new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought.  I know very well what has happened.  I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.  I have been cutting blocks with a razor.  I have tumbled from the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity.  It is a jolly country.  No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there.  Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys.  And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.

About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am.  If they cannot grasp musical form and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they confess that they understand music imperfectly or not at all.  They recognise quite clearly that there is a difference between the feeling of the musician for pure music and that of the cheerful concert-goer for what music suggests.  The latter enjoys his own emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their inferiority.  Unfortunately, people are apt to be less modest about their powers of appreciating visual art.  Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate, he can get all that there is to be got; everyone is ready to cry “humbug” and “impostor” at those who say that more can be had.  The good faith of people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is called in question by those who have never felt anything of the sort.  It is the prevalence of the representative element, I suppose, that makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a good picture when he sees one.  For I have noticed that in matters of architecture, pottery, textiles, &c., ignorance and ineptitude are more willing to defer to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility.  It is a pity that cultivated and intelligent men and women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in visual as in musical art.  A comparison of my own experience in both has enabled me to discriminate very clearly between pure and impure appreciation.  Is it too much to ask that others should be as honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for music?  For I am certain that most of those who visit galleries do feel very much what I feel at concerts.  They have their moments of pure ecstasy; but the moments are short and unsure.  Soon they fall back into the world of human interests and feel emotions, good no doubt, but inferior.  I do not dream of saying that what they get from art is bad or nugatory; I say that they do not get the best that art can give.  I do not say that they cannot understand art; rather I say that they cannot understand the state of mind of those who understand it best.  I do not say