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If we compare music with painting or sculpture we find much the same contrast. Just as music does not mean anything in the sense that words do, so it has no “subject” in the sense that Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire has, or Donatello’s David. It does not deal with objects. It cannot portray a ship or a star. It may seem to float, it may flash for a moment, but it does not describe or set forth. Furthermore, it cannot, strictly speaking, give expression to ideas. It may be so serious, so ordered, so equable—as in Bach—that we say its composer was a philosopher, but no item of his philosophy appears. Above all it is unmoral,ssss1 and without belief or dogma. Too much stress can hardly be laid on this negative quality in music, for it is in this very disability that its greatest virtue lies. I shall refer later to the frequent tendency among listeners to avoid facing this problem by attaching meanings of their own to the music they hear. I need only note in passing that these so-called “meanings” seldom agree, and that the habit is the result either of ignorance of the true office of music, or of mental lassitude toward it. “It is not enough to enjoy yourself over a work of art,” says Joubert; “you must enjoy it.”