88 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 



upon a magic glass; not less permanent, but reduced to a 

 shadow of palpable reality. To follow these distinctions 

 farther would be alien from the present purpose. It is enough 

 to repeat that, within their several spheres, according to their 

 several strengths and weaknesses, both sculpture and painting 

 present the spirit to us only as the spirit shows itself immersed 

 in things of sense. The light of a lamp enclosed within an 

 alabaster vase is still lamplight, though shorn of lustre and 

 toned to coloured softness. Even thus the spirit, immersed 

 in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is 

 still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and 

 invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster 

 form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render 

 it transparent, is the artist's function. But he will have failed 

 of the highest if the light within burns dim, or if he gives the 

 world a lamp in which no spiritual flame is lighted. 



VII 



Music transports us to a different region. Like architec- 

 ture, it imitates nothing. It uses pure sound, and sound of 

 the most wholly artificial kind so artificial that the musical 

 sounds of one race are unmusical, and therefore unintelligible, 

 to another. Like architecture, music relies upon mathematical 

 proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no utility. It 

 is the purest art of pleasure the truest paradise and play- 

 ground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, even 

 less power than sculpture, to tell a story or to communicate 

 an idea. For we must remember that when music is married 

 to words, the words, and not the music, reach our thinking 

 faculty. And yet, in spite of all this, music presents man's 

 spirit to itself through form. The domain of the spirit over 

 which music reigns, is emotion not defined emotion, not 

 feeling even so generally defined as jealousy or anger but 

 those broad bases of man's being out of which emotions 

 spring, defining themselves through action into this or that 

 set type of feeling. Architecture, we have noticed, is so con- 

 nected with specific modes of human existence, that from its 



