Similarly in music there is a specific, purely musical quality without which music also is mere science. This quality I will call melodic imagination. And here an interesting fact emerges. In all three arts the valuable element, the element of life is linked with the imagination. In painting pictorial imagination, in literature verbal imagination, in music melodic imagination--_imagination_ always is the magical essence, the power referred to in the lines: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” And we may be sure that there can be no art unless the word is made flesh--in the forms of painting, literature, or music--and dwells among us. But when we ask ourselves why it should take the form of painting or of words, or of music, it is impossible to give an answer. We can only echo: Why the lily, the rose, the violet? Why the tiger, the elephant, the antelope? Why the Moon, Venus, and the Stars? _Ecstasy clothing Himself in Forms._ And still we have failed to discover in music any principle of progress other than increasing complexity of organization and a multiplication of lovely deaths. A principle which does not as yet satisfy our instincts since it seems quantitative rather than qualitative. But perhaps we are on the verge of a discovery. FOOTNOTES: [3] Such according to eminent critics is the work of the painter Sargent and, for my part, I have no difficulty in seeing that what they say is just. CHAPTER V ABSOLUTE VALUE