m, my aesthetic
emotion collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I
cannot grasp, the ideas of life. Incapable of feeling the austere
emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions
of terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly
enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling. At such times, were
the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation--the song of a bird,
the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of
demons--to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended.
Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford new points of
departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know
very well what has happened. I have been using art as a means to the
emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have been
cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled from the superb peaks of
aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a
jolly country. No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no
one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little
crestfallen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because he has
made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can
even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have
climbed the cold, white peaks of art.

About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am. If they
cannot grasp musical form and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they
confess that they understand music imperfectly or not at all. They
recognise quite clearly that there is a difference between the feeling
of the musician for pure music and that of the cheerful concert-goer for
what music suggests. The latter enjoys his own emotions, as he has every
right to do, and recognises their inferiority. Unfortunately, people are
apt to be less modest about their powers of appreciating visual art.
Everyone is inclined to believe that out of pictures, at any rate, he
can get all that there is to be got; everyone is ready to cry "humbug"
and "impostor" at those who say that more can be had. The good faith of
people who feel pure aesthetic emotions is called in question by those
who have never felt anything of the sort. It is the prevalence of the
representative element, I suppose, that makes the man in the street so
sure that he knows a good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed
that in matters of architecture,