THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 89 



main examples we can reconstruct the life of men who used 

 it. Sculpture and painting, by limiting their presentation to 

 the imitation of external things, have all the help which 

 experience and association render. The mere artificiality of 

 music's vehicle separates it from life and makes its message 

 untranslatable. Nevertheless, this very disability under which 

 it labours is the secret of its extraordinary potency. 



To expect clear definition from music the definition which 

 belongs to poetry would be absurd. The sphere of music is 

 in sensuous perception ; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. 

 Music, dealing with pure sound, must always be vaguer in 

 significance than poetry, which deals with words. Never- 

 theless its effect upon the sentient subject may be more 

 intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot 

 fail to understand what words are intended to convey ; we 

 may very easily interpret in a hundred different ways the 

 message of sound. But this is not because words are wider 

 in their reach and more alive ; rather because they are more 

 limited, more stereotyped, more dead. They symbolise some- 

 thing precise and unmistakable ; but this precision is itself 

 attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value 

 of the counter is better understood when it is a word than 

 when it is a chord, because all that a word conveys has 

 already become a thought, while all that musical sounds 

 convey remains within the region of emotion which has not 

 been intellectualised. 1 Poetry touches emotion through the 

 thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at 

 all, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has 

 become thought, has already lost a portion of its force, and 

 has taken to itself a something alien to its nature. Therefore 

 the message of music can never rightly be translated into 

 words. It is the very largeness and vividness of the sphere 

 of simple feeling which makes its symbolical counterpart in 

 sound so seeming vague. But in spite of this incontestable 

 defect of seeming vagueness, an emotion expressed by music 

 is nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to take it in, 



1 ' Thought,' said Novalis somewhere, ' is only a pale, desiccated 

 emotion.' 



