The reflections in this paper were prompted by a chapter in Roger Fry's book, Transformations. Fry was interested in what he called the “mixture of distinct and separate arts.” He was, of course, primarily concerned with painting, but he used song and opera to illustrate his theory, which was, in his own words, as follows:—
Pictures in which representation subserves poetical or dramatic ends are not simple works of art, but are in fact cases of the mixture of the art of illustration and the art of plastic volumes … They are closely similar to song in which the psychological unity of the words is accompanied by a musical unity. What the exact possibilities and limiting conditions of mixtures of two or more arts may be has, I think, never been properly inquired into.