The essay on the “School of Giorgione” is a later work (1877), but it will be well to consider it here. It is an elaborate composition, and shows a tendency to return to metaphysical speculation, or rather to interfuse a metaphysical tinge into artistic perception. He lays down the principle that the quality of the particular medium of a work of art is what it is necessary to discern, and that it is a mistake to blend the appeal of different methods of artistic expression. “All art,” he says in an italicised sentence, showing that he is laying it down as an established maxim, “_constantly aspires towards the condition of music_,” because music is the only art which makes its appeal through pure form, while all other art tends to have the motive confused by the matter, by the subject which it aims at reproducing. “Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed,” he adds, “is the true type or measure of perfected art.” The attitude of Giorgione, his distinctive quality, lies, according to Pater, in the fact that “he is the inventor of _genre_, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching—little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape—morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar.” But one of the chief points of interest in the essay is that Pater devotes more space to his perception of music than he does in any other place. Giorgione himself was, according to traditions, an admirable musician, and musical scenes are made the motive of many of his pictures, or of those attributed to him: “music heard at the pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the flocks; the tuning of instruments—people with intent faces, as if listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves infinitely, in the appetite for sweet sound—a momentary touch of an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some unfamiliar room, in a chance company.” But the essay is not perhaps quite as lucid as some of the earlier work; the tendency to construct long involved sentences, full of parentheses, is here apparent; it gives one the impression of a vague musical modulation, which, beautiful in its changes, its relations, lacks the crispness and certainty of precise form.