Passage (Walter Pater, *The Renaissance*, 1873, from "The School of Giorgione"): "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance — its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture — the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling; that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees." Pater's use of music as a standard or *condition* serves principally to:
Aargue that other arts should imitate the technical methods of musical composition.
Blament that the other arts are doomed to fall short of music's achievement.
Cname an art in which the unity of matter and form is most fully realised, against which other arts can be measured.
Dsuggest that music is the only art with no real subject matter or content.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: C. name an art in which the unity of matter and form is most fully realised, against which other arts can be measured.
Pater claims music is the *condition* the other arts *aspire towards*. He chooses music because in music it is hardest to peel off a *subject* from its sounding form — the two are unusually inseparable. Music thus functions as a **standard of achieved fusion** that the rest of the passage uses as a yardstick.
- **A** mistakes the comparison for an injunction to imitate technique. Pater is talking about a quality (matter-form fusion), not techniques.
- **B** misreads *aspires towards* as failure. *Aspiring* is a positive ongoing project that art *achieves in different degrees*, not a hopeless quest.
- **D** is the closest distractor but it overstates: Pater is not saying music has no content, only that in music the content cannot easily be separated from the form.
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