those to whom the great issues of life are spiritual issues. Under all the shock of falling faiths and hostile theory, let the poet make the noblest possible interpretation of life, and fight for it, dare the loftiest hypothesis, and let time confirm it, if it will. Moments of inspired guessing lie back of our material advance; why not here also, where aspiration counts most of all? Why should we fear to trust, in life or in art, the profounder instinct, the deeper impulse, forgetting that, in the long history of the race, faith has been an incomparably more potent weapon in fighting the great fight than mere knowledge?

We need greatly to-day the finer courage of diviner and dreamer which dares venture belief in man's best, and create in the light of it. Let the poet, who has the deep resources of beauty at his command, lead the souls of men, teaching them to see with his eyes of more piercing vision. The world of fact is the world of spirit becoming visible, audible, that 'sense' may 'help soul' reach truth. It is for the artist to compel the world of matter to shadow forth his dream. He should shirk nothing, should know the horror, be aware of the ugliness, admit failure, but rise to enduring realism in helping to make

greater things real. Set free from some of the common duties of mankind, he at least owes us this: he must think beyond and above his fellows, drag them up with him, not down. It is his business to dream the finer dream; poets should be diviners of the higher law or they are something less than poets. Unless they can greatly imagine, and greatly set forth the higher imagining, why write? The general confusion of things we can see for ourselves; of the sand-storm in the desert we are all aware, for it blinds our eyes.

It is not for the poet to tell the minute particulars, but to point the path. The will to beauty is his strenuous task, and the individual will to beauty, to harmony, to faith in the divine order of things may have larger share in the working of the Divine Will to beauty than we dream, for the primal act of creation is still going on. We, with our deep impulses, our aspirations, are part of it, and our share in determining the nature of the spectacle that we see is larger than we know. Art, which so largely guides the instinct and stirs the will, should be no mere photograph of human existence, but that finer picturing wherein the facts of life are woven into the vision of eternity.

I

In the first article by me to appear in the Atlantic, I discussed the nature of music itself, in order that I might clear away certain popular misconceptions about it; and now, in discussing what is undoubtedly the greatest of musical forms, I desire first to state, as nearly as may be, what, in its essence, it is. A symphony is, of course, like other music in being an arrangement of rhythmic figures, of melodies (usually called themes), and of harmonies. But before describing it as such, - before dealing with its materials, its form, its history, and its place in the art of music, — I I wish to treat it solely as a thing of beauty expressed in terms of sound. Many people seem to think music an art dealing with objects as the other arts do, or with ideas as does literature. Some, never having become sensitized to it in childhood, look upon it as of no importance whatever; a large number have tried to perform it on an instrument and have failed; others have succeeded, at the price of thinking of it only in terms of technique. A certain happy few, some of whom can perform it and some of whom cannot, are satisfied to take it as it is, to enjoy it and be stimulated by it. These are the true musicians, and we should all aspire to join their happy company.

What we call a symphony is merely a series of ordered sounds produced by means of instruments of various kinds. It is sound and nothing else. Our programme books tell us about 'first

themes' and 'second themes,' and we make what effort we can to patch together the various brilliant textures of symphonic music into a coherent pattern; but the music we seek lies behind these outward manifestations, as, in a lesser sense, the significance of a great poem lies behind or beneath the actual words. A symphony is not a record of something else; it is not a picture of something else; you cannot use the word 'else' in connection with it because it is itself only. Any intelligent person, on being shown a diagram or plan of a symphonic movement, could be made to understand how and why the material was so disposed; for that disposition is dictated to the composer by the nature of sound and by the limitations and capacities of human beings, and it conforms to certain principles which operate everywhere; but that understanding would not reveal the symphony to him.

There is in every one of us a region of sensibility in which mind and emotion are blended and from which the imagination acts, and it is to this sensibility that music appeals. The mind is not the whole man, and the imagination, which we believe to be the highest function of human beings, cannot act from the mind alone. Mathematics, for example, does not lie entirely in the domain of the mind, and the same thing may be said of any other department of science. We cannot conceive any act of the imagination whatever that does not glow with the radiance of emotion or feeling. So that music, in appealing

to the whole being, is not so completely isolated as is generally supposed. But the simultaneous appeal of music to the mind and the feelings has led to much confusion on the part of writers who have not been sensitive to all its qualities. In his essay on Education Herbert Spencer, for example, in discussing the union of science and poetry says,

'It is doubtless true that, as states of consciousness, cognition and emotion tend to exclude each other. And it is doubtless true that an extreme activity of the reflective powers tends to deaden the feelings; while an extreme activity of the feelings tends to deaden the reflective powers: in which sense, indeed, all orders of activity are antagonistic to each other.'

Now this statement reveals at once the limitations of a philosophic mind when dealing with something which requires apprehension by the feelings also. In listening to music the reflective powers are not engaged with objects or with definite ideas, but with pure sounds which require only correlation with themselves, and the conditions of mutual exclusion between thought and feeling no longer exist because the music is expressing thought and feeling in the same terms.1 Spencer speaks of science as full of poetry, which is true enough, but his statement about music reveals his incapacity to understand it. And his misconceptions about art in general may be illustrated by the following concerning the axis in sculpture, as applied to a standing figure:

'But sculptors unfamiliar with the theory of equilibrium not uncommonly so represent this attitude that the line of direction falls midway between the feet. Ignorance of the laws of momen

I stated in an article in the Atlantic for February, 1916, what justification there is for using the word 'intellectual' in regard to music, and I speak here of 'thought' in that sense.THE AUTHOR.

tum leads to analogous errors; as witness the admired Discobolus, which, as it is posed, must inevitably fall forward the moment the quoit is delivered.'

This observation completely misses the quite sound reasons for the pose of that remarkable statue, and, if applied to sculpture in general, would destroy the famous Victory of Samothrace, and many other fine examples of Greek sculpture.

But it is strange and mysterious, after all, that these ordered sounds should be so precious to us; that we should preserve their printed symbols generation after generation and continually reproduce them as sound, feeling them to be strong and stable and true; that we should even come to say, after many generations, that their creator was a wise man who had in him a profound philosophy. And it is stranger still to realize how convincing is this philosophy compared to any philosophy of the reason; and to see how profound, in it, is the sense of reconciliation a reconciliation which the mind seeks in vain. Our life consists of thought, feeling, and action, phenomena of what we are, and in actual life never quite reconcilable. But the world of music is not actual life. Music, 'the image of the will,' and absolved from actual phenomena, achieves by virtue of this freedom a complete and profound philosophy - a philosophy unintelligible to the mind alone, but intelligible to the complete being.

The strength of every art lies chiefly in the completeness of its detachment from reality. Sculpture does not gain by being realistic, picturesque, or decorative; on the contrary it is at its highest when it is ideal, detached and superhuman. Painting does not gain by being categorical, but is greatest when it seeks something beyond the outward, physical view. The novel or the essay depends for its greatness on its power

of relating real persons, things, and ideas to that greater and deeper reality of which they are a part. In this sense music stands supreme above the other arts because it is the most detached. The elements of thought and feeling and action are, in music, presented as elements. The thought is not thought even in the abstract, for it is not 'about' anything; the feeling is not actual feeling and the action is not real action. Each of these properties, or states, of the human being is here expressed in its essence, detached from all actual manifestation. None but the highest type of mind, none but a heart full of deep human sympathy, none but a vigorous, militant spirit, could have conceived and brought forth such compositions, for example, as the Third and Ninth symphonies of Beethoven; yet they are nothing but sound - neither the intelligence, nor the feeling, nor the action is real.

It is from this point of view, then, that I approach the symphony. I do not need now to dwell on its history, on its form, or on its means of expression, because these are merely incidental to its being a profound human document. Pure music at its highest is the will of man made manifest, and one may doubt if that will becomes fully manifest in any other of his creations. It compasses all his actions, all his thoughts, all his feelings; it translates his dreams; it satisfies his insatiable curiosities; it justifies his pride (as he himself never does); it makes him the God he would be; it is like a crystal ball, in whose mystic depths the whole of life moves in a shadow fantasy. Music does this, no less and (especially) no more.

I make this qualification because herein lies the great fallacy in listening to symphonies and other pieces of pure music. You cannot understand a symphony by trying to find out what the composer meant. Music is not a lan

guage, and cannot be translated into your own terms of speech. When a trumpet blares and you make any of the conventional associations with the trumpet, such as a battle, a hunt, a proclamation, a signal, -off goes your mind on a stream of alien ideas that may carry you anywhere and that will certainly carry you further and further away from the music itself. Each of the orchestral instruments has its own individual association; the oboe reminds you of a shepherd's pipe, the flute of a bird's song, the French horn of hunting, and so forth; but each one of the instruments in the orchestra, as you listen to it, is forming lines, as it were, in a great design. And this design, always complete at any one point, goes on unceasingly, forming itself ever and ever anew. It is always complete and always incomplete, always moving onward, always delicately poised for inevitable flight. As you listen you have lived a thousand lives; dream after dream has dissolved itself in your consciousness; each moment has been a perfect and complete existence in itself. When it is finished, you awake to what you call happiness or unhappiness, peace or struggle, satisfaction or chagrin; the unreal spectacle of the world imposes itself upon you again; you are once more a human being. Why ask that glorious world in which your nature has been freed and your soul has been disencumbered of your body, to assume all the imperfections of this one? The gods, of necessity, dwell in the heavens. No, you cannot understand music by translating it into other terms, or by preserving your associations with the world in which you live. Mind and feeling, sublimated by the magic of these sounds, must detach themselves and rise to a world of pure imagination where there is no locality.

Reconciliation! A philosophy without a category; a religion without a

dogma; an indestructible shadowworld which offers no explanations, promulgates no opinions, and has no mission - which exists completely in itself. What more shall we ask for? Why cry to the heavens for a manifestation? Why take refuge in a so-called system of philosophy? Why shuffle the whole problem off on a dogma? What comfort to a squirrel in a cage to know the number of its bars? Is our slow and inevitable progress from the unknown to the unknown any more significant because we have learned to tell our beads intellectual, religious, or æsthetic; to mumble our little formulæ and to pick our way, eyes downward, among the stones and thorns, never once glancing clear-eyed upward to the sun? We have always sought a fourth dimension, and have always had it. We want what we have not; we wish to be what we are not, and all the time it has been within our grasp. We make a far-away heaven to answer this universal cry, when our hand is on its very door-latch. Our imagination falters most when we apply it to things nearest us. Where can heaven be if not here?

This, then, is my thesis. A symphony is not merely an arrangement of rhythms, melodies, and harmonies; it is not a record of the thoughts, feelings, and deeds of men; it is not a picture of man or nature. Rather does it launch itself from these into the unknown. It is pure imagination set free from the actual.

II

The foregoing does not, in any sense, preclude that idea of a symphony which is expressible in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony. What I have said has been said for the purpose of preventing a conception of it in those terms only (and, of course, in still lower terms). Our physical hearing is a transit to the

imagination, and we want the physical hearing to serve that purpose. Nothing retards it more than an attempt at the time to intellectualize the process. In other words, listening to a symphony should consist in giving yourself freely to it, in making of yourself a passive medium. Your study of the arrangement of themes, and so forth, should precede or follow the actual experience. And if you have no leisure or opportunity for such study, and depend entirely on an occasional concert, you should nevertheless continue to pursue the same inactivity, allowing the music itself to increase your susceptibility little by little. If the mind is employed in an attempt to extricate order from confusion, it usurps for the moment the other functions of listening. And I would go so far as to say that the proper goal of a musical education should be to arrive at such a state of impressionability to pure music as would leave the mind, the feelings, and the imagination free to act subconsciously without active direction, and without struggle. The matter is so obvious. There is the music; here is the person. It awaits him. It was created of him and for him. It is inconceivable without him. It is his spirit coming back to him purified. It is the only thing he cannot sully, and which cannot sully him, for, in the very nature of it, it cannot be turned to base uses. What man would be, here he is. In making this beautiful spectacle of life, as Conrad says, he has found its only explanation.

What I have said thus far may seem of but slight assistance to the average person who attends symphony concerts. I have stated what I thought symphonic music to be, and have urged my readers not to listen to it analytically. But my purpose here is not to attempt to blaze an easy path for the music-lover; in fact I am unqualifiedly opposed to that too common practice