As compared with literature, music is abstract. It is independent, as literature is not, of the facts of life. But just as there is some music which approaches to the condition of literature, so there is some literature which approaches to the condition of music. Such literature, while it is concerned with the world of experience, as literature must be, is concerned with that world as symbol and not as reality. Such literature, we might say, is not concerned to illuminate the world of what we here call experience, but to reveal something about the soul of man itself--or, if we prefer scientific jargon to mystical, to deal with the normally subconscious rather than with the normally conscious. Both kinds of literature have been called realistic, but they are realistic from entirely different points of view. Dostoevsky, for instance, regarded the realism of such writers as Zola as trivial. And can _Macbeth_ be regarded as a realistic work, on the basis of the French conception of realism? _Macbeth_ is, indeed, a striking example of the extent to which literature can approach the condition of music. The whole apparatus of the play, the witches, the characters, the incidents, are so obviously not presented for their own sakes, but as symbols through which an overwhelming perception was to be conveyed. Here the fact that the literary artist must accommodate himself to the laws of the real world, that he must satisfy our sense of probability, seems hardly a hindrance. Our sense of probability is, indeed, purposely lulled by the entrance of the witches at the beginning. We are made aware that not the real world alone is concerned. In this respect the supernatural “machinery” of _Macbeth_ performs an altogether different function from that in _Hamlet_. The whole of _Hamlet_ is perfectly realistic in the tight sense. But the fact that literature must always use symbols differentiates it utterly from music. And just as we have seen that real life may present no analogies to what is revealed in music, so it may happen that the literary artist who has access to a wide and deep inner life may find no symbols, such as are essential to literary art, to convey his perceptions. Mr. T. S. Eliot has stated that _Hamlet_ is an artistic failure because the whole play, considered as presentation in terms of symbols, does not adequately convey the emotions or perceptions we confusedly feel Shakespeare is trying to express. Whether or not Mr. Eliot is correct in his instance, his general thesis is perfectly sound. Even if _Hamlet_ could be re-written so as to satisfy Mr. Eliot, it is still true that there are some perceptions, states of mind, emotions, or whatever one likes to call them, which it is very difficult to believe are expressible in literature at all. Santayana gives a neat but somewhat trivial instance in one of his essays where he says that there is no human incident or group of incidents which can serve as a