OE MEASURE OF ALL ART? 337 



poem, for instance, its subject, its given incidents or situation; that 

 the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the 

 actual topography of a landscape, should be nothing without the form, 

 the spirit of the handling ; that this form, this mode of handling, should 

 become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter ; 

 this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different 

 degrees. 



Having illustrated the meaning of this paragraph by refer- 

 ences to painting, poetry, furniture, dress, and the details of 

 daily intercourse, Mr. Pater proceeds as follows : l 



Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere 

 intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its 

 responsibilities to its subject or material ; the ideal examples of poetry and 

 painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composi- 

 tion are so welded together that the material or subject no longer strikes 

 the intellect only ; nor the form, the eye or ear only ; but form and 

 matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the 

 imaginative reason, that complex faculty for which every thought and 

 feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue or symbol. 



It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic 

 ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter, this strange 

 chemistry, uniting, in the integrity of pure light, contrasted elements. 

 In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the 

 means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression ; they 

 inhere in and completely saturate each other ; and to it, therefore, to 

 the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed 

 constantly to tend and aspire. Music, then, not poetry, as is so often 

 supposed, is the true type or measure of consummate art. Therefore, 

 although each art has its incommunicable element, its untranslatable 

 order of impressions, its unique mode of reaching the imaginative 

 reason, yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after 

 the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone com- 

 pletely realises; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, 

 dealing with the concrete products of art, new or old, is to estimate the 

 degree in which each of those products approaches in this sense to 

 musical law. 



If this means that art, as art, aspires toward a complete 

 absorption of the matter into the form toward such a 

 blending of the animative thought or emotion with the 



1 Fortnightly Review, p. 530. 



