I THE ARTS OF FORM I The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical- scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form,[272] of which the number is legion. _And with these arts we count music_ in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of art-historical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the _wordless_[273] arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could so over-estimate the influence of _physiological_ conditions as to apply it to expression, conception or communion. A “singing” picture of Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the bodily eye any more than the space- straining music since Bach addresses itself to the bodily ear. The Classical relation between art-work and sense-organ—of which we so often and so erroneously remind ourselves here—is something quite different from, something far simpler and more material than ours. We _read_ “Othello” and “Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change one sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un- Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of “Faust” itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content) is physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A capella” of the Palestrina style as well as _a fortiori_ in the Passions of Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience _behind_ the sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be present to us, and it is only mediately—through the images of blond, brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked mountain-summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us—that it tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote his last works when he was deaf—deafness merely released him from the last fetters. For this music,