d--are fixed. Da Ponte's Cherubino and Mozart's
melodies remain unalterable. All the rest is undecided; the singer and
the listener change on each occasion.

To assert that the musician Mozart meant nothing by his music, to
assert that he only cared about it _qua_ music, is the same as
to say that the painter Tintoretto, when he put the Crucifixion upon
canvas, the sculptor Michelangelo, when he carved Christ upon the lap
of Mary, meant nothing, and only cared about the beauty of their
forms and colours. Those who take up this position prove, not that the
artist has no meaning to convey, but that for them the artist's nature
is unintelligible, and his meaning is conveyed in an unknown tongue.
It seems superfluous to guard against misinterpretation by saying that
to expect clear definition from music--the definition which belongs
to poetry--would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuous
perception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing
with pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry,
dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject
may be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot
fail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may very
easily interpret in a hundred different ways the message of sound.
But this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive;
rather because they are more limited, more stereotyped, more dead.
They symbolise something precise and unmistakable; but this precision
is itself attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value of
the counter is better understood when it is a word than when it is a
chord, because all that a word conveys has already become a thought,
while all that musical sounds convey remains within the region of
emotion which has not been intellectualised. Poetry touches emotion
through the thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at
all, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has become
thought, has already lost a portion of its force, and has taken to
itself a something alien to its nature. Therefore the message of music
can never rightly be translated into words. It is the very largeness
and vividness of the sphere of simple feeling which makes its
symbolical counterpart in sound so seeming vague. But in spite of this
incontestable defect of seeming vagueness, emotion expressed by music
is nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to