| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
Music from the West. 187 |
||
|
also. There are family-likenesses, peculiarities race and of physiognomy, which appeal to us with a force such as no circumstantial fending or proving can overthrow.
In my first essay I spoke of the untruthfulness of Memory. I might now call attention to the insidious pertinence of her suggestions, most especially in this matter of music. In districts lying so closely near one to the other as ours, it would not be easy to separate what may have been brought by pedlar, by stroller, by noble's retainer, from what has grown out of the soil, save on some principle of resemblance derived from observation and comparison.
In our home-world of national music I must give the first place to tunes the best known—the tunes of Wales. I find in them a remarkable grandeur and pathos, and combined with these a regularity of structure and of intervals, which set them apart from every other group of national melodies with which I am acquainted. It seems to me that no tunes have been so little tinctured by strange influences.
The solitary condition which the Welsh have preferred—their high pride of ancestry—their resolution to protract the existence of a separate language |
||