"I could imagine a music whose rarest charm should consist in its complete divorce from the Good and the Bad;--only that its surface might be ruffled, as it were, by a longing as of a sailor for home, by variable golden shadows and tender frailties:--an Art which should see fleeing toward it, from afar off, the hues of a perishing moral world become wellnigh incomprehensible, and which should be hospitable and profound enough to harbor such belated fugitives."
And Tolstoi transmutes a landscape-impression into a musical impression when he writes, in "Lucerne": "Neither on the lake, nor on the mountains, nor in the skies, a single straight line, a single unmixed color, a single point of repose;--everywhere movement, irregularity, caprice, variety, an incessant interplay of shades and lines, and in it all the reposefulness, softness, harmony and inevitableness of Beauty."
"Not all reach Nirvana; but he who, gifted from the beginning, learns everything that one ought to learn, experiences all that one should experience, renounces what one should renounce, develops what one should develop, realizes what one should realize--he shall reach Nirvana."[R] (Kern, _Geschichte des Buddhismus in Indien_.)
[R] As if anticipating my thoughts, M. Vincent d'Indy has just written me: "... laissant de côté les contingences et les petitesses de la vie pour regarder constamment vers un idéal qu'on ne pourra jamais atteindre, mais dont il est permis de se rapprocher."
If Nirvana be the realm "beyond the Good and the Bad," _one_ way leading thither is here pointed out. A way to the very portal. To the bars that divide Man from Eternity--or that open to admit that which was temporal. Beyond that portal sounds _music_. Not the strains of "musical art."[S]--It may be, that we must leave Earth to find that music. But only to the pilgrim who has succeeded on the way in freeing himself from earthly shackles, shall the bars open.
[S] I think I have read, somewhere, that Liszt confined his Dante Symphony to the two movements, _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, "because our tone-speech is inadequate to express the felicities of Paradise."
FEELING--like honesty--is a moral point of honor, an attribute of whose possession no one will permit denial, which claims a place in life and art alike. But while, in life, a want of feeling may be forgiven to the possessor of a more brilliant attribute, such as bravery or impartial justice, in art feeling is held to be the highest moral qualification.