hapes, each soul interpreting it in an
individual fashion. Music and beauty are synonymous, just as their form
and substance are indivisible.
Havelock Ellis is not the only aesthetician who sees the marriage of
music and sex. "No other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about
ourselves...It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sex
traditions of the race before man was, that music is rooted...Beauty is
the child of love." Dante Gabriel Rossetti has imprisoned in a sonnet
the almost intangible feeling aroused by music, the feeling of having
pursued in the immemorial past the "route of evanescence."
Is it this sky's vast vault or ocean's sound,
That is Life's self and draws my life from me,
And by instinct ineffable decree
Holds my breath
Quailing on the bitter bound?
Nay, is it Life or Death, thus thunder-crown'd,
That 'mid the tide of all emergency
Now notes my separate wave, and to what sea
Its difficult eddies labor in the ground?
Oh! what is this that knows the road I came,
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame,
The lifted, shifted steeps and all the way?
That draws around me at last this wind-warm space,
And in regenerate rapture turns my face
Upon the devious coverts of dismay?
During the last half of the nineteenth century two men became rulers of
musical emotion, Richard Wagner and Frederic Francois Chopin. The music
of the latter is the most ravishing gesture that art has yet made.
Wagner and Chopin, the macrocosm and the microcosm! "Wagner has made
the largest impersonal synthesis attainable of the personal influences
that thrill our lives," cries Havelock Ellis. Chopin, a young man
slight of frame, furiously playing out upon the keyboard his soul, the
soul of his nation, the soul of his time, is the most individual
composer that has ever set humming the looms of our dreams. Wagner and
Chopin have a motor element in their music that is fiercer, intenser
and more fugacious than that of all other composers. For them is not
the Buddhistic void, in which shapes slowly form and fade; their
psychical tempo is devouring. They voiced their age, they moulded their
age and we listen eagerly to them, to these vibrile prophetic voices,
so sweetly corrosive, bardic and appealing. Chopin being nearer the
soil in the selection of forms, his style and structure are more naive,
more original than Wagner's, while his medium, l
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