in positions where it could not
occur.

To say that music, too, has need of scientific aid will cause still more
surprise. Yet it may be shown that music is but an idealisation of the
natural language of emotion; and that consequently, music must be good
or bad according as it conforms to the laws of this natural language.
The various inflections of voice which accompany feelings of different
kinds and intensities, are the germs out of which music is developed. It
is demonstrable that these inflections and cadences are not accidental
or arbitrary; but that they are determined by certain general principles
of vital action; and that their expressiveness depends on this. Whence
it follows that musical phrases and the melodies built of them, can be
effective only when they are in harmony with these general principles.
It is difficult here properly to illustrate this position. But perhaps
it will suffice to instance the swarms of worthless ballads that infest
drawing-rooms, as compositions which science would forbid. They sin
against science by setting to music ideas that are not emotional enough
to prompt musical expression; and they also sin against science by using
musical phrases that have no natural relations to the ideas expressed:
even where these are emotional. They are bad because they are untrue.
And to say they are untrue, is to say they are unscientific.

Even in poetry the same thing holds. Like music, poetry has its root in
those natural modes of expression which accompany deep feeling. Its
rhythm, its strong and numerous metaphors, its hyperboles, its violent
inversions, are simply exaggerations of the traits of excited speech. To
be good, therefore, poetry must pay attention to those laws of nervous
action which excited speech obeys. In intensifying and combining the
traits of excited speech, it must have due regard to proportion--must
not use its appliances without restriction; but, where the ideas are
least emotional, must use the forms of poetical expression sparingly;
must use them more freely as the emotion rises; and must carry them to
their greatest extent, only where the emotion reaches a climax. The
entire contravention of these principles results in bombast or doggerel.
The insufficient respect for them is seen in didactic poetry. And it is
because they are rarely fully obeyed, that so much poetry is inartistic.

Not only is it that the artist, of whatever kind, cannot produce a
truthful work with