experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a
flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast
sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects.
This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like the
momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a
brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary
and familiar objects--an impression which we experience sometimes in
instants of direst extremity, when our practical interest snaps like a
wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some
impending catastrophe with the marvelling unconcern of a mere
spectator."

* * * * *

It has often been noted that two, and two only, of our senses are the
channels of art and give us artistic material. These two senses are
sight and hearing. Touch and its special modifications, taste and smell,
do not go to the making of art. Decadent French novelists, such as
Huysmann, make their heroes revel in perfume-symphonies, but we feel
that the sentiment described is morbid and unreal, and we feel rightly.
Some people speak of a cook as an "artist," and a pudding as a "perfect
poem," but a healthy instinct rebels. Art, whether sculpture, painting,
drama, music, is of sight or hearing. The reason is simple. Sight and
hearing are the distant senses; sight is, as some one has well said,
"touch at a distance." Sight and hearing are of things already detached
and somewhat remote; they are the fitting channels for art which is cut
loose from immediate action and reaction. Taste and touch are too
intimate, too immediately vital. In Russian, as Tolstoi has pointed out
(and indeed in other languages the same is observable), the word for
beauty (_krasota_) means, to begin with, only that which pleases the