Music and poetry - 1898 Author:Sidney Lanier Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III The Physics of Music1 Take if you please the lowest work of genius and the highest work of talent: the former is always Art, the latter always mere cle... more »verness. The one is always in some sense true: the other is often in all senses false. In truth, there is that in the very nature of Cleverness which renders it particularly liable to mislead either itself or other people. Confront it with something new that is to be taken account of: it has not that indescribable insight of fervent love which lies at the bottom of genius; it cannot burn away the husk of things with that instinct towards the kernel which genius possesses ; it is busied, like a newspaper reporter, more with thinking how much can be said than with observing the facts that should be said; it can evolve a paragraph easier than record a circumstance. Its facile dexterity is often its ruin — as if a hasty spider should mesh his own legs. Now the doctrine of falsus in uno is not true except with very careful limitations; but — to descend to particulars — if a man can be shown to have written a paper every important proposition of which contains inaccuracies, and several important propositions of which are preposterous, then it would seem to. be fair at least to regard with suspicion all his utterances in other papers upon the same general subject. 1 Written in 1875. The object of this present writing is, downright, to discredit Mr. Richard Grant White as authority in any matter whatever pertaining to music: and there are grave reasons why this subject is a praiseworthy one, — one, indeed, so far removed from a mere flippant discussion that it is thoroughly in the nature of a religious purpose. For every fervent and pious lover of art must look with displeasure upon the quarrel into which Mr. White has be...« less