When we read a poem, we do not want to
be made to think how much better the same thing could be done in a
different medium. There is nothing so salutary in keeping an art to
its proper task as a flourishing condition of the other arts. Here the
great example is France, where the limitations of the different arts
have been best recognized all the while the highest level of perfection
has been reached in many arts contemporaneously.
Third, the perfect use of the medium in the effort to fulfill the
artistic purpose of sympathetic representation--the power to delight
the senses and create sympathy for the object expressed, on the one
hand, and the range of the vision of the object, on the other; the
depth and the breadth of the aesthetic experience. With reference to
the former we ask: how vividly does the work of art force us to see;
how completely does it make us enter into the world it has created;
and, in doing this, how poignantly has it charmed us, how close has
it united us to itself? The measure of this is partly subjective and
irreducible to rules; yet experience in the arts establishes a norm
or schema of appreciation through the process of comparison, largely
unconscious, by which what we call good taste is acquired. There are
certain works of art that seem to have fulfilled this requirement in
the highest possible degree, thus attaining to perfection within their
compass. Such, for example, are some of Sappho's or Goethe's lyrics,
or the Fifth Canto of the _Inferno_.
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