Note 273 — Chapter VII · MUSIC AND PLASTIC

As soon as the word, which is a transmission-agent of the understanding, comes to be used as the expression-agent of an art, the waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing integrally. Not to mention the read word of higher Cultures—the medium of literature proper—even the spoken word, when used in any artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding, for the ordinary meaning of the word also takes a hand in the process and, as this art grows in power, the wordless arts themselves arrive at expression-methods in which the motives are joined to word-meanings. Thus arises the Allegory, or motive that signifies a word, as in Baroque sculpture after Bernini. So, too, painting very often develops into a sort of painting-writing, as in Byzantium after the second Nicene Council (787) which took from the artist his freedom of choice and arrangement. This also is what distinguishes the arias of Gluck, in which the melody grew up out of the meaning of the libretto, from those of Alessandro Scarlatti, in which the texts are in themselves of no significance and mostly serve to carry the voices. The high-Gothic counterpoint of the 13th Century is entirely free from any connexion with words: it is a pure architecture of human voices in which several texts, Latin and vernacular, sacred and secular, were sung together.