Explore "The Musician and the Orator" by W.B. Yeats on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else, / I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one / or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present / mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses / all means of persuasion -- stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music / as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the / conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the / impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with a / sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians, / having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We / may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as / she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all / poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most / personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate / them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest / them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with / spittle, that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.