These philosophers knew that music creates a spiritual world, in which the spirit cannot live and move without contracting habits of emotion.  In this vagueness of significance but intensity of feeling lies the magic of music.  A melody occurs to the composer, which he certainly connects with no act of the reason, which he is probably unconscious of connecting with any movement of his feeling, but which nevertheless is the form in sound of an emotional mood.  When he reflects upon the melody secreted thus impromptu, he is aware, as we learn from his own lips, that this work has correspondence with emotion.  Beethoven calls one symphony Heroic, another Pastoral; of the opening of another he says, ’Fate knocks at the door.’  Mozart sets comic words to the mass-music of a friend, in order to mark his sense of its inaptitude for religious sentiment.  All composers use phrases like Maestoso, Pomposo, Allegro, Lagrimoso, Con Fuoco, to express the general complexion of the mood their music ought to represent.

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Before passing to poetry, it may be well to turn aside and consider two subordinate arts, which deserve a place in any system of aesthetics.  These are dancing and acting.  Dancing uses the living human form, and presents feeling or action, the passions and the deeds of men, in artificially educated movements of the body.  The element of beauty it possesses, independently of the beauty of the dancer, is rhythm.  Acting or the art of mimicry presents the same subject-matter, no longer under the conditions of fixed rhythm but as an ideal reproduction of reality.  The actor is what he represents, and the element of beauty in his art is perfection of realisation.  It is his duty as an artist to show us Orestes or Othello, not perhaps exactly as Othello and Orestes were, but as the essence of their tragedies, ideally incorporate in action, ought to be.  The actor can do this in dumb show.  Some of the greatest actors of the ancient world were mimes.  But he usually interprets a poet’s thought, and attempts to present an artistic conception in a secondary form of art, which has for its advantage his own personality in play.

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The last of the fine arts is literature; or, in the narrower sphere of which it will be well to speak here only, is poetry.  Poetry employs words in fixed rhythms, which we call metres.  Only a small portion of its effect is derived from the beauty of its sound.  It appeals to the sense of hearing far less immediately than music does.  It makes no appeal to the eyesight, and takes no help from the beauty of colour.  It produces no tangible object.  But language being the storehouse of all human experience, language being the medium whereby spirit communicates with spirit in affairs of life, the vehicle which transmits to us the thoughts and feelings of the past, and on which we rely for continuing our present to the future, it follows that, of all