Music and beauty are
synonymous, just as their form and substance are indivisible.
Havelock Ellis is not the only aesthetician who sees the marriage
of music and sex. "No other art tells us such old forgotten
secrets about ourselves...It is in the mightiest of all
instincts, the primitive sex traditions of the race before man
was, that music is rooted...Beauty is the child of love." Dante
Gabriel Rossetti has imprisoned in a sonnet the almost intangible
feeling aroused by music, the feeling of having pursued in the
immemorial past the "route of evanescence."
Is it this sky's vast
vault or ocean's
sound,
That is Life's self
and draws my life from me,
And by instinct ineffable decree
Holds my breath
Quailing on the bitter bound?
Nay, is it Life or Death, thus thunder-crown'd,
That 'mid the tide of all emergency
Now notes my separate wave, and to what sea
Its difficult eddies labor in the ground?
Oh! what is this that knows the road I came,
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame,
The lifted, shifted steeps and all the way?
That draws around me at last this wind-warm space,
And in regenerate rapture turns my face
Upon the devious coverts of dismay?
During the last half of the nineteenth century two men became
rulers of musical emotion, Richard Wagner and Frederic Francois
Chopin.
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