Love in Art

THE LOVE between man and woman has been told in story and poem since long before the days of Sappho. It forms, indeed, the subject of the great bulk of what we call literature. In music, love's domain is less extended. With the exception song and the opera, most of the greatest music has, in its title at least, no hint of the great heart historyof human kind.

In this respect the plastic arts are more allied to music than to literature. The masterpieces in painting and sculpture generally not labelled love stories. It is possible, to be sure, to interpret some of them tilla half hidden love suggestion appears, made more beautiful, perhaps, by its very obscurity.

But this is exactly what poetic minds frequently attempt when listening to the great sonatas and symphonies. The composer may have meant something of what the musical psychic thinks he finds; or he may never have dreamed of expressing anything except purely musical thoughts, inexpressible in words.

There is, indeed, more than fancy in the claim that sound and color has each its own language with which it conveys its message to the initiated, strengthened, rather than limited, when words fail properly interpret it.