the Prince
Charming, the motor-car, the Chinese pug, the flowers, and the costly
bonbons. For the time being her life is liberated, new avenues of
experience are actually opened to her, all sorts of unsatisfied desires
are satisfied, all sorts of potentialities realized. All that she might
have been and is not, she becomes through art, here and now, and
_continuously with_ the drab workaday life which is her lot, and she
becomes this without any compensatory derealization of that life,
without any transcendentalism, without any loss of grip on the
necessities of her experience: strengthened, on the contrary, and
emboldened, to meet them as they are.

I might multiply examples: for every object of fine art has the same
intention, and if adequate, accomplishes the same end--from the
sculptures of Phidias and the dramas of Euripides, to the sky-scrapers
of Sullivan and the dances of Pavlowa. But there is need only to
consider the multitude of abstract descriptions of the aesthetic
encounter. The artist's business is to create the other object in the
encounter, and this object, in Miss Puffer's words, which are completely
representative and typical, is such that "the organism is in a
condition of repose and of the highest possible tone, functional
efficiency, enhanced life. The personality is brought into a state of
unity and self-completeness." The object, when apprehended, awakens the
active functioning of the whole organism directly and harmoniously with
itself, cuts it off from the surrounding world, shuts that world out for
the time being, and forms a complete, harmonious, and self-sufficient
system, peculiar and unique in the fact that there is no passing from
this deed into further adaptation with the object. Struggle and aliency
are at end, and whatever activity now goes on feels self-conserving,
spontaneous, free. The need of readjustment has disappeared, and with it
the feeling of strain, obstruction, and resistance, which is its sign.
There is nothing but the object, and that is possessed completely,
satisfying, and as if forever. Art, in a word, supplies an environment
from which strife, foreignness, obstruction, and death are eliminated.
It actualizes unity, spirituality, and eternity in the environment; it
frees and enhances the life of the self. To the environment which art
successfully creates, the mind finds itself completely and harmoniously
adapted by the initial act of perception.

In the world of art,