Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/32

16 reached. But it is clear that this recombination becomes more and more difficult as the ages of development pass; and I believe the principle of critical judgment above enunciated is valid, based as it is upon the inner sense of cultivated men. Better than attempts to recombine the already differentiated arts of sight are attempts to use them in conjunction, so that our shiftings of attention from one type of beauty to another may carry with them more permanent and fuller effects of beauty; and such attempts we see common to-day in the conjunction of architecture and of sculpture and of painting, in our private and public galleries, in which are collected together works of the arts of sight.

Now, if we turn to the consideration of the arts of hearing, we find a correspondence which leads to certain suggestions of no little importance to the critical analyst in our day. The arts of hearing have become differentiated on lines which enable us to group them broadly as rhetoric, poetry and literature, and music. Each has become important in itself, and has gradually separated itself from the others; and this just so far as it has shown that it can arouse in men, in a special and peculiar manner, the sense of beauty.

It is true, as with the arts of sight, that the special arts of hearing still hold well together. But in relatively very modern times, music, having discovered a written language of its own, has differentiated very distinctly from the other arts of hearing. Men have discovered that pure music can arouse in a special manner the sense of beauty, and can bring to us a form of æsthetic delight which no other art can as well give.

Poetry has long been written which is not to be sung, and it has gained much in freedom of development from that fact.

Music in our modern times is composed by the greatest masters for its own intrinsic worth, and not as of old as a mere accompaniment of the spoken word of the poet; the existence of the works of Bach, to mention no others, tells of the value of this differentiation.

And here I think we may apply with justice the principle of criticism above presented. The poet and the musician each do