music we
see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian
as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man
alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words,
are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same
combinations of sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly
love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that element of pure
passion which is the primitive and natural ground-material of either. They
give distinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined; or, as the
Italians put it, _la musica e il lamento dell' amore o la preghiera a gli
dei_. This, combined with its independence of all corporeal conditions,
fenders music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, and
therefore the essentially modern art.

For Painting, after the great work accomplished during the Renaissance,
when the painters ran through the whole domain of thought within the scope
of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident,
landscape, _genre_, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is
still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by
European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our
intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the
present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too
much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the
figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated
that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to
the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the
mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended,
with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no
power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser
element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs
must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to
gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct
appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this
sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and
this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular
consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged
mythology for curiosity, and metaph