Music criticism usually divides itself automatically into two classes. In the one, the critic, whose emotions have ostensibly been aroused by poems in tone, tries to render to the reader the intensity of his feelings by quoting from the word poets. The first line of Endymion and passages from Shakespeare fall athwart his pages. Scarcely a musical note but has its literary echo. The music of Maurice Ravel reminds this unimaginative scribe of verses from Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue; snippets and snatches from Keats and Wordsworth serve admirably to evoke the spirit of almost any composer; I have found Walt Whitman linked with Edward MacDowell; Milton and Handel are occasionally made to seem to speak the same language; Byron and Tchaikovsky are asked to walk hand in hand. If you have never heard Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, it may afford you some small consolation to find it tied up in the reviewer's mind with something like this:
On the light fantastic toe."
