rights. Yet the full expression of this independent interest in nature
is more recent than is usually observed. Landscape painting goes back
but little beyond the year sixteen hundred. It is only two or three
centuries ago that painters discovered the physical world to be worthy
of representation for its own sake.

As the worth of nature thus became vindicated in painting, parallel
changes were wrought in the other arts. Arts less distinctly rational
began to assert themselves, and even to take the lead. The art most
characteristic of modern times, the one which most widely and
poignantly appeals to us, is music. But in music we are not distinctly
conscious of a meaning. Most of us in listening to music forget
ourselves under its lulling charms, abandon ourselves to its spell,
and by it are swept away, perhaps to the infinite, perhaps to an
obliteration of all clear thought. Is it not largely because we are so
hard pressed under the anxious conditions of modern life that music
becomes such an enormous solace and strength? I do not say that no
other factors have contributed to the vogue of music, but certainly it
is widely prized as an effective means of escape from ourselves. Music
too, though early known in calm and elementary forms, has within the
last two centuries been developed into almost a new art.

Of all the arts poetry is the most strikingly rational and articulate.
Its material is plain thought, plain words. We employ in it the
apparatus of conscious life. Poetry was therefore concerned in early
times entirely with things of the spirit. It dealt with persons, and
with them alone. It celebrated epic actions, recorded sagacious
judgments, or uttered in lyric song emotions primarily felt by an
individual, yet interpreting the common lot of man. But there has
occurred a great change in poetry too, a change notable during the