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260 ART FORM AND MATERIAL
is thinkable only if the terms used are used loosely, that is if the terms 'content' and 'form' do not exactly cover what we are accustomed to call material, action, plot, story, subject, etc. on the one hand, and 'art form' on the other. There can be no doubt that it is possible to take the subject, the story, the plot of a novel, turn it into a play or a film and yet produce perfect works of art in each case — the form being in each case adequate to the content. How is this possible? It is possible because, while the subject, or story, of both works is identical, their content is nevertheless different. It is this different content that is adequately expressed in the changed form resulting from the adaptation.
The unsophisticated and naive believe that life itself provides the writer with ready-made dramas and novels. According to this view every event has an a priori, immanent affinity to a certain form of art; that life itself determines what happenings are suitable for a play, for a novel or for a film; the writer is given, as it were, a pre-determined material as a definite subject susceptible of being used in only one way, in only one art form. If a certain subject takes his fancy, he cannot use the art form he pleases — that has been already decided by the artistic predetermination inherent in reality itself.
The world outside us, however, has an objective reality which is independent of our consciousness and hence independent of our artistic ideas. Reality has colours, shapes and sounds but it can have no immanent affinity to painting, sculpture or music, for these are specifically human activities. Reality does not of itself curdle into any art form, not even into subjects suitable for definite art forms, and waiting like ripe apples for some artist to pick them. Art and its forms are not a priori inherent in reality but are methods of human approach to it, although of course this approach and its methods are also elements of reality as a whole.
These methods of approach are naturally neither arbitrary nor is their number unlimited. In the cultural sphere of civilized humanity several such methods of approach (or art forms) have evolved as historically given objective forms of culture, and although they are merely subjective forms by means of which human consciousness approaches reality, they