Just as the Sun is the centre of the only system of the physical universe so far formulated--for no centre has been found to the innumerable suns of the stellar universe--so Beethoven is our temporary Absolute in the world of music. And just as the Sun is the source of all vegetable and animal life upon the earth, so I believe that in art we find the vital spirit which animates our human life. Thus it would seem to be true--as I suggested we might discover--that the function of art in the world is to create absolute values in the imagination upon which the human species can continually re-create its intellectual, moral, and physical structures. And if this is so it means that in the values of art we approach most nearly to Truth. FOOTNOTES: [4] See Mr. Harvey Grace’s excellent book on the organ works of J. S. Bach. CHAPTER VI EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE A technical analysis of the art of music as practised in Europe during the past few hundred years would be interesting, but it lies outside the scope of this book. What is relevant is to consider the emotional and intellectual significance of the music composed during that period. Folksong, from which most great composers have consciously or unconsciously drawn, is the emotional substratum of all European music. At its best it is simple, sensuous and passionate--the heart-cry of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life, whose joys are too short, or whose griefs are too enduring. Where it chiefly differs from similar, later, more sophisticated music is in the simple intensity of the emotion. In a society more subject to extreme vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it was easier, and natural, to believe that mere irresponsible “accident” or mischance separated men from happiness.[5] In a beautiful old Neapolitan song collected by Madame Geni Sadero the singer bewails the loss of his love carried off by Moorish pirates in a raid on the Italian coast. Such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody, rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest composers. These melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity, of a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment, richly provided with compensations. Any attempt at such sincerity would to-day be insincere.[6] Equally insincere would be any modern composer’s attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the Sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the Sun in a wonderful song included in the Sadero collection. In our civilized society man knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday, and that next year or the year after he may love again. It is not Moorish pirates, or the accident of plague, or the malefic interference of an unfriendly God that will bear away his happiness. It is happiness itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his