n becomes a debauch; it leaves the soul less
capable of habitual harmony. Especially is such extreme tension
disastrous when, as in music, nothing remains to be the fruit of that
mighty victory; the most pregnant revelation sinks to an illusion and is
discredited when it cannot maintain its inspiration in the world's
presence. Everything has its own value and sets up its price; but others
must judge if that price is fair, and sociability is the condition of
all rational excellence. There is therefore a limit to right complexity
in music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by its
place in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, is
altogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturally
place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music
needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the
few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music
is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is
voluptuousness or fashion, and not music itself.

[Sidenote: Wonders of musical structure.]

Beneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectual
essence. Out of simple chords and melodies, which at first catch only
the ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal also
to the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may
be compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque
that has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to
form, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot
do violence to it by its complex artifices--these are types of pure
living, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life with
order, precision with spontaneity; the flux in them has become
rhythmical and its freedom has passed into a rational choice, since it
has come in sight of the eternal form it would embody. The musician,
like an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than they
from material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth;
every step opens up new vistas, every decision--how unlike those made in
real life!--multiplies opportunities, and widens the horizon before him,
without preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at any
point, to trace the other possible paths leading thence through various
magic landscapes. Pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is
balanced by its entir