it was the same: l'Après midi d'un faune had its foundation in Mallarmé; La Mer, Nocturnes, Ibéria, in nature herself. It may be generally observed, indeed, that musicians who use the pen to write prose or poetry, usually go outside music itself to search for the inspiration for their music. This is as true of Richard Wagner, Cyril Scott, and Edward MacDowell as it is of Liszt and Berlioz.
But what about rhythm? What about the so-called musical quality in good literature? In The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde says: "Since the introduction of printing and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes there has been a tendency to appeal more and more to the eye and less and less to the ear, which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the work of Mr. Pater . . . is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music. We, in fact, have made writing a definite mode of composition and have located it as a form of design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a means of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its musical and rhetorical relation. The voice was the medium and the ear the critic. . . . When Milton could
