"Becalmed at Sea, and a Prosperous Voyage," and in it the composer
pictures the immensity of the sea by a sudden, extraordinary spreading
out of his harmonies, which is musical, and dwelling a long time on
the word "distance" (_Weite_) which is rhetorical:

[Music illustration: In der un-ge-heu-'ren Wei-te.]

[Sidenote: _Bald imitation bad art._]

[Sidenote: _Vocal music and delineation._]

[Sidenote: _Beethoven's canon._]

The extent to which tone-painting is justified is a question which
might profitably concern us; but such a discussion as it deserves
would far exceed the limits set for this book, and must be foregone.
It cannot be too forcibly urged, however, as an aid to the listener,
that efforts at musical cartooning have never been made by true
composers, and that in the degree that music attempts simply to copy
external things it falls in the scale of artistic truthfulness and
value. Vocal music tolerates more of the descriptive element than
instrumental because it is a mixed art; in it the purpose of music is
to illustrate the poetry and, by intensifying the appeal to the fancy,
to warm the emotions. Every piece of vocal music, moreover, carries
its explanatory programme in its words. Still more tolerable and even
righteous is it in the opera where it is but one of several factors
which labor together to make up the sum of dramatic representation.
But it must ever remain valueless unless it be idealized. Mendelssohn,
desiring to put _Bully Bottom_ into the overture to "A Midsummer
Night's Dream," did not hesitate to use tones which suggest the bray