Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 150, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 June 1919 — Music, of All Arts, the One Most Intimately Interwoven With Ethical Consciousness [ARTICLE]

Music, of All Arts, the One Most Intimately Interwoven With Ethical Consciousness

Of all arts, music Is the one moSt Intimately interwoven with the ethical consciousness of our own time. The oratorios of Handel and of Mendelssohn so blend the sacred text and the divine music that we think of the two together, and almost as of things so wedded by t?od that man must not seek to put them asunder. When I have sat to sing In the chorus of the "Messiah,” and have heard the tenor take up the sweet burden of “Comfort ye my people!” I have felt the wholb chain of divine consolation which those historic words express, and which link the prophet of preChristian times to the saints and sinners of today. In far-off Palestine I have been shown the plain on which it Is supposed that the shepherds were tending their flocks when the birth of the Messiah was announced to them. But as I turned my eyes to view It, my memory was full of that pastoral symphony of Handel’s, in which the divine glory” seems just muffled enough to be intelligible to our abrupt and hasty sense. Nay, I lately heard a beloved voice which read the chapter of Elijah’s wonderful experience In the wilderness. While I listened, bar after bar of Mendelssohn’s music struck itself off’ in the resonant chamber of memory* and I thanked the Hebrew of our own time for giving intensity to that drama of insight and heroism. Julia Ward Howe.