light of a lamp enclosed within an 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 that he has not felt music.  The ancients on this point 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.