subtle as to have been unintelligible to earlier musicians, and
unintelligible now, at first hearing, to common ears, lacking in these
finer perceptions of advanced musical endowment. It is to be noticed,
however, that these extraordinary combinations and relations of the
advanced composer occur only at remote intervals in the works of any of
the great masters. The extremely intense or dramatic or tragic is not
the staple of human life. They are incidents in a checkered and
tempest-tossed existence, and the music representing these moods is
also a little outside the range of the purely beautiful.

In one department of the higher art of music--viz., that of
symphony--there has been a working-out of the taste for the symmetric,
the well proportioned, and the agreeable sounding; in other words, the
beautiful as to proportion, charm of melody, and the satisfactory in
harmony. In symphony the tragic and the extremely dramatic have had
but a limited realization, while the purely beautiful in tonal relation
has been the main creative motive. This we find in Mozart and
Beethoven to a remarkable degree.

The general color of instrumental music, or its increasing complexity
and high flavor, has been very much influenced by the writers of songs,
as well as by the dramatic composers writing for the stage. There have
been a few great geniuses in the art of music who, while gifted with a
wide musical fantasy of their own, have taken pleasure in deriving
their inspiration from poetry, and have occupied a large part of their
time as creative composers in setting to music such lyric texts as
interested them. In this way Schubert, for example, wrote something
like 700 songs, Schumann a considerable number, and there have been
various other composers who have written extensively in this line. The
experience of the song-writer has, on the whole, been of great use to
instrumental music, since it has tended not alone to diversify the
music by encouraging a freer and more graphic employment of tonal
forms, but also to retain the melody within the compass suitable to the
voice and to preserve the agreeable proportions of phrases, such as we
already find in poetic meters. Still, the fact remains that for
intensification and for the extravagant element in the higher art of
music, the dramatic composer is the influence mainly to be thanked,
since in opera all these things are done upon so much larger a scale
and with so much greater i