VI.

THE COMPOSER lives in a world apart, into which only those who have the golden key are admitted. The golden key is not the sense of hearing, but what is called an "Ear for Music." Even then half the treasures of the composer's world may be as dead letters to the vulgar or untrained, just as a village school-boy who can read fluently might roam, with an unappreciative gape, through the library of the British Museum. The composer's world is the world of emotion, full of delicate elations and depressions, which, like the hum of minute insects, hardly arrest the uncultivated ear-full of melodious thunder, and rolling waters, and the voice of the south windwithout charm for the many who pass by. Full of intensity, like the incessant blaze of Eastern lightning -full of velocity, like the trailing fire of the falling stars-full of variety, like woodlands smitten by the breath of autumn, or the waste of many colours changing and iridescent upon a sunset sea. emotions which such images are calculated to arouse in the hearts of those who are prepared to entertain them, the composer, who has studied well the secrets of his art, can excite through the medium of sound alone; formless emotions are his friends. Intimately do the spirits of the air, called into existence by the pulsing vibrations of melody and harmony, converse with him. They are the familiars that he can send forth speeding

The

to all hearts with messages too subtle for words,sometimes sparkling with irresistible mirth, at others wild with terror and despair, or filled with the sweet whispers of imperishable consolation. All this, and far more than any words can utter, was to be done, and has been done for man, by music. But not suddenly, or at once and altogether, as the first rude attempts, still extant and familiar to most of us in the shape of Gregorian chants, live to attest.

As the early violin-makers, by long lives of solitary toil and intense thought, slowly discovered the perfect lines and exquisite proportions which make the violins of Stradiuarius the wonder of the world; as the various schools of painting in Italy brought to light, one by one, those elements of form, colour, and chiaroscuro which are found united, with incomparable richness and grace, in the master-pieces of Raphael, Tintoret, and Titian-so did the great maestros of the sixteenth century begin to arrange the rudiments of musical sound in combinations, not merely correct according to the narrow code of melody and harmony suggested by a few leading properties of vibration and the natural divisions of the scale, but in studied and sympathetic relations adapted to the ever-changing, complex, and subtle emotions of the heart. About the time that Italian painting reached its acme of splendour, the dawn of modern music-that form of art which was destined to succeed painting, as painting had succeeded architecture-had already begun. Palestrina, to whom

we

owe modern melody, and whose harmonies enchanted even Mozart and Mendelssohn, when they first heard them in the Pope's chapel at Rome, was born in 1524, nine years after the death of Raphael. In two hundred and fifty years from that date, the delights of melody, the depths and resources of harmony had been explored. The powers of the human voice, the capacities of stringed instruments, every important variety of wind instrument, the modern organ, and the pianoforte, had been discovered. Music could no longer be called a terra incognita. When Mozart died, all its great mines, as far as we can see, had at least been opened. We are not aware that any important instrument has been invented since his day, or that any new form of musical composition has made its appearance. Innumerable improvements in the instrumental department have been introduced, and doubtless the forms of Symphony, Cantata, Opera, and Cabinet music, bequeathed to us by the great masters of the eighteenth century, have been strangely elaborated by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, and are even now undergoing startling modifications in the hands of Wagner and his disciples. It is not for us to say in what direction the rich veins of ore will be found still further to extend, or what undiscovered gems may yet lie in the rivers, or be embedded in the

mountain ranges of the musical cosmos. But we may safely affirm that for all purposes of inquiry into the rationale or into the moral properties of music, we are at this moment as much in possession of the full and

sufficient facts as we ever shall be; and therefore we see no reason why inquiries, to which every other Art has been fully and satisfactorily subjected, should be any longer deferred in the case of Music.

The difference between "tweedle-dum and tweedledee" has always been a subject of profound mystery to the unmusical world; but the musical world is undoubtedly right in feeling strongly upon the subject, though unhappily often wrong when trying to give its reasons. It is quite impossible for any one, who has thoughtfully and sympathetically studied the different schools of music, not to feel that one style and conception of the art is nobler than another. That certain methods of using musical sound are affected, or extravagant, or fatiguing, or incoherent, whilst others are dignified, natural, or really pathetic, arranging and expressing the emotions in a true order, representing no vamped-up passion, but passion as it is, with its elations, depressions, intensities, velocities, varieties, and infinitely fine inflexions of form. Between the spirit of the musical Sentimentalist and the musical Realist there is eternal war. The contest may rage under different captains. At one time it is the mighty Gluck, who opposes the ballad-mongering Piccini; at another, it is the giant Handel versus the melodramatic Bononcini; or it is Mozart against all France and Italy; or Beethoven against Rossini; or Wagner against the world. In each case the points at issue are, or are supposed by the belligerents to be, substan

tially the same. False emotion, or abused emotion, or frivolous emotion, versus true feeling, disciplined feeling, or sublime feeling. Musicians perhaps cannot always explain how music is capable of the above radical distinctions-granted. I am concerned just now with this remarkable fact-the distinction exists in their minds. They arrange the German, the Italian, French, and the Franco-German schools in a certain order of musical merit and importance; there is a fair general agreement about what this order should be; and, perhaps without knowing why, an enlightened musician would no more compare Rossini to Beethoven, or Gounod to Mozart, than a literary critic would speak of Thomas Moore in the same breath with Shakspeare, or place Boucicault by the side of Schiller.

The reason of the superiority of the modern German school from Gluck to Schumann, over the French and Italian, we believe to be a real and substantial one; although, owing to the extraordinary nature of the connection between sound and emotion, it is far more. easy to feel than to explain the distinction between a noble and an ignoble school of music. This difference, however, we believe consists entirely in the view takon of the emotions and the order and spirit in which they are evoked and manipulated by the composer's magical art. Towards the close of the seventeenth century, in Italy, music began to feel its great powers as an emotional medium. The great musical works were then