heir lives, only the old material is stirred. A good
work of visual art carries a person who is capable of appreciating it
out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means to the emotions of life
is to use a telescope for reading the news. You will notice that people
who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their
subjects; whereas people who can, as often as not, have no idea what the
subject of a picture is. They have never noticed the representative
element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of
forms and the relations and quantities of colours. Often they can tell
by the quality of a single line whether or no a man is a good artist.
They are concerned only with lines and colours, their relations and
quantities and qualities; but from these they win an emotion more
profound and far more sublime than any that can be given by the
description of facts and ideas.

This last sentence has a very confident ring--over-confident, some may
think. Perhaps I shall be able to justify it, and make my meaning
clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about music. I am
not really musical. I do not understand music well. I find musical form
exceedingly difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder
subtleties of harmony and rhythm more often than not escape me. The
form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp it
honestly. My opinion about music is not worth having. Yet, sometimes, at
a concert, though my appreciation of the music is limited and humble, it
is pure. Sometimes, though I have a poor understanding, I have a clean
palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at
the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp
is being played, I get from music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get
from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is evanescent; I
understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of
pure aesthetic ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure
musical form, as sounds combined according to the laws of a mysterious
necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its own and no
relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I
lose myself in that infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure
visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal state of mind at a
concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of for