ay distinguish two great
classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are
representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and
those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are
self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of this
distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim a common ground
of existence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive
and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be,
of colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical figures, or
imitative lines; but still a pattern. That is the plane on which these
sisters meet; it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well they
should at times forget their childish origin, addressing their
intelligence to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that
necessary function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still
imperative that the pattern shall be made.

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of
sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication
may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with
substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the
true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning,
involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive
phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment
of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every properly
constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so
that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to
welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an
element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the
antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first
suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely
in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence
there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often
disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared,
and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking
and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to
disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing,
as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious
neatness.

The conjurer jugg