ike some
consummate extract or quintessence of life.

It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like
this is really aspiring and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect
moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or its
accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects. On that background
of the silence of Venice, which the visitor there finds so impressive,
the world of Italian music was then forming. In choice of subject, as in
all besides, the Concert of the Pitti Palace is typical of all that
Giorgione, himself an admirable musician, touched with his influence;
and in sketch or finished picture, in various collections, we may follow
it through many intricate variations--men fainting at music, music heard
at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the
pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks;
the tuning of instruments--people with intent faces, as if listening,
like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect the
smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air,
or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and
finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet
sound--a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes
through some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.

In such favourite incidents, then, of Giorgione's school, music or
music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a
sort of listening--listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's
novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments
are really our moments of play, and we are surprised at the unexpected
blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not
merely because play is in many instances that to which people really
apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress
of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers
in things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way with
us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes often to the play
which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play
at real life, like children "dressing up," disguised in the strange old
Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or fantastic with embroidery and furs,
of which the master was so curious a designer, and which, above all the
spotless white linen at wrist