nguishable intent, but they are properly its
subordinates because they have not its purity. They, too, aim at
remodeling discordant nature into harmony with human nature. They, too,
are dominated by value-forms which shall satisfy as nearly as possible
all interests, shall liberate and fulfil all repressions, and shall
supply to our lives that unity, eternity, spirituality, and freedom
which are the exfoliations of our central desire--the desire to live.
But where philosophy has merely negated the concrete stuff of experience
and defined its reality in terms of desire alone, the arts acknowledge
the reality of immediate experience, accept it as it comes, eliminating,
adding, molding, until the values desiderated become existent in the
concrete immediacies of experience as such. Art does not substitute
values for existence by changing their roles and calling one appearance
and the other reality: art converts values into existences, it realizes
values, injecting them into nature as far as may be. It creates truth
and beauty and goodness. But it does not claim for its results greater
reality than nature's. It claims for its results greater immediate
harmony with human interests than nature. The propitious reality of the
philosopher is the unseen: the harmonious reality of the artist must be
sensible. Philosophy says that apparent actual evil is merely apparent:
art compels potential apparent good actually to appear. Philosophy
realizes fundamental values transcendentally beyond experience: art
realizes them within experience. Thus, men cherish no illusions
concerning the contents of a novel, a picture, a play, a musical
composition. They are taken for what they are, and are enjoyed for what
they are. The shopgirl, organizing her life on the basis of eight
dollars a week, wears flimsy for broadcloth and the tail feather of a
rooster for an ostrich plume. She is as capable of wearing and enjoying
broadcloth and ostrich plume as My Lady, whose income is eight dollars
a minute. But she has not them, and in all likelihood, without a social
revolution she never will have them. In the novels of Mr. Robert
Chambers, however, or of Miss Jean Libbey, which she religiously reads
in the street-car on her way to the shop; in the motion picture theater
which she visits for ten cents after her supper of corned beef, cabbage,
and cream puffs, she comes into possession of them forthwith,
vicariously, and of all My Lady's proper perquisites--