90 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 



than the same emotion limited by language. It is intenser, 

 it is more immediate, as compensation for being less 

 intelligible, less unmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, 

 an indistinct, where each consciousness defines and sets a 

 limitary form. 



Nothing intervenes between the musical work of art and 

 the fibres of the sentient being it immediately thrills. We do 

 not seek to say what music means. We feel the music. And 

 if a man should pretend that the music has not passed beyond 

 his ears, has communicated nothing but a musical delight, he 

 simply tells us that he has not felt music. The ancients on 

 this point were wiser than some moderns when, without 

 pretending to assign an intellectual significance to music, they 

 held for an axiom that one type of music bred one type of 

 character, another type another. A change in the music of 

 a state, wrote Plato, will be followed by changes in its con- 

 stitution. It is of the utmost importance, said Aristotle, to 

 provide in education for the use of the ennobling and the 

 fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that music 

 creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and 

 move without contracting habits of emotion. In this vague- 

 ness of significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of 

 music. A melody occurs to the composer, which he certainly 

 connects with no act of the reason, which he is probably 

 unconscious of connecting with any movement of his feeling, 

 but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotional 

 mood. When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus 

 impromptu, he is aware, as we learn from his own lips, that 

 this work has correspondence with emotion. Beethoven calls 

 one symphony Heroic, another Pastoral; of the opening of 

 another he says, 'Fate knocks at the door.' Mozart sets comic 

 words to the mass-music of a friend, in order to mark his 

 sense of its inaptitude for religious sentiment. All composers 

 use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro, Lagrimoso, Con 

 Fuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood their 

 music ought to represent. 



