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PARTISAN REVIEW
Aside 'from what was going on inside music, music as an art
in itself began at this time to occupy a very important position in
relation to the other arts. Because of its "absolute" nature, its
remoteness from imitation, its almost complete absorption in the
very physical quality of its medium, as well as because of its
resources of suggestion, music had come to replace poetry as the
paragon art. It was the art which the other avant·garde arts envied
most, and whose effects they tried hardest to imitate. Thus it was
the principal agent of the new confusion of the arts. What attracted
the avant-garde to music as much as its power to suggest was, as I
have said, its nature as an art of immediate sensation. When Ver–
laine said, "De la musique avant toute chose," he was not only
asking poetry to be more suggestive-suggestiveness, after all,
was a poetic ideal foisted upon music-but also to affect the
reader or listener with more immediate and more powerful
sensations.
But only when the avant-garde's interest in music led it to
consider music as a
method
of art rather than as a kind of effect
did the avant-garde find what it was looking for. It was when it
was discovered that the advantage of music lay chiefly in the fact
that it was an "abstract" art, an art of "pure form."
It
was such
because it was incapable, objectively, of communicating anything
·else than a sensation, and because this sensation could not be con-
ceived in any other terms than those of the sense through which it
entered the consciousness. An imitative painting can be described
in terms of non-visual identities, a piece of music cannot, whether
it attempts to imitate or not. The effects of music are the effects,
essentially, of pure form; those of painting and poetry are too
often accidental to the formal natures of these arts. Only by accept–
ing the example of music and defining each of the other arts solely
in the terms of the sense or faculty which perceived its effects and
by excluding from each art whatever is intelligible in the terms of
any other sense or faculty would the non-musical arts attain the
"purity" and self-sufficiency which they desired; which they
desired, that is, in so far as they were avant-garde arts. The
emphasis, therefore, was to be on the physical, the sensorial.
"Literature's" corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are
neglected. The latest confusion of the arts was the result of a mis–
taken conception of music as the only immediately sensuous art.
