340 IS MUSIC THE TYPE 



a mathematical metaphor) is raised to a higher power. It continues 

 to be an articulate sound and a logical step in the argument; but 

 it becomes also a musical sound and a centre of emotional force. It 

 becomes a musical sound that is to say, its consonants and vowels are 

 arranged to bear a relation to the consonants and vowels near it a 

 relation of which accent, quantity, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration 

 are specialised forms, but which may be of a character more subtle 

 than any of these. And it becomes a centre of emotional force; that 

 is to say, the complex associations which it evokes modify the associa- 

 tions evoked by other words in the same passage in a way quite distinct 

 from grammatical or logical connection. The poet, therefore, must 

 avoid two opposite dangers. If he thinks too exclusively of the music 

 and the colouring of his verses of the imaginative means of suggesting 

 thought and feeling what he writes will lack reality and sense. But 

 if he cares only to communicate definite thought and feeling according 

 to the ordinary laws of eloquent speech, his verse is likely to be deficient 

 in magical and suggestive power. 



This is right. This makes equitable allowance for the 

 claims alike of the material and the form of art the intel- 

 lectual and emotional content, the sensuous and artificial 

 embodiment. 



But to return to Mr. Pater. His doctrine that art is 

 ' always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence,' 

 his assertion that the perfection of lyrical poetry * often seems 

 to depend in part on a certain suppression or vagueness of 

 mere subject,' contradict the utterances of the greatest crafts- 

 men in the several arts Milton's sublime passages on the 

 function of Poetry ; Sidney's and Shelley's Defences of Poesy ; 

 Goethe's doctrine of * the motive ' ; Rossetti's canon that 

 ' fundamental brain-work ' is the characteristic of all great 

 art ; Michel Angelo's and Beethoven's observations upon their 

 own employment of sculpture and music. Rigidly applied, 

 his principles would tend to withdraw art from the sphere of 

 spirituality altogether. Yet, considered as paradoxes, they 

 have real value, inasmuch as they recall attention to the 

 sensuous side of art, and direct the mind from such antagonistic 

 paradoxes as the one propounded by Mr. Matthew Arnold in 

 his preface to Wordswprth. 



It is difficult to see in what way Mr. Pater can evade the 

 strictures he has passed upon his brethren, the popular critics. 



