[6] Amphora cepit Institui, currente rota cur urceus exit?--_Hor. Ad Pisones._
In all the works of the great composers of the modern school--the only real school--of music, from Bach to Beethoven, including Haydn, there is a supreme dominant feeling for beauty of form, shown chiefly in melody, but hardly less apparent in harmony. Indeed, without this feeling they would not have been great. The rule is absolute: no form, no art; for art is proportion, symmetry. Melody is a series of musical proportions; like a series of arches the lines of which are harmonious. These melodic ideas they elaborated with the utmost care. It is generally supposed that ideas in art come spontaneously; and of all this might seem truest of musical ideas, which are not, like those expressed in language, in painting, in sculpture, or in architecture, required to conform themselves to a type or a purpose. They do come indeed to the musical artist, but not spontaneously in the form in which he presents them. They would not come up if they were not in the soil; but the soil must be cultivated and the growth must be pruned and trained into seeming naturalness and spontaneousness of beauty. Milton's lines--
Where the bright seraphim in burning row Their loud, uplifted angel trumpets blow--
seem like a splendid spontaneous outburst of poetical expression. But we know that their splendor and their spontaneous seeming is the result of elaboration, of erasure, of interlineation, of recasting. The thought we may believe came in a moment, but it was worked with consummate care and art into the form in which the poet gave it to the world. So it is even with melody, the most spontaneous-seeming part of music. We may be sure that even Mozart, most fertile of all composers in melody, the greatest master of instrumentation, elaborated his themes and his treatment of them, if not on paper, at least in his mind before he put his conceptions into score. And the reason, the occasion for this elaboration was the desired attainment of the highest possible perfection of form. I need hardly say to any musician that I am not speaking of technical form, either of harmonic progression or of the cast of a composition, as for example the sonata form, the symphonic form, the dramatic form, but of the form of intrinsic absolute value which appeals to the general craving for and appreciation of beauty. This beauty of form cannot be disregarded in any art without failure to attain the highest place in the world's estimation, no matter how marvellous and admirable the powers displayed in another direction. For lack of this excellence Rembrandt can never take the highest place, but must be content with the admiration of those who can appreciate his mastery of manipulation, a technical excellence. Of all great painters, Turner is most imperfect in this respect. But Turner can hardly be said to have dealt with form at all. Hence a certain weakness amid all his glory. He painted distance, light. Among painters he is the king of space, the prince of the powers of the air.