ong, or what is always the
difference or the margin between right and wrong.

Beauty, in its common conception, has nothing to do with it
(substance), unless it be granted that its outward aspect, or the
expression between sensuous beauty and spiritual beauty can be always
and distinctly known, which it cannot, as the art of music is still in
its infancy. On reading this over, it seems only decent that some kind
of an apology be made for the beginning of the preceding sentence. It
cannot justly be said that anything that has to do with art has nothing
to do with beauty in any degree,--that is, whether beauty is there or
not, it has something to do with it. A casual idea of it, a kind of a
first necessary-physical impression, was what we had in mind. Probably
nobody knows what actual beauty is--except those serious writers of
humorous essays in art magazines, who accurately, but kindly, with club
in hand, demonstrate for all time and men that beauty is a quadratic
monomial; that it _is_ absolute; that it is relative; that it _is _not_
relative, that it _is _not_... The word "beauty" is as easy to use as
the word "degenerate." Both come in handy when one does or does not
agree with you. For our part, something that Roussel-Despierres says
comes nearer to what we like to think beauty is ... "an infinite source
of good ... the love of the beautiful ... a constant anxiety for moral
beauty." Even here we go around in a circle--a thing apparently
inevitable, if one tries to reduce art to philosophy. But personally,
we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon,
for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics--or for the
same reason we prefer Whittier to Baudelaire--a poet to a genius, or a
healthy to a rotten apple--probably not so much because it is more
nutritious, but because we like its taste better; we like the beautiful
and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what
we don't like is ugly--and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly,
for if it were we would like something we don't like. So having
unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.

At any rate, we are going to be arbitrary enough to claim, with no
definite qualification, that substance can be expressed in music, and
that it is the only valuable thing in it, and moreover that in two
separate pieces of music in which the notes are almost identical, one
can be of "substance" with little "manner," and the other