some of our vices, infinitely more ignorant
than we are; dumb, not because we cannot understand, but because he
cannot speak. And may it not be the same with music? May not music be
intellectually inscrutable because it is intellectually meaningless?

The idea is one from which we shrink; but are we right in shrinking from
it? Cannot music be noble in itself apart from any meaning it conveys?
Cannot we be satisfied with what it certainly is, without thinking of
what it may be? It would seem to be so; it is the spirit of our culture
to strain restlessly after the unknown, for ever to seek after the
hidden, to reject the visible and tangible. We yearn to penetrate
through the blue of the summer evening, to thread our way among the
sun-gilded clouds; yet the blue heaven, if we rise into it, is mere
tintless air; the clouds, if we can touch them, are mere dull vapour.
And so also we would fain seek a meaning in those fair sounds which are
fairer than any meaning they could contain; we would break down in rude
analysis the splendours of _Don Giovanni_ only to discover beneath them
the story of a punished Lovelace; we would tear to shreds a glorious
fugue of Bach for the satisfaction of hearing the Jews yelling for
Barabbas.

This is our tendency, this our way of enjoying the great art of other
days: to care not for itself, but for what it suggests, nay, most often
for the suggestion of the mere name of the work of art, for there is no
punished Lovelace in Mozart's melodies, no Barabbas in Bach's fugues,
there is nothing but beautiful forms made out of sounds. The old prosaic
masters of the past, who worked at a picture or a statue or an opera as
a cobbler works at a pair of shoes, never thought of suggesting anything
to us: they gave something substantial, something intrinsically
valuable, a well-shaped figure, a richly tinted canvas, a boldly
modulated piece of music; to produce that and no more had been their
object, it was all they could give, and their contemporaries were
satisfied with it. Their art was their trade, pursued conscientiously,
diligently, intelligently, sometimes with that superior degree of
intelligence we call genius, but it was their trade and no more. They
themselves were as prosaic as any artisan, and no more saw vague poetry
in their works, though these were the _Olympic Jove_, the _School of
Athens_, or the _Messiah_, than does the potter in his pot or the smith
in his iron; all they saw was that t