It is doubtless true to say that this enlargement resulted from the technical improvements in orchestral instruments and from the increase of instrumental virtuosity, but the converse is much more true. The case is here not so much as with the piano, that an improved instrument tempted a great composer to write for it, but rather that great composers needed more perfect means of expression and therefore stimulated the technicians to greater efforts. For, as we have seen, the musical spirits of the romantic period insisted upon breaking through conventional limitations and expressing what had never before been expressed. They wanted overpowering grandeur of sound, impressive richness of tone, great freedom of form, and constant variety of color. They wanted especially those means which could make possible their dreams of pictorial and descriptive music. Flutes and oboes in pairs and two horns and two trumpets capable of only a partial scale, in addition to the usual strings, were hardly adequate to describe the adventures of Dante in the Inferno. The literary and social life of the time had set composers thinking in grand style, and they insisted upon having the new and improved instruments which they felt they needed, upon forcing manufacturers to inventions which should facilitate complicated and extended passages in the wind, and the performers to the acceptance of these new things and to unheard-of industry in mastering them. Thus the mere external characteristics of romantic orchestral music are highly typical of the spirit of the time. Perhaps the most typical quality of all is the insistence upon sensuous effect. We have seen how the denizens of the nineteenth century longed to be part of the things that were going on about them, how, basing themselves on the ‘sentimental’ school of Rousseau, they considered a truth unperceived until they had _felt_ it. This distinction between contemplating life and experiencing it is one of the chief distinctions between the classical and the romantic spirit everywhere, and between the attitude of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth in particular. When Rousseau offered the feelings of his ‘new Heloïse’ as justification for her conduct, he sent a shock through the intelligent minds of France. He said, in substance: ‘Put yourself in her place and see if you wouldn’t do as she did. Then ask yourself what your philosophic and moral disapproval amounts to.’ Within some fifty years it became quite the craze of polite society to put itself in the new Heloïse’s place, and George Sand did it with an energy which astonished even France.