344 IS MUSIC THE TYPE OR MEASURE OF ALL ART ? 



zetti's frescoes and Dante's 'Paradise,' architectural; Tin- 

 toretto's Crucifixion and the Genius of the Vatican, poetical ; 

 Shelley's lyrics in Prometheus Unbound and Titian's Three 

 Ages, musical ; the fa9ade of the Certosa at Pavia, pictorial ; 

 and so forth, as suggestion and association lead us. 



But let it be remembered that this discrimination of an 

 Anders-streben in the arts, is after all but fanciful. It is at 

 best a way of expressing our sense of something subjective 

 in the styles of artists or of epochs, not of something in the 

 arts themselves. Let it be still more deeply remembered 

 that if we fix upon any one art as the type and measure for 

 the rest, we are either indulging a personal partiality, or else 

 uttering an arbitrary, and therefore inconclusive, aesthetical 

 hypothesis. The main fact to bear steadily in mind is that 

 beauty is the sensuous manifestation of the idea that is, of 

 the spiritual element in roan and in the world and that the 

 arts, each in its own way, conveys this beauty to our per- 

 cipient self. We have to abstain on the one hand from any 

 theory which emphasises the didactic function of art, and on 

 the other from any theory, however plausible, which diverts 

 attention from the one cardinal truth : namely, that fine and 

 liberal art, as distinguished from mechanical art or the arts 

 of the kitchen and millinery, exists for the embodiment of 

 thought and emotion in forms of various delightfulness, 

 appealing to what has been called the imaginative reason, 

 that complex faculty which is neither mere understanding 

 nor mere sense, by means of divers sensuous suggestions, and 

 several modes of concrete presentation. 



