like accident must at first have opened up to us.[1] Apart from this imaginative operation upon physical things, our fancy in the realm of music could have done as good as nothing.
And in principle it is the same with all the arts. All the material and the physical process which the artist uses — take our English language as used in poetry for an example — has been elaborated and re fined, and, so to speak, consecrated by ages of adaptation and application in which it has been fused and blended with feeling — and it carries the life-blood of all this endeavour in its veins; and that is how, as we have said over and over again, feelings get their embodiment, and embodiments get their feeling. If you try to cut the thought and fancy loose from the body of the stuff in which it moulds its pictures and poetic ideas and musical constructions, you impoverish your fancy, and arrest its growth, and reduce it to a bloodless shade. When I pronounce even
- ↑ This applies even to the development of song, so far as that involves a musical system.
