composer be held accountable? Beyond
a certain point the responsibility is more or less undeterminable. The
outside characteristics--that is, the points furthest away from the
mergings--are obvious to mostly anyone. A child knows a "strain of
joy," from one of sorrow. Those a little older know the dignified from
the frivolous--the Spring Song from the season in which the "melancholy
days have come" (though is there not a glorious hope in autumn!). But
where is the definite expression of late-spring against early-summer,
of happiness against optimism? A painter paints a sunset--can he paint
the setting sun?

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular
tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as
the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be
both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not
intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better
to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most
extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these
"shades of abstraction"--these attributes paralleled by "artistic
intuitions" (call them what you will)-is ever to be denied man for the
same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

2

There may be an analogy--and on first sight it seems that there must
be--between both the state and power of artistic perceptions and the
law of perpetual change, that ever-flowing stream partly biological,
partly cosmic, ever going on in ourselves, in nature, in all life. This
may account for the difficulty of identifying desired qualities with
the perceptions of them in expression. Many things are constantly
coming into being, while others are constantly going out--one part of
the same thing is coming in while another part is going out of
existence. Perhaps this is why the above conformity in art (a
conformity which we seem naturally to look for) appears at times so
unrealizable, if not impossible. It will be assumed, to make this
theory clearer, that the "flow" or "change" does not go on in the
art-product itself. As a matter of fact it probably does, to a certain
extent--a picture, or a song, may gain or lose in value beyond what the
painter or composer knew, by the progress and higher development in all
art. Keats may be only partially true when he says that "A work of
beauty is a joy forever"--a thing that i