HIGH ARTS AND GENERAL CULTURE.

This article examines the relationship between the High Arts, specifically literature, and the general culture. Certainly, literature is the art most explicitly and openly involved in the exploration of human experience. Whatever some modern theories may argue it has at bottom its own meanings, not simply a series of different meanings drawn from it by whoever reads it. At its height it takes that most everyday tool, language, and transforms it into a way of leaving the everyday, inviting us to observe experience within another, not so contingent, perspective. It has many aspects but the one most pertinent here is its relationship with the moral texture of people's lives.