alabaster vase is still lamplight, though shorn of lustre
and toned to coloured softness. Even thus the spirit, immersed in
things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still
spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested
with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with
utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the
artist's function. But he will have failed of the highest if the
light within burns dim, or if he gives the world a lamp in which no
spiritual flame is lighted.

* * * * *

Music transports us to a different region. It imitates nothing. It
uses pure sound, and sound of the most wholly artificial kind--so
artificial that the musical sounds of one race are unmusical, and
therefore unintelligible, to another. Like architecture, music relies
upon mathematical proportions. Unlike architecture, music serves no
utility. It is the purest art of pleasure--the truest paradise and
playground of the spirit. It has less power than painting, even less
power than sculpture, to tell a story or to communicate an idea. For
we must remember that when music is married to words, the words, and
not the music, reach our thinking faculty. And yet, in spite of all,
music presents man's spirit to itself through form. The domain of the
spirit over which music reigns, is emotion--not defined emotion, not
feeling even so defined as jealousy or anger--but those broad bases of
man's being out of which emotions spring, defining themselves through
action into this or that set type of feeling. Architecture, we have
noticed, is so connected with specific modes of human existence, that
from its main examples we can reconstruct the life of men who used
it. Sculpture and painting, by limiting their presentation to the
imitation of external things, have all the help which experience
and, association render. The mere artificiality of music's vehicle
separates it from life and makes its message untranslatable. Yet, as I
have already pointed out, this very disability under which it labours
is the secret of its extraordinary potency. Nothing intervenes between
the musical work of art and the fibres of the sentient being it
immediately thrills. We do not seek to say what music means. We feel
the music. And if a man should pretend that the music has not passed
beyond his ears, has communicated nothing but a musical delight, he
simply tells us tha