thetic ideas. Reason, too, by
bringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in single
acts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces into
life the influence of a representative medium, without which life could
never pass from a process into an art. Language acquires scope in the
same way, by its kindly infidelities; its metaphors and syntax lend
experience perspective. Language vitiates the experience it expresses,
but thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another.
The two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion in
discourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus a
proverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable than
the event it first described would ever have been if not translated into
an epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for by
that translation the event has become an idea.

[Sidenote: It is a perpetual mythology.]

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which in
a certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its "ideas" imbedded
in their own medium--they are musical ideas--and cannot impose them on
any foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary,
seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as much
as possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middle
course and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be
futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making
music thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaning
nourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or no
use in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digest
that reality to which it confines itself, making it over into ideal
substance and material for the mind. It looks at things with an
incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which
they never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by their
imaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what is
incidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play in
man's adventures.

Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literary
impulse itself. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds,
as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs.
His art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration; he must