capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy:  to use art as a means to the emotions of life is to use a telescope for reading the news.  You will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is.  They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of colours.  Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or no a man is a good artist.  They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win an emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the description of facts and ideas.

This last sentence has a very confident ring—­over-confident, some may think.  Perhaps I shall be able to justify it, and make my meaning clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about music.  I am not really musical.  I do not understand music well.  I find musical form exceedingly difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and rhythm more often than not escape me.  The form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp it honestly.  My opinion about music is not worth having.  Yet, sometimes, at a concert, though my appreciation of the music is limited and humble, it is pure.  Sometimes, though I have a poor understanding, I have a clean palate.  Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art.  It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent; I understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic ecstasy.  But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me.  How inferior is my normal state of mind at a concert.  Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life.  Incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling.  At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation—­the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons—­to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended.  Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford