“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For the aim of all art is to express the individual, to express something of the secret or the mysterious element in his own experience. But the individual’s experience is largely a matter of emotion, and emotion, like music, is something that is not bound by words or concrete images; it is something that transcends form, escaping from the definite and the particular into the more universal realm of feeling and impression. Music, therefore, being an art that is essentially abstract, is the highest of the arts in the sense that it can most directly convey this emotional truth. It is the ideal to which all art aspires.”
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)