int
were wiser than some moderns when, without pretending to assign an
intellectual significance to music, they held it for an axiom that
one type of music bred one type of character, another type another.
A change in the music of a state, wrote Plato, will be followed by
changes in its constitution. It is of the utmost importance, said
Aristotle, to provide in education for the use of the ennobling and
the fortifying moods. These philosophers knew that music creates a
spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and move without
contracting habits of emotion. In this vagueness of significance but
intensity of feeling lies the magic of music. A melody occurs to the
composer, which he certainly connects with no act of the reason, which
he is probably unconscious of connecting with any movement of his
feeling, but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotional
mood. When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus impromptu, he
is aware, as we learn from his own lips, that this work has
correspondence with emotion. Beethoven calls one symphony Heroic,
another Pastoral; of the opening of another he says, 'Fate knocks at
the door.' Mozart sets comic words to the mass-music of a friend, in
order to mark his sense of its inaptitude for religious sentiment. All
composers use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro, Lagrimoso, Con
Fuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood their music ought
to represent.

* * * * *

Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and consider
two subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any system of
aesthetics. These are dancing and acting. Dancing uses the living human
form, and presents feeling or action, the passions and the deeds of
men, in artificially educated movements of the body. The element of
beauty it possesses, independently of the beauty of the dancer, is
rhythm. Acting or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter,
no longer under the conditions of fixed rhythm but as an ideal
reproduction of reality. The actor is what he represents, and the
element of beauty in his art is perfection of realisation. It is his
duty as an artist to show us Orestes or Othello, not perhaps exactly
as Othello and Orestes were, but as the essence of their tragedies,
ideally incorporate in action, ought to be. The actor can do this
in dumb show. Some of the greatest actors of the ancient world were
mimes. But he usually interprets