Their images live in the imagination of man, vivid, individual, unique. We have no such image of Frohberger’s music. It is a shrivelled, meaningless ghost, a letter in the alphabet of music, which has in itself no life. Frohberger’s music is not like the Great Auk, an isolated death-shape of the physical world, nor like the Centaur, an isolated death-shape of the intellectual world, its position in music is that of one of those intermediates which, like the “missing link,” can never be found because the mind works _per saltum_. Frohberger and the “missing link” are for ever lost in the gaps. All that is without residuary value, all that has been completely incorporated in a new structure disappears thus because it slips through the mesh of the mind--not because the mind is not fine enough to retain the most minute differences, but because it chooses not to perceive. This reconciles the pre-Bach existence of Frohberger’s music with its present non-existence and delivers us from the apparent contradiction; for it allows us to make what is, philosophically, a necessary assumption, namely, that no two things are ever exactly the same, and consequently that Bach’s music does not contain Frohberger’s music absolutely. Therefore the equation is not: Bach = B(ach) + F(rohberger) but Bach = B + (F-X) X being that unknown quantity which is Frohberger’s uniqueness and which we to-day cannot perceive. But although art feeds on knowledge as life feeds on death at the same time creating more knowledge, as life creates more death--_Ecstasy clothing Himself in Forms_--yet there remains much that is mysterious. Why there are different forms of art is a question which insistently recurs. A comparison of music with the other arts in order to discover a value specific and exclusive to music is not likely to enlighten us. Painters talk of “pictorial construction” as the specifically painter’s element which in all good graphic art is wedded to the illustration, psychology, representation or whatever other content a picture may yield, be it ancient or modern. They point out that the spectator is not emotionally moved by the representation of tears but by the rhythm of lines and the recession of planes. The good writer knows that a description of a sad event is not in itself saddening, it may even be comic; but unlike the painter he has no technical term for this essential quality without which literature is mere verbiage--unless, indeed, we apply the word “poetic” to this quality, as we have every right to do. Painting which is without this vital element--call it “pictorial representation,” “significant form,” or what you will--is not art but knowledge or science.[3] Literature which is without this “poetic” quality is, again, mere knowledge, mere fiction. We have no need to seek for examples. A dozen famous names leap to our minds. Rather have we to seek for that literature which is poetic.