listener, sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board, and
rouses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist. Enriched by
this new contribution, the emotional complex resounds back to the
violinist, intensifying his original "feeling-state." In its
heightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator, "and so on,
back and forth, growing in stimulating power at each recoil. The whole
process is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis, with the opponents
closing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster
with every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure.
'Social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing." This,
briefly told, is what passes between the player of music and his
creative listener.

In application this principle does not by any means stop with
performing or composing music or with the fine arts. It goes on to
embrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the
fiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not too
much to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself
adequately expressed without the cooeperation of this social resonance,
without the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognized
partners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy.

Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few who
understand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your
own thankworthiness. Our children shall rise up and call you blessed.
For in your quiet way, you have helped to create the world's
creators--the preachers, prophets, captains, artists, discoverers, and
seers of the ages. To these, you, unrecognized and unawares, have been
providing the very sinews of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality,
and insight.

What made the game of art so brilliant in the age of Pericles? It was
not star playing by individuals. It was steady, consistent team-work
by the many. Almost every one of the Athenians who were not masters
were masters by proxy. In "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"
Chamberlain holds that Greek culture derived its incomparable charm
from "a peculiar harmony of greatness"; and that "if our poets are not
in every respect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, that is not
the fault of their talent, but of those who surround them." Only
imagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean atmosphere!
It must have been as exhilarating as coasting down in