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Theory of Literature
well as studies in the cultural and social background, however
illuminating they may be from their own point of view. Unfortunately
hitherto we have had scarcely any tools for such a com-
parison between the arts. Here a very difficult question arises:
What are the common and the comparable elements of the arts?
We see no light in a theory like Croce's, which concentrates all
aesthetic problems on the act of intuition, mysteriously identi-
fied with expression. Croce asserts the non-existence of modes of
expression and condemns "any attempt at an aesthetic classifica-
tion of the arts as absurd" and thus a fortiori rejects all distinc-
tion between genres or types. 13 Nor is much gained for our
problem by John Dewey's insistence, in his Art as Experience
(1934), that there is a common substance among the arts because
there are "general conditions without which an experience
is not possible." 14 No doubt, there is a common denominator in
the act of all artistic creation or, for that matter, in all human
creation, activity, and experience. But these are solutions which
do not help us in comparing the arts. More concretely, Theodore
Meyer Greene defines the comparable elements of the arts as
complexity, integration, and rhythm, and he argues eloquently,
as John Dewey had done before him, for the applicability of the
term "rhythm" to the plastic arts. 15 It seems, however, impossible
to overcome the profound distinction between the rhythm
of a piece of music and the rhythm of a colonnade, where neither
the order nor the tempo is imposed by the structure of the work
itself. Complexity and integration are merely other terms for
"variety" and "unity" and thus of only very limited use. Few
concrete attempts to arrive at such common denominators among
the arts on a structural basis have gone any further. G. D.
BirkhofF, a Harvard mathematician, in a book on Aesthetic
Measure, 16 has with apparent success tried to find a common
mathematical basis for simple art forms and music and he has
included a study of the "musicality" of verse which is also defined
in mathematical equations and coefficients. But the problem
of euphony in verse cannot be solved in isolation from meaning,
and BirkhofPs high grades for poems by Edgar Allan Poe
seem to confirm such an assumption. His ingenious attempt, if
accepted, would tend rather to widen the gulf between the essen-
tially "literary" qualities of poetry and the other arts which