ply because it deals with clang-tints and not with more definite symbols,[1] is not, as Cecil Forsythe has shown us, inspired by great deeds, by political confusion, by mercantile progress, by social intercourse. War never inspires great music, and England and America have produced less good music than Finland and Scandinavia, not to speak of Bohemia and Italy! The great Beethoven wandered alone, and he wrote some of his finest music after he became stone-deaf. The musical artist, indeed, shut up in a garret, may derive his masterpiece through an orphic process of introspection. There is no need for him even to read; an illiterate composer is a possible figure. "The song, the fugue, the sonata have absolutely no analogues in the world of Nature," writes W. H. Hadow. "Their basis is psychological, not physical, and in them the artist is in direct touch with his idea, and presents it to us, as it were, first hand. Given sound as the plastic medium, Music asks nothing more: it creates its subjects by the spontaneous activity of the mind." And W. F. Apthorp remarks: "The bonds which hold Painting, Sculpture, and Poetry fast to Nature are far tougher and of more inexorable grip than any connection discoverable between Nature and Music. . . . We may safely assert
- ↑ Every good musician, as a matter of fact, speaks a distinct language of his own.
