SENSIBILITY OF MUSICAL COMPOSERS. 227 



that the highest form of vocal music was arrived at by 

 degrees. 



Moreover, we have some clue to the influences which 

 have induced this development ; and may roughly conceive 

 the process of it. As the tones, intervals, and cadences of 

 strong emotion were the elements out of which song was 

 elaborated ; so, we may expect to find that still stronger 

 emotion produced the elaboration : and we have evidence 

 implying this. Instances in abundance may be cited, show* 

 ing that musical composers are men of extremely acute 

 sensibilities. The Life of Mozart depicts him as one of 

 intensely active affections and highly impressionable tem 

 perament. Various anecdotes represent Beethoven as 

 very susceptible and very passionate. Mendelssohn is de 

 scribed by those who knew him to have been full of fine 

 feeling. And the almost incredible sensitiveness of Chopin 

 has been illustrated in the memoirs of George Sand. An 

 unusually emotional nature being thus the general charac 

 teristic of musical composers, we have in it just the agency 

 required for the development of recitative and song. In- 

 tenser feelirig producing intenscr manifestations, any cause 

 of excitement will call forth from such a nature, tones and 

 changes of voice more marked than those called forth from 

 an ordinary nature will generate just those exaggerations 

 which we have found to distinguish the lower vocal music 

 from emotional speech, and the higher vocal music from 

 the lower. Thus it becomes credible that the four-toned 

 recitative of the early Greek poets (like all poets, nearly 

 allied to composers in the comparative intensity of their 

 feelings), was really nothing more than the slightly ex 

 aggerated emotional speech natural to them, which grew 

 by frequent use into an organized form. And it is readily 

 conceivable that the accumulated agency of subsequent 

 poet-musicians, inheriting and adding to the products 

 of those who went before them, sufficed, in the course of 



