THE RECOGNITION OF THE SUBLIME

A LONG while ago, in a journal which I used to keep for what I hoped were important observations, I noted that in listening to music there were three phases of aesthetic pleasure. The first phase was the familiar one of sensing significance or beauty, or both, in a composition. Here one simply took delight in the work as it stood and for itself. The second and higher experience began with a sort of affectionate curiosity that took one behind the work heard into the spirit of the man who made it. This happened when, on listening to a particular work of a master, one saw, as it were, through that work into the composer's inner world. To a greater extent this called upon musical knowledge and experience, for it could hardly happen if a good many works by the same composer were not already known. If, for example, Mozart had left behind him nothing but one string quartet, one could hardly attain, from hearing this, to an experience of intimacy with the man behind the music. It would be because, while listening to a single string quartet, one was aware, bordering the experience, of a penumbra of recollections of his other work, vocal, instrumental and symphonic, that one was privileged at favourable moments to penetrate beyond it all into a kind of beatific vision of the whole world of the com-