mountain; the men themselves, the
youths listening and the elder men teaching, grave and eager
intellectual faces, in the lecture rooms. And, finally, the things
which fill the minds of these men, their thoughts and dreams, the
poetry they have given to the world; the poetry of that infinitely
remote, dim past, evoked out of cavern remains and fossils--the lake
dwellers among the mists of melting glaciers; the primaeval horses
playing on the still manless shores; the great saurians plunging in
the waves of long-dried seas; the jungles which are now our coal beds;
and see! the beginning of organic life, the first callow vegetation on
the stagnant waters in the dawn-light of the world. The place is but a
mean boarded and glazed vestibule; full of the sickly fumes of
chemicals; and the people who haunt it are only future apothecaries.
But the compositions are as spacious and solemn, the colours as tender
and brilliant, and the poetry as high and contemplative as that of any
mediaeval fresco; it is all new also, undreamed of, _sui generis_, in
its impersonal cosmic suggestiveness, as in its colouring of opal, and
metallic patinas, and tea rose and Alpine ice cave.

XVII.

I have alluded already to the fact that, perhaps because of the part
of actual participating work which it entails, music is the art which
has most share in life and of life, nowadays. It seems probable
therefore that its especial mission may be to keep alive in us the
feeling and habit of art, and to transmit them back to those arts of
visible form to which it owes, perhaps, the training necessary to its
own architectural structure and its own colour combinations. Compared
with the arts of line and projection, music seems at a certain moral
disadvantage, as not being applicable to the things of everyday use,
and also not educating us to the better knowledge of the beautiful and
significant things of nature. In connection with this kind of
blindness, music is also compatible (as we see by its flourishing in
great manufacturing towns) with a great deal of desecration of nature
and much hand-to-mouth ruthlessness of life. But, on the other hand,
music has the especial power of suggesting and regulating emotion, and
the still more marvellous faculty of creating an inner world for
itself, inviolable because ubiquitous.

And, therefore, with its audible rhythms and harmonies, its restrained
climaxes and finely ordered hierarchies, music may discipline our