“Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and so suggesting an image.  The instruments in music perform this part, as color does in painting.  And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same, according to the pitch,—­quite regular when the combination is a true chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,—­I say that music is an art conceived in the very bowels of nature.

“Music is subject to physical and mathematical laws.  Physical laws are but little known, mathematics are well understood; and it is since their relations have been studied, that the harmony has been created to which we owe the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini, grand geniuses, whose music is undoubtedly nearer to perfection than that of their precursors, though their genius, too, is unquestionable.  The old masters could sing, but they had not art and science at their command,—­a noble alliance which enables us to merge into one the finest melody and the power of harmony.

“Now, if a knowledge of mathematical laws gave us these four great musicians, what may we not attain to if we can discover the physical laws in virtue of which—­grasp this clearly—­we may collect, in larger or smaller quantities, according to the proportions we may require, an ethereal substance diffused in the atmosphere which is the medium alike of music and of light, of the phenomena of vegetation and of animal life!  Do you follow me?  Those new laws would arm the composer with new powers by supplying him with instruments superior of those now in use, and perhaps with a potency of harmony immense as compared with that now at his command.  If every modified shade of sound answers to a force, that must be known to enable us to combine all these forces in accordance with their true laws.

“Composers work with substances of which they know nothing.  Why should a brass and a wooden instrument—­a bassoon and horn—­have so little identity of tone, when they act on the same matter, the constituent gases of the air?  Their differences proceed from some displacement of those constituents, from the way they act on the elements which are their affinity and which they return, modified by some occult and unknown process.  If we knew what the process was, science and art would both be gainers.  Whatever extends science enhances art.