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FALSE ANALOGY 183
covered that the emotional effect produced by emphasis in the spoken word, can be indicated in the written word by the shape and weight of the lettering. Those who remember the titling of silent films may also remember that excitement, tension, weariness, despair or passion were made visible in the forms of lettering, in the expressive black-and-white of the titles. In the days of the silent film a special, much appreciated and well-remunerated art had developed in this field. The writers of titles were important members of a film outfit and the part played by their pen or brush was similar to that of a good announcer or narrator on the wireless at the present time. It was an accepted convention, for instance, that alerting alarm-signals rushed at us from the screen with tousled letters rapidly increasing in size. They seemed to throw themselves on us, attacking our eye as a shout assaults our ear. At other times a slowly darkening title signified a pause full of meaning or a melancholy musing. Some titles were like a dash after a sentence instead of a full stop. In the last years of the silent film no better-class film was satisfied with neutral, cold letterpress or script for its titles. The physiognomy of the pictures had to be continued in the physiognomy of the lettering, in order to preserve the visual continuity of atmosphere. This was already a kind of abstract film, because it depicted not objects but emotions. It did not photograph or draw recognizable, external things but expressed moods directly without the intervention of object images.
FALSE ANALOGY
For the sake of the completeness of epistemological analysis it is to be mentioned that the theoreticians who described this sort of abstract art as 'visual music' merely because it is not a presentation but a direct expression of emotion, were quite mistaken.
They were mistaken, because 'abstract' is a correlative concept. It has meaning and content only when contrasted with the concrete from which it is an abstraction. For instance: the apple is spherical. The abstraction of this natural shape is a circle. But of what natural shape is music the abstraction?