Hosts, the Mother of God, the Crucifix, the Eternal Trinity, supplanted by
a sort of pagan mythology in the guise of sacred names, by a creation
indeed of high genius, of intense, and dazzling, and soul-absorbing
beauty, in which, however, there was nothing which subserved the cause of
Religion, nothing on the other hand which did not directly or indirectly
minister to corrupt nature and the powers of darkness.

6.

The art of Painting, however, is peculiar: Music and Architecture are more
ideal, and their respective archetypes, even if not supernatural, at least
are abstract and unearthly; and yet what I have been observing about
Painting, holds, I think, analogously, in the marvellous development which
Musical Science has undergone in the last century. Doubtless here too the
highest genius may be made subservient to Religion; here too, still more
simply than in the case of Painting, the Science has a field of its own,
perfectly innocent, into which Religion does not and need not enter; on
the other hand here also, in the case of Music as of Painting, it is
certain that Religion must be alive and on the defensive, for, if its
servants sleep, a potent enchantment will steal over it. Music, I suppose,
though this is not the place to enlarge upon it, has an object of its own;
as mathematical science also, it is the expression of ideas greater and
more profound than any in the visible world, ideas, which centre indeed in
Him whom Catholicism manifests, who is the seat of all beauty, order, and
perfection whatever, still ideas after all which are not those on which
Revelation directly and principally fixes our gaze. If then a great master
in this mysterious science (if I may speak of matters which seem to lie
out of my own province) throws himself on his own gift, trusts its
inspirations, and absorbs himself in those thoughts which, though they
come to him in the way of nature, belong to things above nature, it is
obvious he will neglect everything else. Rising in his strength, he will
break through the trammels of words, he will scatter human voices, even
the sweetest, to the winds; he will be borne upon nothing less than the
fullest flood of sounds which art has enabled him to draw from mechanical
contrivances; he will go forth as a giant, as far as ever his instruments
can reach, starting from their secret depths fresh and fresh elements of
beauty and grandeur as he goes, and pouring them together into still more
m