one ideal moment, the lifelong desire of Faust, and to force it to obey the mandate :

"Ah, still delay-thou art so fair!"

Such are the arts addressed to the eye alone, both of them lending their service to the earliest, the latest, the most various, of all material constructions Architecture, Architecture, whose pediments and roofs and walls originate in our bodily necessities, whose pinnacles typify our worship and aspiration, and which so soon becomes the beneficiary and the incasement of its decorative allies. None of the three can directly express time or movement, but there is practically no limit to their voiceless representation of space and multitude.

Music.

The composer's sublime freedom, through progressive change.

But movement in time is a special function of Music, that heavenly maid, never so young as now, and still the sovereign of the passions, reaching and rousing the soul through sound-vibrations perpetually changing as they flow. To this it adds the sympathetic force of harmonic counterpoint. Its range, then, is freer than that of the plastic and structural arts, by this element of progressive change. Under its spell, thrilling with the sensations which it can excite, and which really are immanent in our own natures, considering moreover the superb mathematics of its harmony, and again that it has been the last in development of all these arts, we question whether it is not only superior to them

MUSIC YEARNING AYE FOR SPEECH 65

but even to that one to which these lectures are devoted. All feel, at least, the force of Poe's avowal that music and poetry at their highest must go together, because "in music the soul most nearly attains the great end for which it struggles-supernal beauty." And so old John Davies, in praise of music,

"The motion which the ninefold sacred quire

Of angels make: the bliss of all the blest,

Which (next the Highest) most fills the highest desire." Schopenhauer thought that the musician, because there is no sound in nature fit to give him more than a suggestion for a model, "approaches the original sources of existence more closely than all other artists, nay, even than Nature herself." Herbert Spencer has suggested that music may take rank as the highest of the fine arts, as the chief medium of sympathy, enabling us to partake the feeling which excites it, and "as an aid to the achievement of that higher happiness which it indistinctly shadows forth." And in truth, if the intercourse of a higher existence is to be effected through sound-vibrations rather than through the swifter light-waves, or by means of aught save the absolute celestial insight, one may fondly conceive music to be the language of the earth-freed, as of those imagined seraphim with whom feeling is "deeper than all thought."

Consider, on the other hand, how feeling governs the simple child, "that lightly draws its breath,"

ual Speech is supreme.

while thought begins its office as the child grows in But intellect strength and knowledge, and it is a fair inference that thought is the higher attribute, and that the suggestion of emotion by music is a less vital art than that of intellectual speech. The dumb brutes partake far more of man's emotion than of his mental intelligence. Neither is music - despite our latter-day theorists who defy the argument of Lessing's Laocoön and would make one art usurp the province of another, and despite its power as an indirect incentive to thought by rousing the emotions a vehicle for the conveyance of precise and varied ideas. The clearer the idea, the more exact the language which utters and interprets it. This, then, is the obvious limitation of music: it can traverse a range of feeling that may govern the tone of the hearer's contemplations, it can "fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath" and prolong their harmonic intervals indefinitely, but the domain of absolute thought, while richer and more imperial for its excitation, is not mastered by it. Of that realm music can make no exact chart.

Thus far, we have no art without its special office, and none that is not wanting in some capacity displayed by one or more of the rest. Each goes upon its appointed way. Now comes poetry, rhythmical, creative language, compact of beauty, imagination, passion, truth, in no wise related, like the plastic arts, to material substance; less able than its associate, music, to move the soul

Limitations of the poet.

ITS POWERS AND LIMITATIONS

67

with those dying falls of sound that increase and lessen thought and the power to harbor it; almost a voiceless spirit of invention, working without hands, yet the more subtile, potent, inclusive, for this evasive ideality, and for creations that are impalpable except through the arbitrary and non-essential symbols by which it now addresses itself to the educated eye.

Permit me to select, almost at random, from Keats and Tennyson, ready illustrations of the bounds and capabilities of the various arts passages necessarily familiar, since they are from Keats and Tennyson, but chosen from those masters because, of all English poets since Spenser, they are most given to picture-making, to the craft that is, as we say, artistic, picturesque. A stanza from the "Ode How far he on a Grecian Urn" describes, and rivals can illustrate in verse, the ravishing power of a bit of sculpture. sculpture to perpetuate arrested form and attitude - yes, even the suggestion of arrested music:

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on —
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

and imitate

Though winning near the goal; yet, do not grieve
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss;
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair."

These undying lines not only define by words the

power and limits of the sculptor, but are almost a matchless example of the farthest encroachment poetry can make upon sculpture's own province.1 What it cannot do is to combine the details of the carving so as to produce them to the mind, as sculpture does to the eye, at a single instant of time. It lingers exquisitely upon each in succession. Progressive time is required for its inclusion of the effects of a Grecian frieze or scroll. Now, take

His picturemaking:

-a

from Tennyson's lovely but lighter poem, "The Day-Dream," —a lyrical idyl at the acme of melodious and fanciful picture-making, stanza which seems to match with a certain roundness and color the transfixing effect of the painter's handiwork. It portrays a group entranced by the spell that has doomed to a hundred years of abeyance and motionlessness the life of the king's palace and the Sleeping Beauty. In the poems of Keats and Tennyson, as I say, artists find their sculptures and paintings already designed for them, so that these poets are the easiest of all to illustrate with some measure of adequacy. The theme and bounds. of the following lines, rendered by a painter, would show the whole group and scene at a flash of the eye; poetry cannot do this, yet, aided

its liberties

1 Since the first appearance of this lecture I have seen a finely penetrative essay by Mr. J. W. Comyns Carr (The New Quarterly Magazine, October, 1875), in which this same Ode is quoted to illustrate the ideal calm sought for by “The Artistic Spirit in Modern Poetry." As no better example can be found, in conveyance of the poetic and the plastic methods respectively, I do not hesitate to retain it.