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Within itself music has, like architecture, an abstract quantitative relation, as a contrast to its inward and emotional quality; it also has as its basis a permanent law to which the tones with their combinations and successions must conform. For the third and most spiritual expression of the romantic form of art, we must look to poetry.
The result may be as artificial as the painfully composed Latin quantitative verse of English schoolboys, but the thing can be done. Tennyson's experiments in quantity are well known, and should be carefully studied. He was proud of his hexameter: "High winds roaring above me, dark leaves falling about me," and of his pentameter: "All men alike hate slops, particularly gruel."
To put the same truth in another way, science deals with one specially abstracted aspect of the facts; it drains them of their qualitative elements and, reducing them to their quantitative elements, it proceeds to weigh and measure them and state their laws. It moves in the realm of actualities and not in the realm of values.
What is found in the latter as seemingly an adequate determinant can also be demonstrated only in lesser force in the constitution of transitional types and in manifestly normal persons. The differences in the results may be of a qualitative nature, but analysis shows that the differences in the determinants are only quantitative.
These are to be traced back to quantitative differences, and the aliud or diversum is to be replaced by plus et minus. There is nothing absolutely light, but only relatively.
I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words, of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always reading some vital book.
Just how much information to impart, and just how much to withhold are quantitative questions, which can be decided wisely by only those persons who know what their quantitative values are. This is an important matter, and should be dealt with as such by the staff itself.
A complete chemical analysis of a body of unknown composition involves the recognition of its component parts by the methods of !qualitative analysis!, and the determination of the proportions in which these components are present by the processes of !quantitative analysis!. A preliminary qualitative examination is generally indispensable, if intelligent and proper provisions are to be made for the separation of the various constituents under such conditions as will insure accurate quantitative estimations.
Church-music, apparently, was also a factor in the development of versification, particularly that "Gregorian" style which demanded neither quantitative nor accentual rhythm, but simply a fair count of syllables in the libretto, note matching syllable exactly. The Appeal to the Ear
Popular accentual verse persisted, then, while the more cultivated Roman public acquired and then gradually lost, in the course of centuries, its ear for the quantitative rhythms which originally had been copied from the Greeks.
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