THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 91 



VIII 



Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and 

 consider two subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any 

 system of aesthetics. These are dancing and acting. Dancing 

 uses the living human form, and presents feeling or action, 

 the passions and the deeds of men, in artificially educated 

 movements of the body. The element of beauty it possesses, 

 independently of the beauty of the dancer, is rhythm. Acting 

 or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter, no 

 longer under the conditions of fixed rhythm, but as an ideal 

 reproduction of reality. The actor is what he represents, and 

 the element of beauty in his art is perfection of realisation. 

 It is his duty as an artist to show us Orestes or Othello, 

 not perhaps exactly as Othello and Orestes were, but as the 

 essence of their tragedies, ideally incorporate in action, ought 

 to be. The actor can do this in dumb show. Some of the 

 greatest actors of the ancient world were mimes. But he 

 usually interprets a poet's thought, and attempts to present 

 an artistic conception in a secondary form of art, which has 

 for its advantage his own personality in play. 



IX 



The last of the fine arts is literature ; or, in the narrower 

 sphere of which it will be well to speak here only, is poetry. 

 Poetry employs words in fixed rhythms, which we call metres. 

 Only a small portion of its effect is derived from the beauty 

 of its sound. It appeals to the sense of hearing far less 

 immediately than music does. It makes no appeal to the 

 eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour. It 

 produces no palpable, tangible object. But language being 

 the storehouse of all human experience, language being the 

 medium whereby spirit communicates with spirit in affairs of 

 life, the vehicle which transmits to us the thoughts and feel- 

 ings of the past, and on which we rely for continuing our 

 present to the future, it follows that, of all the arts, poetry 

 soars highest, flies widest, and is most at home in the region 



