“Well,” she said, “‘Scots wha’ ha’ wi’ Wallace bled’ is partisan.”
“No,” I answered, “it is martial, but it gives the foe his due. ‘Break proud Edward’s power.’ That, it seems to me, is a tribute to Edward.”
At first they dissented, but finally agreed with me that most martial poems—all great ones—give the enemy his due. Marian spoke, in this relation, of Homer.
We considered high-falutin style and books that are all climax, without rhythm and reservations of strength, unlike life, which is all heartbeats and pulsations. Florence told of a book which had “six climaxes on every page.” I spoke of the conventional phrases which mar style, because we feel them to be imitated.
“No,” I answered; “and originality simply means truth in the writer.”
“We feel,” said Virginia, “that he didn’t take the trouble to think for himself.” Then she spoke of having been made, in school, to compare the like thoughts of different authors, and asked whether their being alike made them less original.
“No,” I answered, “for two might see life in the same way, each for himself.”
I went on to speak of music. “To me,” I said, “it seems the most perfect of arts, because it is in itself harmony, the very word we associate with this idea of completeness. I don’t know much of the laws of musical composition, but I know they are the laws of rhythm and harmony, the laws of all motion. Of course, it is figurative to speak of the music of the stars, and yet in a sense their motion is music, because it follows the laws of music. Music is the least definite of all arts, yet the most real and near. It arouses our emotions as nothing else can do.”
Most of them felt as I, that music was most gripping in its effects. Marian, however, did not, since she is not at all musical. I spoke of words and intellectual ideas in relation to music. Virginia said it made her feel glad to hear music, that she had to beat time. The others all enjoy music most when it has a literary annotation, either in opera, or in concerts with verbal explanations. At least they want to know the name of every melody. In this I said I agreed with them, because knowing the name immediately put me into the mood the composer wished, and saved me those first five minutes of uncertainty which every strange music awakens.