There is much music, of course, which suggests no such mystical fancies. With most of Wagner’s music, for instance, there is no hint of other worlds, but rather a gorgeous colouring of this one--or of those aspects of this one which excite romantic poets with strong bodily appetites who can assume the background of the vigorous material prosperity of the nineteenth century. Such music is fully comparable with a certain kind of literature; all it lacks is the definiteness of statement, and hence the intellectual clarity, which the use of language affords. It may be even more powerful and subtle than literature can be--_Tristan und Isolde_ expresses certain emotions with immense adequacy. But it is not doing something which music alone can do; and, for that reason, it throws very little light on the peculiar problem of music. For the peculiar problem of music consists in its independence, in its power of transporting us to a world which is not otherwise revealed. To Schopenhauer, to whom both the world and music were embodiments of the same Will, there was a musical equivalent for every experience; and, it would seem to follow, for every musical utterance there is a corresponding experience. The two worlds are independent, but there exists between them, as a mathematician would say, a one-to-one correspondence. Yet he very strangely goes on to accept the theory that a musical utterance is a kind of generalisation of a number of distinct experiences. He points out that the musical setting of a poem, for instance, will serve for a number of similar poems. It is the “kernal” of all these poems which is given directly by the music. But it is equally true that the same poem will serve for several musical settings. When Beethoven, as one of sixty-three composers, composed his setting of Carpani’s poem “In questa tomba oscura,” he probably composed the best setting, since it is the only one that has survived; but among the other sixty-two there must have been many which, in Schopenhauer’s phrase, were expressions of the “kernal” of the poem. The fact seems to be that, unless music is deliberately illustrative, it is not concerned with what is otherwise expressible. That is why musicians are always dissatisfied with “literary” descriptions of music. However good in their own kind they may be, they are always felt to be irrelevant and even, in some way, a degradation of the actual musical utterance. It is felt that they exhibit a certain insensitiveness or lack of taste, as in that curiously popular image which likens twin hills to a woman’s breasts.