ways of the world before the voice
of the one in the wilderness, and before 'Comfort ye my people, etc.'
Mozart, I agree with you, is the most universal musical genius: Beethoven
has been too analytical and erudite: but his inspiration is nevertheless
true. I have just read his Life by Moscheles: well worth reading. He
shewed no very decided preference for music when a child, though he was
the son of a composer: and I think that he was, strictly speaking, more
of a thinker than a musician. A great genius he was somehow. He was
very fond of reading: Plutarch and Shakespeare his great favourites. He
tried to think in music: almost to reason in music: whereas perhaps we
should be contented with _feeling_ in it. It can never speak very
definitely. There is that famous 'Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, etc.,'
in Handel: nothing can sound more simple and devotional: but it is only
lately adapted to these words, being originally (I believe) a love song
in Rodelinda. Well, lovers adore their mistresses more than their God.
Then the famous music of 'He layeth the beams of his chambers in the
waters, etc.,' was originally fitted to an Italian pastoral song--'Nasce
al bosco in rozza cuna, un felice pastorello, etc.' That part which
seems so well to describe 'and walketh on the wings of the wind' falls
happily in with 'e con l'aura di fortuna' with which this pastorello
sailed along. The character of the music is ease and largeness: as the
shepherd lived, so God Almighty walked on the wind. The music breathes
ease: but words must tell us who takes it easy. Beethoven's Sonata--Op.
14--is meant to express the discord and gradual atonement of two lovers,
or a man and his wife: and he was disgusted that every one did not see
what was meant: in truth, it expresses any resistance gradually
overcome--Dobson shaving with a blunt razor, for instance. Music is so
far the most universal language, that any one piece in a particular
strain symbolizes all the analogous phenomena spiritual or material--if
you can talk of spiritual phenomena. The Eroica symphony describes the
battle of the passions as well as of armed men. This is long and muddy
discourse: but the walls of Charlotte Street present little else,
especially during this last week of Lent, to twaddle about. The
Cambridge Dons have been up in town for the Easter vacation: so we have
smoked and talked over Peacock, Whewell, etc. Alfred is busy preparing a
new volume for the