completeness in itself is lost and its value for
our esthetic enjoyment has faded away.

Now we understand why it is necessary that each art should have its
particular method for fundamentally changing reality. Now we recognize
that it is by no means a weakness of sculpture that the marble statue
has not the colors of life but a whiteness unlike any human being. Nor
does it appear a deficiency in the painting or the drawing that it can
offer two dimensions only and has no means to show us the depth of real
nature. Now we grasp why the poet expresses his feelings and thoughts in
the entirely unnatural language of rhythms and rhymes. Now we see why
every work of art has its frame or its base or its stage. Everything
serves that central purpose, the separation of the offered experience
from the background of our real life. When we have a painted garden
before us, we do not want to pick the flowers from the beds and break
the fruit from the branches. The flatness of the picture tells us that
this is no reality, in spite of the fact that the size of the painting
may not be different from that of the windowpane through which we see a
real garden. We have no thought of bringing a chair or a warm coat for
the woman in marble. The work which the sculptor created stands before
us in a space into which we cannot enter, and because it is entirely
removed from the reality toward which our actions are directed we become
esthetic spectators only. The smile of the marble girl wins us as if it
came from a living one, but we do not respond to her welcome. Just as
she appears in her marble form she is complete in herself without any
relation to us or to anyone else. The very difference from reality has
given her that self-sustained perfect life.

If we read in a police report about burglaries, we may lock our house
more securely; if we read about a flood, we may send our mite; if we
read about an elopement, we may try to find out what happened later. But
if we read about all these in a short story, we have esthetic enjoyment
only if the author somehow makes it perfectly clear to us by the form of
the description that this burglary and flood and elopement do not belong
to our real surroundings and exist only in the world of imagination. The
extreme case comes to us in the theater performance. We see there real
human beings a few feet from us; we see in the melodrama how the villain
approaches his victim from behind with a dagger; we feel