I Suppose There Are Two Kinds Of Music - One Kind Which
One Feels, Just As An Oyster Might, And Another Sort
Which Requires A Higher Faculty, A Faculty Which Must
Be Assisted And Developed By Teaching.
Yet if base music
gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other?
But we do.
We want it because the higher and better
like it. We want it without giving it the necessary
time and trouble; so we climb into that upper tier,
that dress-circle, by a lie; we PRETEND we like it.
I know several of that sort of people - and I propose
to be one of them myself when I get home with my fine
European education.
And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull,
Turner's "Slave Ship" was to me, before I studied art.
Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that
picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure
as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year,
when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him - and me,
now - to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural
effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame,
and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him - and me,
now - to the floating of iron cable-chains and other
unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming
around on top of the mud - I mean the water. The most of
the picture is a manifest impossibility - that is to say,
a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find
truth in a lie.
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