on. The vast difference in the grade of the results attained is
due to the capacity of the composers. The simple man giving himself up
to reverie and being gifted with a certain amount of musical feeling,
produces a commonplace melody of serious import or of lively rhythm
according to the nature of the reverie in which he indulges. This is
to him a complete expression of his mood, and it is received as such by
others in like state.

A Bach, a Beethoven, or a Schumann, giving himself up to tonal reverie,
will also arrive at more or less symmetrical melodic forms
proportionate to the mood of the composer and the idea which he is
seeking to bring to expression; but instead of his reverie terminating
at the end of one or two periods, as is invariably the case with the
simple man (an additional idea having to be sought with much diligence
and imperfect success), he goes on for a series of periods, and perhaps
develops a quite long discourse, all having relation to the simple
conception with which he started and to a fundamental mood. It is
evident that, owing to the time consumed in writing out a musical
discourse, the high composer will not have been able to complete his
composition, or at least the written expression of it, at a single
sitting; and upon examining it we do, in fact, find it to consist of
successive chapters or paragraphs, each one of which might be taken as
the expression of a mood, and all having reference to the central mood
underlying the beginning, which by the arrangement of material
necessarily becomes the characteristic mood of the entire work.

Moreover, Bach, Beethoven, or Schumann, in bringing their tonal mood to
expression, will permit themselves all sorts of freedom in bringing
together unexpected motives, rhythms, or chords, and the result,
consequently, will be of a very different character from that attained
by the composer of simple pieces, and will, therefore, be intelligible
to those only who have the musical capacity to realize these more
remote and less obvious relations.

Our composer also will have embraced in his tonal reverie, or at least
in the extreme moments of it, all those extraordinary means of intense
musical expression which the dramatic composer may have found out in
his effort to represent the tragic and extreme moments of dramatic
complication. And thus the tendency of the musical art is constantly
toward the complex, and toward the bringing together of relations so