not themselves own these fields or raise any crops upon them!) How much
map-making ingenuity has been devoted to this task of grouping and
classifying the arts: distinguishing between art and fine art, between
artist, artificer and artisan; seeking to arrange a hierarchy of the arts
on the basis of their relative freedom from fixed ends, their relative
complexity or comprehensiveness of effect, their relative obligation to
imitate or represent something that exists in nature! No one cares
particularly to-day about such matters of precedence--as if the arts were
walking in a carefully ordered ecclesiastical procession. On the other
hand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of the
distinction made by Lessing in his _Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting and
Poetry_; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression,
according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say,
the "time-arts"--like poetry and music--deal primarily with actions that
succeed one another in time. The space-arts--painting, sculpture,
architecture--deal primarily with bodies that coexist in space. Hence
there are some subjects that belong naturally in the "painting" group, and
others that belong as naturally in the "poetry" group. The artist should
not "confuse the genres," or, to quote Whistler again, he should not push
a medium further than it will go. Recent psychology has more or less upset
Lessing's technical theory of vision,
[Footnote: F. E. Bryant, _The Limits of Descriptive Writing_, etc. Ann
Arbor, 1906.]
but it has confirmed the value of his main contention as to the fields
of the various arts.


_1. The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice_

An illustration will make this matter clear. Let us take the Greek myth of