The name is absent

46 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

artist of genius offends in his work and calls forth the repro-
bation of the critics: a reprobation which does not, however,
succeed in suffocating the admiration for, and tire popularity
of, his work, so that finally, when it is not possible to blame
the artist and it is not wished to blame the critic of kinds, the
matter ends with a compromise, and the kind is enlarged or
accepts beside it a new kind, like a legitimated bastard, and
the compromise lasts, by force of inertia, until a new work
of genius comes to upset again the fixed rule. An irony of the
doctrine is also the impossibility, in which the theoreticians
find themselves, of logically fixing the boundaries between
the kinds and the arts : all the definitions that they have pro-
duced, when examined rather more closely, either evaporate
in. the general definition of art, or shew themselves to be an
arbitrary raising to the rank of kinds and rules particular
works of art irreducible to rigorous logical terms. Absurdities
resulting from the effort to determine rigorously what is in-
determinable, owing to the contradictory nature of the at-
tempt, are to be found even among the great ones, even in
Lessing, who arrives at this extravagant conclusion, that
painting represents “bodies”: bodies, not actions and souls,
not the action and the soul of the painter! They are also to be
found among the questions that logically arise from that il-
Iogic : thus, a definite field having been assigned to every
kind and to every art, what kind and what art is superior? Is
painting superior to sculpture, drama to lyric? And again,
the forces of art having been thus divided, would it not be
advisable to reunite them in a type of work of art which shall
drive away other forces, as a coalition of armies drives away
a single army: will not the work, for instance, in which po-
etry, music, scenic art, decoration, are united, develop a
greater aesthetic force than a Lied of Goethe or a drawing of
Leonardo? These are questions, distinctions, judgments, and

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