Now gently gliding, now gracefully leaping, now violently
stirred, penetrated, or laboriously contending with the natural expression
of passion, the stream of sound, in primitive vivacity, bears over into
the hearer's soul unimagined moods which the artist has overheard from his
own, and finally raises him up to that repose of everlasting beauty of
which God has allowed but few of his elect favorites to be the heralds."
"There are but seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen," says Newman,
"yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings
so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master
in it create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant
inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game of
fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning?... Is it possible
that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should
be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes? Can it be that those
mysterious stirrings of the heart, and keen emotions, and strange
yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not
whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and
goes, and begins and ends in itself? it is not so; it cannot be.
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