I say this advisedly, because I am sure that if some music is good for
man and elevates him, other melodies are equally bad and enervating. An
experience far wider than any we yet possess is necessary to enable us
to say how far this influence is capable of extension. How far, that
is, the mind may be directed on the one hand to ascetic abnegation by
the systematic use of certain music, or on the other to illicit and
dangerous pleasures by melodies of an opposite tendency. But this much
is, I think, certain, that after a comparatively advanced standard of
culture has once been attained, music is the readiest if not the only
key which admits to the yet narrower circle of the highest imaginative
thought.
On the occasion for travel afforded him by his honeymoon, an impulse
which he could not at the time explain, but which after-events have
convinced me was the haunting suggestion of the _Gagliarda_, drove him
to visit the scenes mentioned so often in Temple's diary. He had always
been an excellent scholar, and a classic of more than ordinary ability.
Rome and Southern Italy filled him with a strange delight. His education
enabled him to appreciate to the full what he saw; he peopled the stage
with the figures of the original actors, and tried to assimilate his
thought to theirs. He began reading classical literature widely, no
longer from the scholarly but the literary standpoint. In Rome he
spent much time in the librarians' shops, and there met with copies
of the numerous authors of the later empire and of those Alexandrine
philosophers which are rarely seen in England. In these he found a new
delight and fresh food for his mysticism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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