102 ON THE RELATION OF ART 



has been already said upon this topic in another essay. It 

 is more to the present purpose to point out that even those 

 arts which seem most widely removed from life exert their 

 toning influence upon the moral consciousness. 



Music, for example, inculcates nothing, tells no story, utters 

 no propositions which provoke assent or dissent. Yet music, 

 in spite of the insidious vagueness of its language, in spite 

 of the fact that its influences are rarely seized or analysed, 

 has a potent charm for tuning our susceptibilities to divers 

 issues. Few of those who have read Plato will dispute what 

 he records about the tonic value of the Dorian mood, as 

 compared with the enervation of the Mixo-Lydian and the 

 frenzy of the Phrygian. To demur that we have only vague 

 notions about the Greek moods avails nothing. A fugue of 

 Bach or the choruses of Israel in Egypt, Rossini's melodies 

 and Strauss's valses, the overture to Tannhauser and the 

 pibroch of a Highland clan such terms of comparison will 

 suit our purpose just as well as those implied in the obscure 

 phraseology of antique writers on Greek music. Dryden 

 seized the truth and roughly expressed it in his ode for St. 

 Cecilia's Day, styled ' Alexander's Feast.' 



Architecture, again, teaches nothing, tells no story, offers 

 no allurements to the senses, imitates nothing. Such 

 immediate appeals to the sensibilities it leaves to the 

 figurative arts. Yet men and women who are susceptible 

 to their surroundings cannot fail to be toned to different 

 moods, according as they dwell habitually in a Gothic 

 castle, in a Genoese palace, or in a rococo villa of the 

 Regency according as they worship habitually in Chartres 

 Cathedral, in a Jesuit church with its gimcracks, or in an 

 English Methodist chapel with its arid grimness. I admit 

 that it is easy to over-estimate the possible influence of these 

 material environments. Some people seem unimpressible by 

 them. Yet experience leads me to think that there are numerous 

 human beings in each nation who do receive powerful and 

 permanent tone from the impressions communicated to them 

 by architecture. 



Something similar to Seneca's remark on landscape and 



