung or chanted. It is hardly necessary to say how far away the great mass of poetry has got from song since the invention of writing and of printing. There are even attempts at present to use the device of figures made by printed forms to intensify the sense of a poem as it strikes the eye — like the tail of the mouse in Alice in Wonderland. But apart from any exaggeration, while the heard "music" of silently read poetry is still a factor (illustrating the point made in the last paragraph), poetry as a mode of literature is now outwardly and sensibly visual. Has it then migrated from one "class" to another in the last two thousand years?
Then there is the classification into arts of space and time that has already been mentioned. Now even if this division were correct, it is one made after the event and from the outside, and throws no light upon the esthetic content of any work of art. It does not aid perception; it does not tell what to look for, nor how to see, hear, and enjoy. It has, moreover, a positive serious defect. As was previously pointed out, it denies rhythm to architectural structures, statues and paintings, and symmetry to song, poetry, and eloquence. And the implication of the denials is refusal to acknowledge the thing most fundamental to esthetic experience — that it is perceptual. The division is made on the basis of traits of art products as external and physical existences.
A writer on the fine arts in one edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica illustrates this fallacy so beautifully as to make it pertinent to quote a passage. In justifying the division of the arts into spatial and temporal, he says, in speaking of a statue and building: "What the eye sees from any point of view it sees all at once; in other words, the parts of anything we see fill or occupy not time but space, and reach us from various points in space at a single instantaneous perception." And it is added: "Their products (that is, of the arts of sculpture and architecture) are in themselves solid, stationary, and permanent."
A number of ambiguities and resulting misconceptions are crowded into these few sentences. First, as to the "all-at-once." Any object in space (and all objects are spatial) sends out vibrations all at once, and the physical parts of the object occupy space all at once. But these traits of the object have nothing to say or do in distinguishing one kind of perception from another. Space occupancy is a general condition of the existence of anything — even of a ghost if there be one. It is a causal condition for having any and every "sensation." Similarly vibrations sent out from an object are causal conditions of every kind of perception; accordingly they do not mark out one kind of perception from others.
Thus at most what "reaches us simultaneously" is the physical conditions of a perception, not the constituents of the object as perceived. Inference is made to the latter only through confusion of "simultaneous" with "single." Of course, all the impressions that reach us from any object or event must be integrated into one perception. The only alternative to singleness of perception, whether the object be one in space or time, is a disconnected succession of snapshots that do not even form cross-sections of anything. The difference between that elusive and fragmentary thing psychologists call a sensation and a perception is the singleness, the integrated unity, of the latter. Simultaneity of both physical existence and physiological reception have nothing to do with this singleness. As was just indicated, they can be taken to be identical only when the causal conditions of a perception are confused with the actual content of the perception.
But the fundamental mistake is the confusion of the physical product with the esthetic object, which is that which is perceived. Physically, a statue is a block of marble, nothing more. It is stationary, and, as far as the ravages of time permit, permanent. But to identify the physical lump with the statue that is a work of art and to identify pigments on a canvas with a picture is absurd. What about the play of light on a building with the constant change of shadows, intensities, and colors, and shifting reflections? If the building or statue were as "stationary" in perception as it is in physical existence, they would be so dead that the eye would not rest on it, but glance by. For an object is perceived by a cumulative series of interactions. The eye as the master organ of the whole being produces an undergoing, a return effect; this calls out another act of seeing with new allied supplementations with another increment of meaning and value, and so on, in a continuous building-up of the esthetic object. What is called the inexhaustibility of a work of art is a function of this continuity of the total act of perceiving. "Simultaneous vision" is an excellent definition of a perception so little esthetic that it is not even a perception.
Architectural structures provide, I should imagine, the perfect reductio ad absurdum of the separation of space and time in works of art. If anything exists in the mode of "space-occupancy," it is a building. But even a small hut cannot be the matter of esthetic perception save as temporal qualities enter in. A cathedral, no matter how large, makes an instantaneous impression. A total qualitative impression emanates from it as soon as it interacts with the organism through the visual apparatus. But this is only the substratum and framework within which a continuous process of interactions introduces enriching and defining elements. The hasty sightseer no more has an esthetic vision of Saint Sophia or the Cathedral of Rouen than the motorist traveling at sixty miles an hour sees the flitting landscape. One must move about, within and without, and through repeated visits let the structure gradually yield itself to him in various lights and in connection with changing moods.
I may appear to have dwelt at unnecessary length upon a not very important statement. But the implication of the passage quoted affects the whole problem of art as experience. An instantaneous experience is an impossibility, biologically and psychologically. An experience is a product, one might almost say a by-product, of continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world. There is no other foundation upon which esthetic theory and criticism can build. When an individual does not permit this process to work itself out fully, he begins at the point of arrest to supplant experience of the work of art with unrelated private notions. What ails much esthetic theory and criticism is accurately described in the following: "When the continuously unfolding process of cumulative interaction and its result are neglected, an object is seen in only a part of its totality, and the rest of theory becomes subjective reverie, instead of a growth. It is arrested after the first perception of partial detail; the rest of the process is exclusively cerebral — a one-sided affair that acquires momentum only from within. It does not include that stimulation from environment that would displace revery by interaction with the self."*
In any case, the division of the arts into spatial and temporal has to be eked out by another classification, that into representative and non-representative, a division within which architecture and music are now assigned to the latter genus. Aristotle, who gave the conception that art is representative its classic formation, at least avoided the dualism of this division. He took the concept of imitation more generously and more intelligently. Thus he declares that music is the most representative of all the arts — this being the very one that some modern theorists refer to the wholly non-representative class. Nor did he mean anything so silly as that music represents the twittering of birds, lowing of cows and gurgling of brooks. He meant that music reproduces by means of sounds the affections, the emotional impressions, that are produced by martial, sad, triumphant, sexually orgasmic, objects and scenes. Representation in the sense of expression covers all the qualities and values of any possible esthetic experience.
Architecture is not representative if we understand by that term reproduction of natural forms for the sake of their reproduction — as some have supposed that cathedrals "represent" high trees in a forest. But architecture does more than merely utilize natural forms, arches, pillars, cylinders, rectangles, portions of spheres. It expresses their characteristic effect upon the observer. Just what a building would be which did not use and represent the natural energies of gravity, stress, thrust, and so on, must be left to those to explain who regard architecture as nonrepresentative. But architecture does not combine representation to these qualities of matter and energy. It expresses also enduring values of collective human life. It "represents" the memories, hopes, fears, purposes, and sacred values of those who build in order to shelter a family; provide an altar for the gods, establish a place in which to make laws, or set up a stronghold against attack. Just why buildings are called palaces, castles, homes, city-halls, forums, is a mystery if architecture is not supremely expressive of human interests and values. Apart from cerebral reveries, it is self-evident that every important structure is a treasury of storied memories and a monumental registering of cherished expectancies for the future.
Moreover, the separation of architecture (music, too, for that matter) from such arts as painting and sculpture makes a mess of the historical developments of the arts. Sculpture (which is acknowledged to be representative) was for ages an organic part of architecture: witness the frieze of the Parthenon, the carvings of the cathedrals of Lincoln and Chartres. Nor can it be said that its growing independence of architecture — with statues scattered in parks and public squares and busts placed on pedestals in rooms already overcrowded — has coincided with any advance in the art of sculpture. Painting was first adherent to the walls of caves. It long continued to be a decorative effect of temples and palaces, without and on inner walls. Frescoes were meant to inspire faith, revive piety and instruct the worshiper concerning the saints, heroes, and martyrs of his religion. When Gothic buildings left little wall space for murals, stained glass and later panel paintings took their place — still as much parts of an architectural whole as were carvings on altar and reredos. When nobles and merchant princes began the collection of paintings on canvas, they were used to decorate walls — so much so that they were frequently cut and trimmed to make them fit better the purpose of wall ornamentation. Music was associated with song, and its differentiated modes were adapted to the needs of great crises and important events — death, marriage, war, worship, feasting. With the passage of time, both painting and music have ceased to be subservient to special ends. Since all the arts have tended to exploit their own media to the point of independence, the fact can be better used to prove that none of the arts is literally imitative than to furnish a reason for drawing hard and fast lines between them.
Moreover, as soon as lines have been drawn, the theorists who institute them find it necessary to make exceptions and introduce transitional forms and even to say that some arts are mixed — dancing, for example, being both spatial and temporal. Since it is the nature of any art object to be itself, single and unified, this notion of a "mixed" art may be safely regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole rigid classificatory business. What can such classifications make out of sculpture in relief, high and low, of marble figures on tombs, carved on wooden doors and cast in bronze doors? What about carvings of capitals, friezes, cornices, canopies, brackets? How do the minor arts fit in, workings in ivory, alabaster, plaster of paris, terra-cotta, silver and gold, ornamental iron work in brackets, signs, hinges, screens and grills? Is the same music nonrepresentative when played in a concert hall and representative when it is part of a sacramental service in a church?
The attempt at rigid classification and definition is not confined to the arts. A like method has been applied to esthetic effects. Much ingenious effort has been spent in enumerating the different species of beauty after beauty itself has had its "essence" set forth: the sublime, grotesque, tragic, comic, poetic, and so on. Now there are undoubtedly realities to which such terms apply — as proper names are used in connection with different members of a family. It is possible for a qualified person to say things about the sublime, eloquent, poetic, humorous, that enhance and clarify perception of objects in the concrete. It may help in seeing a Giorgione to possess in advance a definite sense of what it is to be lyric; and in listening to Beethoven's major theme in the "Fifth Symphony" to come to it with a clear conception of what force is and is not in the arts. But, unfortunately, esthetic theory has not been content with clarifying qualities as matter of emphasis in individual wholes. It erected adjectives into nouns substantive, and then played dialectical tunes upon the fixed concepts which emerge. Since rigid conceptualization is compelled to take place on the basis of principles and ideas that are framed outside of direct esthetic experience, all such performances afford good samples of "cerebral revery."
If, however, we regard such terms as picturesque, sublime, poetic, ugly, tragic, as marking tendencies, and hence as adjectival as are the terms, pretty, sugary, convincing, we shall be led back to the fact that art is a quality of activity. Like any mode of activity, it is marked by movement in this direction and that. These movements may be discriminated in such fashion that our relation to the activity in question is rendered more intelligent. A tendency, a movement, occurs within certain limits which define its direction. But tendencies of experience do not have limits that are exactly fixed or that are mathematical lines without breadth and thickness. Experience is too rich and complex to permit such precise limitation. The termini of tendencies are bands not lines, and the qualities that characterize them form a spectrum instead of being capable of distribution in separate pigeonholes.
Thus anyone can select passages of literature and say without hesitation this is poetic, that is prosaic. But this assigning of qualities does not imply that there is one entity called poetry and another called prose. It implies, once more, a felt quality of a movement toward a limit. Hence the quality exists in many degrees and forms. Some of its lesser degrees manifest themselves in unexpected places. Dr, Helen Parkhurst quotes the following from a weather report: "Low pressure prevails west of the Rocky Mountains, in Idaho and south of the Columbia River as far as Nevada. Hurricane conditions continue along the Mississippi Valley and into the Gulf of Mexico. Blizzards are reported in North Dakota and Wyoming, snow and hail in Oregon and zero temperature in Missouri. High winds are blowing southeastward from the West Indies and shipping along the coast of Brazil has received a warning."
No one would say that the passage is poetry. But only pedantic definition will deny that there is something poetic about it, due in part to the euphony of the geographical terms, and more to "transferred values"; to accumulation of allusions that create a sense for the wide spaciousness of the earth, the romance of distant and strange countries, and above all the mystery of the varied turmoil of the forces of nature in hurricane, blizzard, hail, snow, cold, and tempest. The intention is a prosaic statement of weather conditions. But the words are charged with a load that gives them an impulsion toward the poetic. I suppose that even equations composed of chemical symbols may under certain circumstances of an extension of insight into nature have for some persons a poetic value, though in such cases the effect is limited and idiosyncratic. But that experiences having different materials and different movements toward different kinds of conclusions will have differences that at the poles are as far apart as the baldly prosaic and the excitedly poetic, is guaranteed in advance to happen. For in some cases the tendency is in the direction of fulfillment of an experience as an experience, while in other cases the result moved toward is but a deposit for use in another experience.
Examination of the literature regarding the comic and humorous will show, I think, the same two facts. On one hand, incidental and side remarks make clearer some particular tendency and make the reader more alive and discriminating in actual situations. These instances will be identical with cases where an adjectival quality, a tendency, is under survey. But there are elaborate and painful efforts to establish a rigid definition illustrated by a collection of cases. How can any classification of genus and species reduce to conceptual unity such a variety of tendencies as are indicated by even a few of the terms in use: Laughable, ridiculous, ribald, amusing, funny, mirthful, farcical, diverting, witty, hilarious; joking, fooling, making fun of, making sport of, mocking, letting-down? Of course with sufficient ingenuity one may start from a definition, like incongruity, or from a sense of logic and proportion working in reverse, and then find a specific differentia for each variety. But it should be evident that we are then attending a dialectical game.
If we confine ourselves to one aspect alone, the ridiculous, le rire, the comic is what we laugh at. But we also laugh with; we laugh from elation, sheer high spirits, geniality, conviviality, from scorn and from embarrassment. Why confine all these variations of tendency in a single hard and fast concept? Not that conceptions are not the heart of thinking, but that their real office is as instruments of approach to the changing play of concrete material, not to tie that material down into rigid immobility. Since it is the incidental material rather than the formal definitions that acts as reinforcements of perception in particular experience, the side remarks exercise the real office of conception.
Finally, on this point, the notion of fixed classes and that of fixed rules inevitably accompany each other. If there are, for example, so many separate genres in literature, then there is some immutable principle which marks off each kind and which defines an inherent essence that makes each species what it is. This principle must then be conformed to; otherwise the "nature" that belongs to the art will be violated and "bad" art will be the result. Instead of being free to do what he can with the material at hand and the media under his control, the artist is bound, under penalty of rebuke from the critic who knows the rules, to follow the precepts that flow from the basic principle. Instead of observing subject-matter, he observes rules. Thus classification sets limits to perception. If the theory that underlies it is influential, it restricts creative work. For new works, in the degree in which they are new, do not fit into pigeonholes already provided. They are in the arts what heresies are in theology. There are obstructions enough in any case in the way of genuine expression. The rules that attend classification add one more handicap. The philosophy of fixed classification as far as it has vogue among critics (who whether they know it or not are subjects of one or other of the positions that philosophers have formulated more definitely) encourages all artists, save those of unusual vigor and courage, to make "safety first" their guiding principle.
The tenor of the foregoing is not so negative as might seem at first sight. For it calls attention in an indirect way to the importance of media and to their inexhaustible variety. We may safely start any discussion of the varied matter of the arts with this fact of the decisive importance of the medium: with the fact that different media have different potencies and are adapted to different ends. We do not make bridges with putty nor use the most opaque things we can find to serve as windowpanes to transmit sunlight. This negative fact alone compels differentiation in works of art. On the positive side, it suggests that color does something characteristic in experience and sound something else; sounds of instruments something different from the sound of the human voice and so on. At the same time it reminds us that the exact limits of the efficacy of any medium cannot be determined by any a priori rule, and that every great initiator in art breaks down some barrier that had previously been supposed to be inherent. If, moreover, we establish the discussion on the basis of media, we recognize that they form a continuum, a spectrum, and that while we may distinguish arts as we distinguish the seven so-called primary colors, there is no attempt to tell exactly where one begins and the other ends; and also that if we take one color out of its context, say a particular band of red, it is no longer the same color it was before.
When we view the arts from the standpoint of media of expression, the broad distinction that confronts us is between the arts that have the human organism, the mind-body, of the artist as their medium and those which depend to a much greater extent upon materials external to the body: automatic and shaping arts so-called. * Dancing, singing, yarn-spinning — the prototype of the literary arts in connection with song — are examples of "automatic" arts, and so are bodily scarifications, tattooings, etc., and the cultivation of the body by the Greeks in games and gymnasia. Cultivation of voice, posture, and gesture that adds grace to social intercourse is another.
Since the shaping arts must at first have been identified with technological arts, they were associated with work and with some degree, even if slight, of external pressure in contrast with automatic arts as spontaneous, free accompaniments of leisure. Therefore, the Greek thinkers ranked them as higher than those which subordinated the use of the body to deal with external materials by the intermediation of instruments. Aristotle reckons the sculptor and the architect — even if of the Parthenon — as craftsmen rather than as artists in the liberal sense. Modern taste tends to reckon as higher the fine arts that reshape material, where the product is enduring instead of fugitive, and is capable of appealing to a wide circle, including the unborn, in contrast with the limitation of singing, dancing, and oral storytelling to an immediate audience.
But all rankings of higher and lower are, ultimately, out of place and stupid. Each medium has its own efficacy and value. What we can say is that the products of the technological arts become fine in the degree in which they carry over into themselves something of the spontaneity of the automatic arts. Except in the case of work done by machines, mechanically tended by an operator, the movements of the individual body enter into all reshapings of material. When these movements carry over in dealings with physically external matters the organic push from within of an automatic art, they become, in so far, "fine." Something of the rhythm of vital natural expression, something as it were of dancing and pantomime, must go into carving, painting, and making statues, planning buildings, and writing stories; which is one more reason for the subordination of technique to form.
Even in the case of this broad distinction of the arts, we are in the presence of a spectrum rather than of separate classes. Cadenced speech would not have developed far in the direction of music without the assistance of reed, string and drum, and the assistance is not external, since it modified the matter of song itself. The history of musical forms is on one side the history of the invention of instruments and the practice of instrumentation. That instruments are not mere vehicles, like a phonographic disc, but all media are, is evident in the way in which the piano, for example, operated in fixing the scale now in general use. Similarly print has acted — or reacted — to profoundly modify the substance of literature; modifying, by way of a single illustration, the very words that form the medium of literature. The change is indicated on the unfavorable side by the growing tendency to use "literary" as a term of disparagement. Spoken language was never "literary" till print and reading came into general use. But, on the other side, even if it be admitted that no single work of literature excels, say, the Iliad (though even that doubtless is the product of an organization of previously scattered materials necessitated by writing and wider publication), yet print has made for an enormous extension not merely in bulk but in qualitative variety and subtlety, aside from compelling an organization that did not previously exist.
However, I have no desire to go into this matter further than to indicate that even in this broad differentiation of different arts into automatic and shaping, we are in the presence also of intermediate forms, transitions, and mutual influences, rather than of the compartments of a filing-case. The important thing is that a work of art exploit its medium to the uttermost — bearing in mind that material is not medium save when used as an organ of expression. The materials of nature and human association are multifarious to the point of infinity. Whenever any material finds a medium that expresses its value in experience — that is, its imaginative and emotional value — it becomes the substance of a work of art. The abiding struggle of art is thus to convert materials that are stammering or dumb in ordinary experience into eloquent media. Remembering that art itself denotes a quality of action and of things done, every authentic new work of art is in some degree itself the birth of a new art.
I should say, then, there are two fallacies of interpretation in connection with the matter under discussion. One is to keep the arts wholly separate. The other is to run them altogether into one. The latter fallacy is found in the interpretation often given by critics who content themselves with the tag in quotation of Pater's saying that all "arts constantly aspire to the condition of music." I say interpretations rather than Pater himself, because the complete passage shows that he did not mean that every art is developing to the point where it will give the same effect that music gives. He thought that music "most perfectly realizes the artistic ideal of complete union of form and matter." This union is the "condition" to which other arts aspire. Whether he is correct or not in holding that music does most perfectly realize this interfusion of substance and form, there should not be imputed to him the other idea. For, among other things, it is plainly false. Since he wrote, both painting and music itself have moved in the direction of the architectonic and away from the "musical" in its limited sense: so, to a considerable extent, has poetry as well as painting. And it is worth noting that Pater speaks of every art passing into the condition of some other, music having figures, "curves, geometrical forms, weaving."
In short what I should like to bring out is that such words as poetic, architectural, dramatic, sculptural, pictorial, literary — in the sense of designating the quality best effected by literature — designate tendencies that belong in some degree to every art, because they qualify any complete experience, while, however, a particular medium is best adapted to making that strain emphatic. When the effect appropriate to one medium becomes too marked in the use of another medium, there is esthetic defect. When, therefore, I use the names of arts as nouns in what follows, it will be understood that I have in mind a range of objects that express a certain quality emphatically but not exclusively.
The trait that characterizes architecture in an emphatic sense is that its media are the (relatively) raw materials of nature and of te fundamental modes of natural energy. Its effects are dependent upon features that belong in dominant measure to just these materials. All of the "shaping" arts bend natural materials and forms of energy to serve some human desire. There is nothing distinctive in architecture with respect to this general fact. But it is singularly marked off with respect to the scope and directness of its use of natural forces. Compare buildings with other artistic products and you are at once struck by the indefinitely wide range of materials it adopts to its ends — wood, stone, steel, cement, burnt clay, glass, rushes, cement, as compared with the relatively restricted number of materials available in painting, sculpture, poetry. But equally important is the fact that it takes these materials, so to speak, neat. It employs materials not only on a grand scale but at first hand — not that steel and bricks are furnished directly by nature but that they are closer to nature than are pigments and musical instruments. If there is any doubt about this fact, there is none about its use of the energies of nature. No other products exhibit stresses and strains, thrusts and counterthrusts, gravity, light, cohesion, on a scale at all comparable to the architectural, and it takes these forces more directly, less mediately and vicariously, than does any other art. It expresses the structural constitution of nature itself. Its connection with engineering is inevitable.
For this reason, buildings, among all art objects, come the nearest to expressing the stability and endurance of existence. They are to mountains what music is to the sea. Because of its inherent power to endure, architecture records and celebrates more than any other art the generic features of our common human life. There are those who, under the influence of theoretical preconceptions, regard the human values expressed in architecture esthetically irrelevant, a mere unavoidable concession to utility. That buildings are esthetically the worse because they express the pomp of power, the majesty of government, the sweet pieties of domestic relations, the busy traffic of cities, and the adoration of worshipers is not apparent. That these ends enter organically into the structure of buildings seems too evident to permit of discussion. That degradation to some special use often occurs and is artistically detrimental is equally clear. But the reason is the baseness of the end, or the fact that materials are not so handled express in a balanced way adaptation both to natural and human conditions.
The complete elimination of human use (as by Schopenhauer) illustrates the limitation of "use" to narrow ends and it depends upon ignoring the fact that fine art is always the product in experience of an interaction of human beings with their environment. Architecture is a notable instance of the reciprocity of the results of this interaction. Materials are transformed so as to become media of the purposes of human defense, habitation, and worship. But human life itself is also made different, and this in ways far beyond the intent or capacity of foresight of those who constructed the buildings. The reshaping of subsequent experience by architectural works is more direct and more extensive than in the case of any other art save perhaps literature. They not only influence the future, but they record and convey the past. Temples, colleges, palaces, homes, as well as ruins, tell what men have hoped and struggled for, what they have achieved and suffered. The desire of man to live on through his deeds, characteristic of the erection of pyramids, is found in less massive way in every architectural work. The quality is not confined to buildings. For something architectural is found in every work of art in which there is manifest on a broad scale the harmonious mutual adaptation of enduring forces of nature with human need and purpose. The sense of structure cannot be dissociated from the architectonic, and the architectural exists in any work whether of music, literature, painting, or architecture, in its specific meaning, wherein structural properties are strongly manifest. But in order to be esthetic, structure has to be more than physical and mathematical. It has to be used with the support, reinforcement, and extension, through enduring time, of human values. The appropriateness of clinging ivy to some buildings illustrates that intrinsic unity of architectural effect with nature which is seen on a larger scale in the necessity that buildings fit naturally into their surroundings to secure full esthetic effect. But this unconscious vital union must be paralleled by an equal absorption of human values into the complete experienced effect of the building. The ugliness, for example, of most factory buildings and the hideousness of the ordinary bank building, while it depends upon structural defects on the technically physical side, reflects as well a distortion of human values, one incorporated in the experience connected with the buildings. No mere technical skill can render such buildings beautiful as temples once were. First there must occur a humane transformation so that these structures will spontaneously express a harmony of desires and needs that does not now exist.
Sculpture, as we have already noted, is closely allied with architecture. I think it is open to doubt whether the sculptural dissociated from the architectural ever will reach great esthetic heights. It is difficult not to feel something incongruous in the single and isolated statue in the public square or park. Surely statues are most successful when they are massive, monumental, and have something approaching an architectural context, even though it be but an expansive bench. Sculpture may include a number, a great number of different figures, as in the Elgin marbles. But imagine these figures intended collectively to represent a single action and yet physically detached from one another, and you summon up an image that evokes a smile. Yet there are differences that mark off the sculptural effect from the architectural.
Sculpture selects for emphasis the recording and monumental aspect of architecture. It specializes, so to say, upon the memorial. Buildings enter into and help shape and direct life directly; statues and monuments, as they remind us of the heroism, devotion, and achievement of the past. The granite column, the pyramid, the obelisk, are sculptural; they are witnesses to the past, not, however, of subjection to the vicissitudes of time but of power to endure and rise above time — noble or pathetic manifestations of such immortality as belongs to mortals. The other distinction marks a more decisive difference. Both sculpture and architecture must possess and must express unity. But the unity of an architectural whole is that of the convergence of a vast multitude of elements. The unity of sculpture is more single and defined — it is forced to be so if only by space. Only Negro sculpture has attempted, through sacrifice of all directly associated values, to give within a narrow compass the character of design that is inherent in an effective building, accomplishing it by means of rhythm of lines, masses, and shapes. But even Negro sculpture has been compelled to observe the principle of singleness — the design is built out of the connected parts of the human body: head, arms and legs, trunk.
This singleness of material and of purpose (for even a specialized structure like a temple serves a complex of aims) makes it necessary for sculpture to limit itself to expression of materials that have a significant and readily perceived unity of their own. Living things only fulfill this condition — animals and man, or, when directly adherent to buildings, flowers, fruits, vines and other forms of vegetation. Architecture expresses the collective life of man — the hermit, the lone soul, does not build but seeks a cave. Sculpture expresses life in its individualized forms. The respective emotional effects of the two arts correspond with this principle. Architecture is said to be "frozen music," but emotionally this holds only of its dynamic structure, not of the effect of its substance. Upon the whole, its emotional effect is dependent upon or closely allied to human affairs in which the building participates. The Greek temple is too remote for us to experience much more than the effects of exquisite balance of natural forces. But it is impossible upon entering a medieval cathedral not to feel as part of it the uses to which it is historically put; even a westerner feels something of the same sort in entering a Buddhist temple. I would not use the word "borrowed" of the like effects that belong to experience of homes and public buildings, because the values are too completely incorporated to make that word applicable. But esthetic values in architecture are peculiarly dependent upon absorption of meanings drawn from collective human life.
The emotions aroused by sculpture are of necessity those belonging to what is defined and enduring — except when sculpture is used for illustrative purposes, a use congenial to the medium. For, while music and lyric poetry are intrinsically suited to express especial throbs and crises (like the occasions which evoke them), sculpture is anything but "occasional" in character, as little so as architecture. Sentiments of the vague, transient, and uncertain do not go well with the medium. Akin to the architectural in this respect, it differs from it as, once more, the singular differs from the collective. What is said about art as union of the universal and individual is peculiarly true of sculpture; so much so that the idea that this union provides a formula for all works of art probably had its source in Greek statuary. Michelangelo's "Moses" is highly individualized, but it is no more generic than it is episodic, for the "universal" is something quite different from the general. The attitude of the sculptured figure with its energetic but restrained forward impulsion expresses the leader who sees from afar the promised land he knows he will not enter. But it conveys, in a highly individualized value and feeling, the eternal disparity of aspiration and achievement.
Sculpture communicates the sense of movement with extraordinarily delicate energy — witness Greek dancing figures and the "Winged Victory." But it is movement arrested in a single and enduring poise — as celebrated in the verses of Keats — not the vicissitudes of motion for which music is the incomparable medium. A sense of time is an inalienable part of the nature of sculptural effect in its own or formal right. But it is sense of time suspended, not in succession and lapse. In short, the emotions to which the medium is best suited are finish, gravity, repose, balance, peace. Greek sculpture owes much of its effect to the fact that it expresses the idealized human form — so much so that its influence upon subsequent sculpture has not been altogether happy, since it has overweighted European statues and busts, till very recently, with a tendency to expression of idealizations, which, except at the hands of masters in well-adjusted conditions (like those of Greece), tend to the pretty, trivial, and the illustration of wish fulfillments. To portray the human form in the guise of gods and semi-divine heroes is not an enterprise to be lightly undertaken.
Even a child soon learns that it is through light that the world becomes visible. He learns it as soon as he connects the blotting out of scenes before him with the shutting of his eyes. Yet this truism, when its force is apprehended, says more about the peculiar effect of color as the medium of painting than would volumes of verbal expatiation. For painting expresses nature and the human scene as a spectacle, and spectacles exist because of the interaction of the live being, centered through the eyes, with light, pure, reflected, and refracted into colors. The pictorial (in this sense) exists in the works of many arts. The play of light and shade is a vital factor in architecture, of sculpture that has not been too much enslaved to Greek models — and the coloring of their statues by the Greeks was perhaps a compensation. Prose and drama often attain the picturesque, and poetry the genuinely pictorial, that is the communication of the visible scene of things. But in these arts, it is subdued and secondary. The effort to make it primary, as in "imagism," doubtless taught poets something new, but it was such a forcing of the medium that it could endure only as an emphasis, not as a dominant value. The obverse truth is the fact that, when paintings go beyond the scene and spectacle to tell a story, they become "literary."
Because painting deals directly with the world as a "view," a directly seen world, it is even less possible to discuss the products of this art than of any other in the absence of objects. Pictures can express every object and situation capable of presentation as a scene. They can express the meaning of events when the latter provide a scene in which a past is summed up and a future indicated, provided the scene is sufficiently simple and coherent. Otherwise — as, for example, in Abbey's pictures in the Public Library in Boston — it becomes a document. To say that it can present objects and situations is, however, so far short of its power as to be misleading, if we do not include the unrivaled ability of paint to convey through the eye the qualities by which objects are distinguished and the aspects by which their very nature and constitution is established in perception — the fluidity of water, the solidity of rocks, the combined frailty and resistance of trees, the texture of clouds, and so through all the varied aspects by which we enjoy nature as a spectacle and an expression. Because of the very reach of painting, an attempt to set forth the range of materials with which it deals would be to get involved in an endless cataloguing. It is enough that the aspects of the spectacle of nature are inexhaustible, and that every significant new movement in painting is the discovery and exploitation of some possibility of vision not previously developed — as Dutch painters grasped the intimate quality of interiors, forming a design in furnishings and perspectives; as Rousseau Douanier elicited the spatial rhythm of homely as well as exotic scenes; as Cezanne re-saw the volume of natural forces in their dynamic relations, the stability of wholes composed by just adaptations to one another of unstable parts.
The ear and eye complement one another. The eye gives the scene in which things go on and on which changes are projected — leaving it still a scene even amid tumult and turmoil. The ear, taking for granted the background furnished by cooperative action of vision and touch, brings home to us changes as changes. For sounds are always effects; effects of the clash, the impact and resistance, of the forces of nature. They express these forces in terms of what they do to one another when they meet; the way they change one another, and change the things that are the theater of their endless conflicts. The lapping of water, the murmur of brooks, the rushing and whistling of wind, the creaking of doors, the rustling of leaves, the swishing and cracking of branches, the thud of fallen objects, the sobs of depression and the shouts of victory — what are these, together with all noises and sounds, but immediate manifestation of changes brought about by the struggle of forces? Every stir of nature is effected by means of vibrations, but an even uninterrupted vibration makes no sound; there must be interruption, impact, and resistance.
Music, having sound as its medium, thus necessarily expresses in a concentrated way the shocks and instabilities, the conflicts and resolutions, that are the dramatic changes enacted upon the more enduring background of nature and human life. The tension and the struggle has its gatherings of energy, its discharges, its attacks and defenses, its mighty warrings and its peaceful meetings, its resistances and resolutions, and out of these things music weaves its web. It is thus at the opposite pole from the sculptural. As one expresses the enduring, the stable and universal, so the other expresses stir, agitation, movement, the particulars and contingencies of existences — which, nevertheless, are as ingrained in nature and as typical in experience as are its structural permanences. With only a background there would be monotony and death; with only change and movement there would be chaos, not even recognized as disturbed or disturbing. The structure of things yields and alters, but it does so in rhythms that are secular, while the things that catch the ear are the sudden, abrupt, and speedy in change.
The connections of cerebral tissues with the ear constitute a larger part of the brain than those of any other sense. Recur to the live animal and the savage, and the import of this fact is not far to seek. It is a truism that the visible scene is evident; the idea of being clear, plain, is all one with being in view — in plain sight as we say. Things in plain view are not of themselves disturbing; the plain is the ex-plained. It connotes assurance, confidence; it provides the conditions favorable to formation and execution of plans. The eye is the sense of distance — not just that light comes from afar, but that through vision we are connected with what is distant and thus forewarned of what is to come. Vision gives the spread-out scene — that in and on which, as I have said, change takes place. The animal is watchful, wary, in visual perception, but it is ready, prepared. Only in a panic is what is seen deeply perturbing.
The material to which the ear relates us through sound is opposite at every point. Sounds come from outside the body, but sound itself is near, intimate; it is an excitation of the organism; we feel the clash of vibrations throughout our whole body. Sound stimulates directly to immediate change because it reports a change. A footfall, the breaking of a twig, the rustling of underbrush may signify attack or even death from hostile animal or man. Its import is measured by the care animal and savage take to make no noise as they move. Sound is the conveyor of what impends, of what is happening as an indication of what is likely to happen. It is fraught much more than vision with the sense of issues; about the impending there is always an aura of indeterminateness and uncertainty — all conditions favorable to intense emotional stir. Vision arouses emotion in the form of interest — curiosity solicits further examination, but it attracts; or it institutes a balance between withdrawal and forward exploring action. It is sounds that make us jump.
Generically speaking, what is seen stirs emotion indirectly, through interpretation and allied idea. Sound agitates directly, as a commotion of the organism itself. Hearing and sight are often classed together as the two "intellectual" senses. In reality the intellectual range of hearing although enormous is acquired; in itself the ear is the emotional sense. Its intellectual scope and depth come from connection with speech; they are a secondary and so to speak artificial achievement, due to the institution of language and conventional means of communication. Vision receives its direct extension of meaning from connection with other senses, especially with touch. The difference works both ways. What is true of hearing on the intellectual side is true of seeing on the emotional. Architecture, sculpture, painting can stir emotion profoundly. The "right" farmhouse come upon in a certain mood may constrict the throat and make the eyes water as does a poetical passage. But the effect is because of a spirit and atmosphere due to association with human life. Apart from the emotional effect of formal relations, the plastic arts arouse emotion through what they express. Sounds have the power of direct emotional expression. A sound is itself threatening, whining, soothing, depressing, fierce, tender, soporific, in its own quality.
Because of this immediacy of emotional effect, music has been classed as both the lowest and the highest of the arts. To some its direct organic dependence and resonances have seemed evidence that it is close to the life of animals; they can cite the fact that music of a considerable degree of complexity has been successfully performed by persons of subnormal intelligence. The appeal of music — of certain grades — is much more widespread, much more independent of special cultivation, than that of any other art. And one has only to observe some musical enthusiasts of a certain kind at a concert to see that they are enjoying an emotional debauch, a release from ordinary inhibitions and an entrance into a realm where excitations are given unrestricted rein — Havelock Ellis noting that musical performances are resorted to by some for obtaining sexual orgasms. On the other side, there are types of music, those most prized by connoisseurs, that demand special training to be perceived and enjoyed, and its devotees form a cult, so that their art is the most esoteric of all arts.
Because of the connections of hearing with all parts of the organism, sound has more reverberations and resonances than any other sense. It is quite likely that the organic causes that render persons unmusical are due to breaks in these connections rather than to inherent defects in the auditory apparatus itself. What has been said in general about the power of an art to take a natural, raw material and convert it, through selection and organization, into an intensified and concentrated medium of building up an experience, applies with particular force to music. Through the use of instruments, sound is freed from the definiteness it has acquired through association with speech. It thus reverts to its primitive passional quality. It achieves generality, detachment from particular objects and events. At the same time, the organization of sound effected through the multitude of means at the command of the artists — a wider range technically, perhaps, than of any other art save architecture — deprives sound of its usual immediate tendency to stimulate a particular overt action. Responses become internal and implicit, thus enriching the content of perception instead of being dispersed in overt discharge. "It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings," as Schopenhauer says.
It is the peculiarity of music, and indeed its glory, that it can take the quality of sense that is the most immediately and intensely practical of all the bodily organs (since it incites most strongly to impulsive action) and by use of formal relationships transform the material into the art that is most remote from practical preoccupations. It retains the primitive power of sound to denote the clash of attacking and resisting forces and all accompanying phases of emotional movement. But by the use of harmony and melody of tone, it introduces incredibly varied complexities of question, uncertainty, and suspense wherein every tone is ordered in reference to others so that each is a summation of what precedes and a forecast of what is to come.
In contrast with the arts so far mentioned, literature exhibits one unique trait. Sounds, which are directly or as symbolized in print, their medium, are not sounds as such, as in music, but sounds that have been subjected to transforming art before literature deals with them. For words exist before the art of letters and words have been formed out of raw sounds by the art of communication. It would be useless to try to sum up the ends that speech serves before literature as such exists — command, guidance, exhortation, instruction, warning. Only exclamation and interjections retain their native aspect as sounds. The art of literature thus works with loaded dice; its material is charged with meanings they have absorbed through immemorial time. Its material thus has an intellectual force superior to that of any other art, while it equals the capacity of architecture to present the values of collective life.
There is not the gap between raw material and material as medium in letters that there is in other arts. Moliere's character did not know he had been talking prose all his life. So men in general are not aware that they have been exercising an art as long as they have engaged in spoken intercourse with others. One reason for the difficulty in drawing a line between prose and poetry is doubtless the fact that the matter of both has already undergone the transforming influence of art. Use of "literary" as a term of disparagement signifies that the more formal art has departed too far from the idiom of the prior art from which it draws its sustenance. All the "fine" arts in order not to become merely refined have to be renewed from time to time by closer contact with materials outside the esthetic tradition. But literature in particular is the one most in need of constant refreshment from this source, since it has at command material already eloquent, pregnant, picturesque, and general in its appeal, and yet most subject to convention and stereotype.
Continuity of meaning and value is the essence of language. For it sustains a continuing culture. For this reason words carry an almost infinite charge of overtones and resonances. "Transferred values" of emotions experienced from a childhood that cannot be consciously recovered belong to them. Speech is indeed the mother tongue. It is informed with the temperament and the ways of viewing and interpreting life that are characteristic of the culture of a continuing social group. Since science aims to speak a tongue from which these traits are eliminated, only scientific literature is completely translatable. All of us share to some extent in the privilege of the poets who
". . . speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held."
For this continuity is not confined to letters in its written and printed form. The grandam telling stories of "once upon a time" to children at her knee passes on and colors the past; she prepares material for literature and may be herself an artist. The capacity of sounds to preserve and report the values of all the varied experiences of the past, and to follow with accuracy every changing shade of feeling and idea, confers upon their combinations and permutations the power to create a new experience, oftentimes an experience more poignantly felt than that which comes from things themselves. Contacts with the latter would remain on a merely physical plane of shock were it not that things have absorbed into themselves meanings developed in the art of communication. Intense and vivid realization of the meanings of the events and situations of the universe can be achieved only through a medium already instinct with meaning. The architectural, pictorial, and sculptural are always unconsciously surrounded and enriched by values that proceed from speech. It is impossible because of the nature of our organic constitution to exclude this effect.
While there is no difference that may be exactly defined between prose and poetry, there is a gulf between the prosaic and poetic as extreme limiting terms of tendencies in experience. One of them realizes the power of words to express what is in heaven and earth and under the seas by means of extension; the other by intension. The prosaic is an affair of description and narration, of details accumulated and relations elaborated. It spreads as it goes like a legal document or catalogue. The poetic reverses the process. It condenses and abbreviates, thus giving words an energy of expansion that is almost explosive. A poem presents material so that it becomes a universe in itself, one, which, even when it is a miniature whole, is not embryonic any more than it is labored through argumentation. There is something self-enclosed and self-limiting in a poem, and this self-sufficiency is the reason, as well as the harmony and rhythm of sounds, why poetry is, next to music, the most hypnotic of the arts.
Every word in poetry is imaginative, as indeed it was in prose until words were rubbed down by attrition in use to be mere counters. For a word, when it is not purely emotional, refers to something absent for which it stands. When things are present, it is enough to ignore them, or to use them and point to them. Probably even purely emotional words are not exceptions; the emotion they give vent to may be that toward absent objects so massed that they have lost their individuality. The imaginative force of literature is an intensification of the idealizing office performed by words in ordinary speech. The most realistic presentation of a scene by words puts before us, after all, things that, for direct contact, are but possibilities. Every idea is by its nature indicative of a possibility not of present actuality. The meaning it conveys may be actual at some time and place. But as entertained in idea, the meaning is for that experience a possibility; it is ideal in the strict sense of the word: strict sense, because "ideal" is also used to denote the fanciful and Utopian, the possibility that is impossible.
If the ideal is really present to us, its presence must be effected through the medium of sense. In poetry the medium and the meaning seem to fuse as by a preestablished harmony, which is the "music" and euphony of words. Music in the strict sense there cannot be, since pitch is wanting. But the musical there is, since words themselves are harsh and solemn, swift and languorous, solemn and romantic, brooding and flighty, in accord with meaning. The chapter on sound of words in Lascelles Abercrombie's The Theory of Poetry renders detail superfluous, though I would call especial attention to his demonstration that cacophony is as genuine a factor as is euphony. For I think it fair to interpret its force as evidence that fluidity must be balanced with structural factors that in themselves are harsh, or else it will in the end be sugary.
There are critics who hold that music outrivals poetry in its power to convey a sense of life and phases of life as we should desire them to be. I cannot, however, but think that by the very nature of its medium music is brutally organic: not, of course, in the sense in which "brutal" signifies "beastly," but as we speak of brute facts, of that which is undeniable and unescapable, because so inevitably there. Nor is this view disparaging to music. Its value is precisely that it can take material which is organically assertive and apparently intractable, and make melody and harmony out of it. As for pictures, when they are dominated by ideal qualities, they become weak from excess of poetic quality; they cross the borderline and, when critically examined, they manifest a lack of sense of the medium — paint. But in the epic, lyric, the dramatic — comedy as well as tragedy — ideality in contrast with actuality plays an intrinsic and essential part. What might be or might have been stands always in contrast with what is and has been in a way only words are capable of conveying. If animals are strict realists, it is because they lack the signs that language confers on humans.
Words as media are not exhausted in their power to convey possibility. Nouns, verbs, adjectives express generalized conditions — that is to say character. Even a proper name can but denote character in its limitation to an individual exemplification. Words attempt to convey the nature of things and events. Indeed it is through language that these have a nature over and above a brute flux of existence. That they can convey character, nature, not in abstract conceptual form, but as exhibited and operating in individuals is made evident in the novel and drama, whose business it is to exploit this particular function of language. For characters are presented in situations that evoke their natures, giving particularity of existence to the generality of potentiality. At the same time situations are defined and made concrete. For all we know of any situation is what it does to and with us: that is its nature. Our conception of types of character and the manifold variations of these types is due mainly to literature. We observe, note, and judge the people about us in terms that are derived from literature, including, of course, biography and history with novel and drama. Ethical treatises in the past have been impotent in comparison in portraying characters so that they remain in the consciousness of mankind. The correlativity of character and situation is illustrated in the fact that whenever situations are left inchoate and wavering, characters are found to be vague and indefinite — something to be guessed at, not embodied, in short are uncharactered.
In what has been said, I have touched upon themes to each of which volumes have been devoted. For I have been concerned with the various arts in but one respect. I have wished to indicate that, as we build bridges of stone, steel, or cement, so every medium has its own power, active and passive, outgoing and receptive, and that the basis for distinguishing the different traits of the arts is their exploitation of the energy that is characteristic of the material used as a medium. Most of what is written about the different arts as different seems to me to be said from the inside — by which I mean it takes the medium as an existing fact without asking why and how it is what it is.
Literature thus presents evidence, more convincing perhaps than that offered by the other arts, that art is fine when it draws upon the material of other experiences and expresses their material in a medium which intensifies and clarifies its energy through the order that supervenes. The arts accomplish this result not by self-conscious intention but in the very operation of creating, by means of new objects, new modes of experience. Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings to which we had been dumb, or for which we had but the ear that permits what is said to pass through in transit to overt action. For communication is not announcing things, even if they are said with the emphasis of great sonority. Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular; and part of the miracle it achieves is that, in being communicated, the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.
Men associate in many ways. But the only form of association that is truly human, and not a gregarious gathering for warmth and protection, or a mere device for efficiency in outer action, is the participation in meanings and goods that is effected by communication. The expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled form. Art breaks through barriers that divide human beings, which are impermeable in ordinary association. This force of art, common to all the arts, is most fully manifested in literature. Its medium is already formed by communication, something that can hardly be asserted of any other art. There may be arguments ingeniously elaborated and plausibly couched about the moral and the humane function of other arts. There can be none about the art of letters.
*From a personal letter of Dr. Barnes to the author.
*Santayana, in his Reason in Art, was the first, I think, to make clear the importance of this distinction.