on to the strings and makes them fly asunder; that, while Kreisler
spoke, our music can only play its fancies and whimsies; and that,
instead of hearing intelligible spoken words, we hear only musical
sounds which are gibberish and chaos.

For the time when men sought in music only for music's own loveliness
is gone by; and the time has come when all the arts trespass on each
other's ground, and, worst of all, when the arts which can give and show
envy poetry, the art which can neither give nor show but only suggest,
and when, for the sake of such suggestion, they would cheat us of all
the real gifts--gifts of noble forms of line and colour, and sweet woofs
of melody and harmony which they once gave us. The composer now wishes
to make you see and feel all that he sees and feels in his imagination,
the woods and seas, the joys and sorrows, all the confused day-dreams,
sweet and drowsy, all the nightmare orgies which may pass through his
brain; the sound has become the mere vehicle for this, the weak, vague
language which he can only stammer and we can only divine; the artist
breaks violently against the restraint of form, thinking to attain the
unattainable beyond its limits, and sinks down baffled and impotent
amidst ruin.

We are apt to think of music as of a sort of speech until, on
examination, we find it has no defined meaning either for the speaker or
for the listener. In reality, music and speech are as different and as
separate as architecture and painting, as wholly opposed to each other
as only those two things can be which, having started from the same
point, have travelled in completely opposite directions, like the two
great rivers which, originating on the same alp, flow respectively to
the north, and to the south, each acquiring a separate character on its
way--the one as the blue river of Germany, ending amidst the tide-torn
sandbanks of the North Sea; the other as the green river of Provence,
dying amidst the stagnant pools and fever-haunted marshes of the
Mediterranean. As long as the Rhine and the Rhone are not yet Rhine and
Rhone, but merely pools of snow-water among the glaciers, so long are
they indistinguishable; but as soon as separated into distinct streams,
their dissimilarity grows with every mile of their diverging course.
So as to speech and music: as long as both exist only in embryo in the
confused cries and rude imitations of the child or of the primitive
people, they cannot be distingu