prolonging and sustaining power of it, and
the symbol of its moral passion. Whatever in music is measured and
designed belongs therefore to Apollo and the Muses; whatever is impulsive
and passionate, to Athena; hence her constant strength a voice or cry (as
when she aids the shout of Achilles) curiously opposed to the dumbness of
Demeter. The Apolline lyre, therefore, is not so much the instrument
producing sound, as its measurer and divider by length or tension of
string into given notes; and I believe it is, in a double connection with
its office as a measurer of time or motion and its relation to the
transit of the sun in the sky, that Hermes forms it from the
tortoise-shell, which is the image of the dappled concave of the cloudy
sky. Thenceforward all the limiting or restraining modes of music belong
to the Muses; but the more passionate music is wind music, as in the
Doric flute. Then, when this inspired music becomes degraded in its
passion, it sinks into the pipe of Pan, and the double pipe of Marsyas,
and is then rejected by Athena. The myth which represents her doing so
is that she invented the double pipe from hearing the hiss of the
Gorgonian serpents; but when she played upon it, chancing to see her face
reflected in water, she saw that it was distorted, whereupon she threw
down the flute which Marsyas found. Then, the strife of Apollo and
Marsyas represents the enduring contest between music in which the words
and thought lead, and the lyre measures or melodizes them (which Pindar
means when he calls his hymns "kings over the lyre"), and music in which
the words are lost and the wind or impulse leads,--generally, therefore,
between intellectual, and brutal, or meaningless, music. Therefore, when
Apollo prevails, he flays Marsyas, taking the limit and external bond of
his shape from him, which is death, without touching the mere muscular
strength, yet shameful and dreadful in dissolution.

42. And the opposition of these two kinds of sound is continually dwelt
upon by the Greek philosophers, the real fact at the root of all music is
the natural expression of a lofty passion for a right cause; that in
proportion to the kingliness and force of any personality, the expression
either of its joy or suffering becomes measured, chastened, calm, and
capable of interpretation only by the majesty of ordered, beautiful, and
worded sound. Exactly in proportion to the degree in which we become
narrow in the cau