hearers will put down the most diverse literary interpretations of the same music which they have heard at the same time. The message of music is therefore a message contained in itself. As an art it needs neither poetry, nor morality, nor any other order of experience to support or interpret it. The art of music exists for its own art's sake and must be judged and enjoyed only by the kind of experience appropriate to that art. This same general rule applies to writing as to music and to every other art, but writing differs from music in that the former is only slightly sensuous, the latter is prevailingly sensuous in its appeal. The use of language, whether spoken or written, implies the sense of hearing, but the significance of language does not lie directly in hearing. Attempts have been made to write poetry as music is written, that is, poetry which conveys the design of the poet merely through sound. Such poems, to the extent to which they are successful, are of course no more translatable into words appealing to the understanding than music is thus translatable. Tone poems in language, if there were any such thing, would really be music and not poetry. But genuine tone poems do not exist except as experiments which show the impossibility of a poem's being two contrary things at one time, at once music and speech. It is of the essence of speech to appeal to the understanding; there must be in it a message addressed to the understanding beyond the sense impression of hearing or it is not speech. Without a message, there can be no language. It is therefore a necessary part of the art of writing that it should raise in the minds of those to whom it is addressed questions which have to do with the thinking side of human nature. Such questions can be avoided only if one is content to be meaningless. To have meaning at all, writing must have intellectual meaning, and to attempt to ignore this side of writing would be to exclude from the art one of its essential elements. The opposite contention that all writing should be didactic and teach directly a moral lesson is too crudely and openly untrue to call for discussion. The choice of form is rather a matter of aim than of mood, for different moods might reveal themselves through\ the same form. Choice of form cannot be left to chance, but it is a necessity calling for a plan and defined intention. The artist does not say, "Here am I, a vessel with sails set ready for any voyage. Come, ye winds of literary inspiration, blow upon me, and I will go wherever ye send me." Rather the artist is both the vessel and the pilot. He knows when he undertakes the adventure of writing whether he expects to land in the haven of an epic poem or of a sonnet. He knows that the style of slippered ease may do for a familiar essay, but he would not expect to start out in this style and to find in the end that he had produced a tragedy. The forms or types of literature have therefore real meaning for the artist in his acceptance of them as among the conditions and limitations under which he labors. Though they have no mandatory significance, though no supreme law-giver has ordained that a sonnet shall have fourteen lines or a play have its unalterable elements of structure, whatever they may be, the types of literature have nevertheless an empirical value that the artist accepts as real. The contention, therefore, of the critics of a certain school that every artistic achievement is a new and independent creation, that types and forms are terms for absolute generalization which have no meaning for the creative artist, whose concern is with an entirely original and individual artistic experience, is true only in a limited sense and in a sense that has no great significance for the writer as a productive artist. It is indeed of more interest as a theoretical and philosophical distinction than as a principle governing the active exercise of the art of writing. To be sure, the artist does not write to illustrate a type of literature, but he can scarcely write without doing so. Only by inventing entirely new types or forms can he escape the associations which his own mind and the minds of his readers make with old and familiar forms. The invention of new types, however, is as rare as the invention of new words. Every artistic problem is an individual problem, but the solving of it does not imply an utter disregard of all artistic traditions. Variations upon the accepted forms may be made, as a play may have five acts, or three acts, or one act, yet still remain a play. The problem of the artist is not continually to invent new forms, unheard of and unimagined before, but quite as justifiably to work within、 the limits of the familiar, to accept a certain amount of constraint on the side of tradition, and, thus bounded, to realize nevertheless an individual aim in style through the management of technical detail. XXVI DICTION AGONIZING Over words is part of the normal experience of persons who aspire to become writers. Youth is beset by all manner of growing pains, and the experimentations and searchings of the young writer in the use of words is the accompaniment of his endeavor to find his proper place in his intellectual world. Words are the symbols of the ideas out of which ultimately he will create for himself a harmonious universe. But the stage of creation is a time of storm and stress. Very often the struggle is complicated by the fact that the young writer proposes for himself an achievement which is possible neither for him nor for any other man. In the fluctuations and uncertainties of his time of growth, what the young writer desires above all is stability and certainty. He yearns to fix this fleeting world, to find the symbols which shall express it for once and for all. Since his world is mainly a world of sensuous experience, most ardently he seeks to find, words that will transfer to another the vividness of reality in sensuous experiences of his own. Hence the fondness of young writers for Spring poetry and for descriptions of nature. The young writer sees himself in a situation, at night, lying on the warm grass on a hillside. Below are the lights of a city, caught through the fringing boughs and tall stems of a grove of eucalyptus trees. The sharp odor of the eucalyptus fills the air, and the wind sets the long branches swinging. How keenly he sees and hears -- and feels all this, and how eager he is to get it all down in the precise words that will fix the moment forever and that will enable others to see and hear and feel all that he does. Yet how vain is all his endeavor! He who had never seen a eucalyptus tree could not be made to see one by any description, except as he constructed from hints a picture of his own a picture that would fill with dismay the young writer who thought he had expressed in words the essence of a eucalyptus tree. Words cannot create realities, and at the best they can barely suggest. them. They can suggest moods more successfully than they can reproduce things. Moods are much the same for all people and are not very numerous, but the combinations of forms in the natural world are infinite in number. The first sad lesson the young writer must learn is that the world of words and the world of things are two separate worlds, and that there is no direct line of communication between them. Since the world of words is the only one upon which he can exert any control, it is upon this world that he is thrown back more and more, there to labor and sweat until out of confusion he shall have assembled a sufficient number of words of his own to shadow forth to his satisfaction and, as he hopes, to the satisfaction of some few others, the thoughts that are in him. Inadequate though they are, words are the necessary rough materials for all expression in language, as musical tones are the necessary materials in compositions for piano or violin. But words, even in the rough, are far from being all alike in their qualities and values. In one aspect, words are merely vehicles for the conveying of information. They name objects, actions, attributes, |