For fairly obvious reasons the psychology of Music is often regarded as more backward than that of the other arts, and the _impasse_ which has here been reached more baffling and more exasperating. But such advance as has been possible in the theory of the other arts has been mainly concerned with them as representational or as serviceable. For poetry, for painting, for architecture there still remain problems as perplexing as any which can be raised about music. For example, what is the difference between good and bad blank verse in its formal aspect, between delightful and distressing alliteration, between euphony and cacophony, between metrical triumph and metrical failure? Or in the case of Painting, why do certain forms excite such marked responses of emotion and attitude and others, so very like them geometrically, excite none or produce merely confusion? Why have colours their specific responses and how is it that their combinations have such subtle and yet definite effects? Or what is the reason that spaces and volumes in Architecture affect us as they do? These questions are at present as much without answers as any that we can raise about Music; but the fact that in these arts other questions arise which can in part be answered, whereas in Music questions about the effects of form overwhelmingly preponderate, has in part obscured the situation. Other effects are of course also involved; in programme music something analogous to representation in painting; in opera and much other music, dramatic action; and so forth. But these effects, although often contributing to the total value, are plainly subordinate in music to its more direct influence as sound alone. The difficulties which they raise have such close analogies in painting and poetry that a separate discussion may be omitted. The problem of ‘pure form’ arises, however, with peculiar insistence in music. More than forty years ago Gurney summed up the state of musical theory as follows: “When we come to actual forms, and to the startling differences of merit which the very simplest known to us present, the musical faculty defies all explanation of its action and its judgements. The only conceivable explanation indeed would be an analogy, and we know not where to look for it[55]”. And the work done since has added remarkably little. As he so admirably insisted, even though we confine ourselves to the responses of one individual, all general explanations of the musical effect apply equally to the ineffective, to the distressing and the delightful, to the admirable and the atrocious alike. But the same is true of all attempts to explain the effects upon us of any forms which neither represent something nor are in obvious ways serviceable. Whether they are forms seen or heard, whether they are made up of notes or of movements, of intervals of time or of images of speech, the same is true of them all.