balanced pecking cranes, and in the curling leaves of
which little naked winged Cupids are drawing their bows and sharpening
their arrows even as in the bas-reliefs of a pagan sarcophagus. In the
free and spontaneous activity of musical conception, the composer may
forget the words he is setting, as the painter may forget the subject
he is painting in the fervour of plastic imagination; for the musician
conceives not emotions, but modulations; and the painter conceives not
actions, but gestures and attitudes. Thence it comes that Mozart has
made regicide Romans storm and weep as he would have made Zerlina and
Cherubino laugh, just as Titian made Magdalen smite her breast in
the wilderness with the smile of Flora on her feast-day; hence that
confusion in all save form, that indifference to all save beauty, which
characterises all the great epochs of art, that sublime jumble of times
and peoples, of tragic and comic, that motley crowding together of
satyrs and anchorites, of Saracens and ancient Romans, of antique
warriors and mediaeval burghers, of Gothic tracery and Grecian arabesque,
of Theseus and Titania, of Puck and Bottom, that great masquerade of art
which we, poor critics, would fain reduce to law and rule, to
chronological and ethnological propriety.

Those times are gone by: we wish to make every form correspond with an
idea; we wish to be told a story by the statue, by the picture, most of
all by that which can least tell it--by music. We forget that music is
neither a symbol which can convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry
which can express an instinctive feeling; we wish to barter the power
of leaving in the mind an indelible image of beauty for the miserable
privilege of awakening the momentary recollection of one of nature's
sounds, or the yet more miserable one of sending a momentary tremor
through the body; we would rather compare than enjoy, and rather weep
than admire. Therefore we try to force music to talk a language which
it does not speak and which we do not understand; and succeed only in
making it babble like a child or rave like a madman, obtaining nothing
but unintelligible and incoherent forms in our anxiety to obtain
intelligible and logical thoughts. We forget that great fact, forever
overlooked by romanticism, that poetry and music are essentially
distinct in their nature; that Chapelmaster Kreisler's improvisation was
not played but spoken; and that had not the snuffers fallen into the