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 take it in, than the same emotion limited by language.  It is intenser, it is more immediate, as compensation for being less intelligible, less unmistakable in meaning.  It is an infinite, an indistinct, where each consciousness defines and sets a limitary form.

V

A train of thought which begins with the concrete not unfrequently finds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions.  This is the point to which the performance of Cherubino’s part by Pauline Lucca at the Scala twenty years ago has led me—­that I have to settle with myself what I mean by art in general, and what I take to be the proper function of music as one of the fine arts.

‘Art,’ said Goethe, ‘is but form-giving.’  We might vary this definition, and say, ‘Art is a method of expression or presentation.’  Then comes the question:  If art gives form, if it is a method of expression or presentation, to what does it give form, what does it express or present?  The answer certainly must be:  Art gives form to human consciousness; expresses or presents the feeling or the thought of man.  Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communication of innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the softening of manners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at all events, is its prime function.