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 form, 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