XIX.
Meanwhile, I pursued my studies with ardour and enjoyment, read a very great deal of belles-lettres, and continued to work at German philosophy, inasmuch as I now, though without special profit, plunged into a study of Trendelenburg. My thoughts were very much more stimulated by Gabriel Sibbern, on account of his consistent scepticism. It was just about this time that I made his acquaintance. Old before his time, bald at forty, tormented with gout, although he had always lived a most abstemious life, Gabriel Sibbern, with his serene face, clever eyes and independent thoughts, was an emancipating phenomenon. He had divested himself of all Danish prejudices. "There is still a great deal of phlogiston in our philosophy," he used to say sometimes.
I had long been anxious to come to a clear scientific understanding of the musical elements in speech. I had busied myself a great deal with metrical art. Brücke's Inquiries were not yet in existence, but I was fascinated by Apel's attempt to make use of notes (crotchets, quavers, dotted quavers, and semi-quavers) as metrical signs, and by J.L. Heiberg's attempt to apply this system to Danish verse. But the system was too arbitrary for anything to be built up upon it. And I then made up my mind, in order better to understand the nature of verse, to begin at once to familiarise myself with the theory of music, which seemed to promise the opening out of fresh horizons in the interpretation of the harmonies of language.
With the assistance of a young musician, later the well-known composer and Concert Director, Victor Bendix, I plunged into the mysteries of thorough-bass, and went so far as to write out the entire theory of harmonics. I learnt to express myself in the barbaric language of music, to speak of minor scales in fifths, to understand what was meant by enharmonic ambiguity. I studied voice modulation, permissible and non- permissible octaves; but I did not find what I hoped. I composed a few short tunes, which I myself thought very pretty, but which my young master made great fun of, and with good reason. One evening, when he was in very high spirits, he parodied one of them at the piano in front of a large party of people. It was a disconcerting moment for the composer of the tune.
A connection between metrical art and thorough-bass was not discoverable. Neither were there any unbreakable laws governing thorough-bass. The unversed person believes that in harmonics he will find quite definite rules which must not be transgressed. But again and again he discovers that what is, as a general rule, forbidden, is nevertheless, under certain circumstances, quite permissible.
Thus he learns that in music there is no rule binding on genius. And perhaps he asks himself whether, in other domains, there are rules which are binding on genius.