Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,
I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one
or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present
mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses
all means of persuasion--stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music
as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the
conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the
impersonal land of sound and colour, and I would have no one write with
a sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,
having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We
may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as
she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all
poets. Music is the most impersonal of things, and words the most
personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate
them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest
them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with
spittle that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.