of art must be unique, for it is the value of a unique activity--the
free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent,
mediating communication. And this value we should be able to discover
by seeking the difference which supervenes upon experience through
expression of this kind.

Apart from expression, experience may be vivid and satisfactory as we
feel and think and dream and act; yet it is always in flux, coming and
going, shifting and unaware. But through expression it is arrested by
being attached to a permanent form, and there can be retained and
surveyed. Experience, which is otherwise fluent and chaotic, or when
orderly too busy with its ends to know itself, receives through
expression the fixed, clear outlines of a thing, and can be contemplated
like a thing. Every one has verified the clarifying effect of expression
upon ideas, how they thus acquire definiteness and coherence, so that
even the mind that thinks them can hold them in review. But this effect
upon feeling is no less sure. The unexpressed values of experience are
vague strivings embedded in chaotic sensations and images; these
expression sorts and organizes by attaching them to definite ordered
symbols. Even what is most intimate and fugitive becomes a stable
object. When put into patterned words, the subtlest and deepest passions
of a poet, which before were felt in a dim and tangled fashion, are
brought out into the light of consciousness. In music, the most elusive
moods, by being embodied in ordered sounds, remain no longer
subterranean, but are objectified and lifted into clearness. In the
novel or drama, the writer is able not only to enact his visions of
life in the imagination, but, by bodying them forth in external words
and acts, to possess them for reflection. In painting, all that is
seen and wondered at in nature is seen with more delicacy and
discrimination and felt with greater freedom; or the vague fancies