eth not,
And a path is there where no man thought:
So hath it fallen here."[1]

[Footnote 1: Euripides: _Medea_ (Gilbert Murray translation).]

ART AS VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE. The drama, art, and painting
are, in general, ways by which we can vicariously experience
the emotions of others. All of the expressive arts are made
possible by the fundamental psychological fact that human
beings give certain instinctive and habitual signs of emotion
and instinctively respond to them. In consequence, through
art experience may be immeasurably broadened, deepened,
and mellowed. Through the medium of art, modes of life long
past away can leave their imperishable and living mementos.
Dante opens to the citizen of the twentieth century the mind
and imagination of the Middle Ages. A Grecian urn can
arouse, at least to a Keats, the whole stilled magic of the
Greek spirit. And not only can we live through the life and
emotion of times long dead, but the fiction and drama and
poetry of our own day permit us to enter into realms of
experience which in extent and variety would not be possible to
one man. Indeed, the possibility of vicariously enlarging
experience is one of the chief appeals of art. We cannot all be
rovers, but we can have in reading Masefield a pungent sense
of romantic open spaces, the salt winds, the perilous motion
or the broad calm of the sea. We feel something of the same
urgency as that of the author when we read:

"I must go down to the seas again, the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking."[2]

[Footnote 2: Masefield: _Sea-Fever_.]

Art opens up wide avenues of possibility; it releases us from
the limitations to which a particular mode of life, an accidental
niche in a business or profession has committed us. It
enables us vividly to experience and sympathetically to
appreciate the lives which are led by other men, and in which
something in our own personalities could have found fulfillment.

While the objects of art thus broaden our experience by
their precise and contagious communication of emotion, they
may also express ideas. Thus a play may have a message, a
poem a vision, a painting an allegory. Art is both at an
advantage and at a disadvantage in the communication of
ideas. Ideas, if they are to be accurately