between intellectual, and brutal, or meaningless, music. Therefore, when
Apollo prevails, he flays Marsyas, taking the limit and external bond of
his shape from him, which is death, without touching the mere muscular
strength, yet shameful and dreadful in dissolution.

42. And the opposition of these two kinds of sound is continually dwelt
upon by the Greek philosophers, the real fact at the root of all music is
the natural expression of a lofty passion for a right cause; that in
proportion to the kingliness and force of any personality, the expression
either of its joy or suffering becomes measured, chastened, calm, and
capable of interpretation only by the majesty of ordered, beautiful, and
worded sound. Exactly in proportion to the degree in which we become
narrow in the cause and conception of our passions, incontinent in the
utterance of them, feeble of perseverance in them, sullied or shameful in
the indulgence of them, their expression by musical sound becomes broken,
mean, fatuitous, and at last impossible; the measured waves of the air of
heaven will not lend themselves to expression of ultimate vice, it must
be forever sunk into discordance or silence. And since, as before
stated, every work of right art has a tendency to reproduce the ethical
state which first developed it, this, which of all the arts is most
directly in power of discipline; the first, the simplest, the most
effective of all instruments of moral instruction; while in the failure
and betrayal of its functions, it becomes the subtlest aid of moral
degradation. Music is thus, in her health, the teacher of perfect order,
and is the voice of the obedience of angels, and the companion of the
course of the spheres of heaven; and in her depravity she is also the
teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, and the Gloria in Excelsis
becomes the Marseillaise. In the third section of this volume, I reprint
two chapters from another essay of mine ("The Cestus of Aglaia"), on
modesty or measure, and on liberty, containing further reference to music