There is a class of persons to whom art in general is but a fashionable
luxury, and music in particular but an agreeable sound, an elegant
superfluity serving to relieve the tedium of conversation at a soiree,
and fill up the space between sorbets and supper. To such, any
philosophical discussion on the aesthetics of art must seem as puerile an
occupation as that of the fairy who spent her time weighing grains of
dust with a spider's web. Artists, to whom, through a foreign prejudice
which dates back to the barbarism of the Middle Ages, they persist in
refusing any high place in the social scale, are to them only petty
tradesmen dealing in suspicious wares (in most instances unshrewdly,
since they rarely get rich, which aggravates their position); while what
they call performers are looked upon by them as mere tricksters or
jugglers, who profit by the dexterity of their fingers, as dancers and
acrobats by the suppleness of their limbs. The painter whose works
decorate their saloons figures in the budget of their expenses on a line
with the upholsterer, whose hangings they speak of in the same breath
with Church's "Heart of the Andes," and Rosa Bonheur's "Cattle Fair."

It is not for such people that I write; but there are others,--and to
these I address myself,--who recognize in the artist the privileged
instrument of a moral and civilizing influence; who appreciate art
because they derive from it pure and ennobling inspirations; who respect
it because it is the highest expression of human thought, aiming at the
absolute ideal; and who love it as we love the friend to whom we
confide our joys and sorrows, and in whom we find a faithful response to
every movement of the soul.

Lamartine has said, with truth, "Music is the literature of the heart;
it commences where speech ends." In fact, music is a psycho-physical
phenomenon. In its germ, it is a sensation; in its full development, an
ideal. It is sufficient not to be deaf to perceive music, at least, if
not to appreciate it. Even idiots and maniacs are subject to its
influence. Not being restricted to any precise sense, going beyond the
mere letter, and expressing only states of the soul, it has this
advantage over literature, that every one can assimilate it to his own
passions, and adapt it to the sentiments which rule him. Its power,
limited in the intellectual order to the imitative passions, is in that
of the imagination unlimited. It responds to an interior, in