lcohol, although that opium or
alcohol is killing them by inches. It is absurd to be impatient with
them. All one can do is to let them go in peace to their undoing, and
hope that their example will be rather a warning than a model to
others.

X.

But, letting alone the possibility of art acting as a poison for the
soul, there remains an important question. As I said, although art is
one of the most wholesome of our soul's activities, there are yet
kinds of art, or (since it is a subjective question of profit or
damage to ourselves) rather kinds of artistic effect, which, for some
evident reason, or through some obscure analogy or hidden point of
contact awaken those movements of the fancy, those states of the
emotions which disintegrate rather than renew the soul, and accustom
us rather to the yielding and proneness which we shun, than to the
resistance and elasticity which we seek throughout life to increase.

I was listening, last night, to some very wonderful singing of modern
German songs; and the emotion that still remains faintly within me
alongside of the traces of those languishing phrases and passionate
intonations, the remembrance of the sense of--how shall I call
it?--violation of the privacy of the human soul which haunted me
throughout that performance, has brought home to me, for the hundredth
time, that the Greek legislators were not so fantastic in considering
music a questionable art, which they thought twice before admitting
into their ideal commonwealths. For music can do more by our emotions
than the other arts, and it can, therefore, separate itself from them
and their holy ways; it can, in a measure, actually undo the good they
do to our soul.

But, you may object, poetry does the very same; it also expresses,
strengthens, brings home our human, momentary, individual emotions,
instead of uniting with the arts of visible form, with the harmonious
things of nature, to create for us another kind of emotion, the
emotion of the eternal, unindividual, universal life, in whose
contemplation our souls are healed and made whole after the
disintegration inflicted by what is personal and fleeting.

It is true that much poetry expresses merely such personal and momentary
emotion; but it does so through a mechanism differing from that of music,
and possessing a saving grace which the emotion-compelling mechanism
of music does not. For by the very nature of the spoken or written
word, by the word's str