Essays Before a Sonata

, but we believe that their expression can be less vague if the basic distinction of this art-dualism is kept in mind. It is morally certain that the higher part is founded, as Sturt suggests, on

tempted definition). So it seems that "substance" is too indefinite to analyze, in more specific terms. It is practically indescribable. Intuitions (artistic or not?) will sense it-process, unknown. Perhaps it is an unexplained consciousness of being nearer God, or being nearer the devil-of approaching truth or approaching unreality-a silent something felt in the truth-of-nature in Turner against the truth-of-art in Botticelli, or in the fine thinking of Ruskin against the fine soundings of Kipling, or in the wide expanse of Titian against the narrow-expanse of Carpaccio, or in some such distinction that Pope sees between what he calls Homer's "invention" and Virgil's "judgment"-apparently an inspired imagination against an artistic care, a sense of the difference, perhaps, between Dr. Bushnell's

d. Probably nobody knows what actual beauty is-except those serious writers of humorous essays in art magazines, who accurately, but kindly, with club in hand, demonstrate for all time and men that beauty is a quadratic monomial; that it is absolute; that it is relative; that it is not relative, that it is not... The word "beauty" is as easy to use as the word "degenerate." Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you. For our part, something that Roussel-Despierres says comes nearer to what we like to think beauty is ... "an infinite source of good ... the love of the beautiful ... a constant anxiety for moral beauty." Even here we go around in a circle-

over that in two separate pieces of music in which the notes are almost identical, one can be of "substance" with little "manner," and the other can be of "manner" with little "substance.