All forms of artistic expression, then, require that we shall see the object not as fact but as art. If it is fact--that is, merely an isolated object or event--it remains insignificant until some artist catches it up into the wider realm in which it belongs and sets it forth in some form of beauty. If we accept this conception of all the arts as seeking the inner sense of things, as portraying life in its essence rather than in its outward manifestations, we shall be able to understand the peculiar power of music. It becomes then, not merely a series of sounds arranged so as to be euphonious and pleasing to the ear, but a book of life which contains the ultimate expression of our instinct and of our wisdom. The Third Symphony of Beethoven, for example, gives us a more convincing presentment of heroic struggle than is to be found in the other arts or in literature, first, because it has the power to present it in the element of time, which is an essential part of any heroic deed; second, because it presents it as a quality disassociated from a particular heroism and therefore elevated into a type and made eternal; and third, because it presents it in conjunction with those other qualities without which there can be no heroism at all. (For no quality in life or element in nature exists for us save as the opposite or reverse of something else. What we call light is comprehensible only as the opposite of darkness; love is the opposite of hate, cold of heat, and so forth.) Each of the other arts has one or two of these qualities; none has all of them. The novelist, for example, can use the first and last but not the second. Meredith’s “Vittoria” is an ideal presentment of the struggle for Italian unity, but the heroism which constitutes the essence of the book has to find expression through actual persons. So the greatest virtue of music lies not alone in its peculiar unification of matter and manner, its artistic perfection, but in the power which that gives it to create a world not based on the outward and the visible, but on that invisible realm of thought, feeling, and aspiration which is our real world. For if there is any one certain historical fact, it is that from the earliest times until now man has continually sought some escape from reality, some building up of a perfect world of ideal beauty which should still his eternal dissatisfaction with the imperfections and inconsistencies of his own life. It is in the very nature of his situation that he should seek some perfection somewhere. So he has tried to paint this perfection on canvas, idealizing life and nature into a satisfying form of beauty; or he has carved a physical perfection in marble to deify himself and give himself a place in nature; or he has built up for himself a world of magical words in which all his noblest dreams strive for expression. Everywhere and always he has had this dream, which has saved him when all else failed.