What is it, in the last analysis, that all art which is not
purely personal and episodical strives to express? Is it not the
_world-order_?--the very thing that religion, philosophy, science,
strive according to their different natures and methods to express?
The perception of the world-order by the artist arouses an emotion to
which he can give vent only in terms of number; but number is itself
the most abstract expression of the world order. The form and content
of art are therefore not different, but the same. A deep sense of this
probably inspired Pater's famous saying that all art aspires toward
the condition of music; for music, from its very nature, is the
world-order uttered in terms of number, in a sense and to a degree not
attained by any other art.

This is not mere verbal juggling. We have suffered so long from an
art-phase which exalts the personal, as opposed to the cosmic, that
we have lost sight of the fact that the great arts of antiquity,
preceding the Renaissance, insisted on the cosmic, or impersonal
aspect, and on this alone, just as does Oriental art, even today.
The secret essence, the archetypal idea of the subject is the
preoccupation of the Oriental artist, as it was of the Egyptian,
and of the Greek. We of the West today seek as eagerly to fix the
accidental and ephemeral aspect--the shadow of a particular cloud upon
a particular landscape; the smile on the face of a specific person, in
a recognizable room, at a particular moment of time. Of symbolic art,
of universal emotion expressing itself in terms which are universal,
we have very little to show.

The reason for this is first, our love for, and understanding of,
the concrete and personal: it is the _world-aspect_ and not the
_world-order_ which interests us; and second, the inadequacies of