Part 40 (1/2)
Nevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted sounds, although barbaric practice and theory are slow to recognise it. Each tone has its quality, like jewels of different water; every cadence has its vital expression, no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture or in a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and though this perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort and excitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top.
Partic.i.p.ation in music may become perfunctory or dull for the great majority, as when hymns are sung in church; a mere suggestion of action will doubtless continue to colour the impression received, for a tendency to act is involved in perception; but this suggestion will be only an over-tone or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performers will be singled out from the crowd; those whom the public likes to hear will be asked to continue alone; and soon a certain suasion will be exerted over them by the approval or censure of others, so that consciously or unconsciously they will train themselves to please.
[Sidenote: Physiology of music.]
The musical quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for its basis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep or loudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure and thin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different in principle, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, and the harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with its immense appeal, to the c.u.mulative effect already secured by rendering many notes together. The heightened effect which a note gets by figuring in a phrase, or a phrase in a longer pa.s.sage, comes of course from the tensions established and surviving in the sensorium--a case, differently shaded, of chords and overtones. The difference is only that the more emphatic parts of the melody survive clearly to the end, while the detail, which if perceived might now clash, is largely lost, and out of the preceding parts perhaps nothing but a certain swing and potency is present at the close. The mind has been raked and set vibrating in an unusual fas.h.i.+on, so that the _finale_ comes like a fulfilment after much premonition and desire, whereas the same event, unprepared for, might hardly have been observed. The whole technique of music is but an immense elaboration of this principle. It deploys a sensuous harmony by a sort of dialectic, suspending and resolving it, so that the parts become distinct and their relation vital.
[Sidenote: Limits of musical sensibility.]
Such elaboration often exceeds the synthetic power of all but the best trained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty varies prodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a given conscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is there any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed circ.u.mstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony might be felt at once, if the musician's power of sustained or c.u.mulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes and their interval in one sensation (actual experience being always transitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), so a trained mind might survey a whole composition. This is not to say that time would be transcended in such an experience; the apperception would still have duration and the object would still have successive features, for evidently music not arranged in time would not be music, while all sensations with a recognisable character occupy more than an instant in pa.s.sing. But the pa.s.sing sensation, throughout its lapse, presents some experience; and this experience, taken at any point, may present a temporal sequence with any number of members, according to the synthetic and a.n.a.lytic power exerted by the given mind. What is tedious and formless to the inattentive may seem a perfect whole to one who, as they say, takes it all in; and similarly what is a frightful deafening discord to a sense incapable of discrimination, for one who can hear the parts may break into a celestial chorus. A musical education is necessary for musical judgment. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills.
[Sidenote: The value of music is relative to them.]
The degree to which music should be elaborated depends on the capacity possessed by those it addresses. There are limits to every man's synthetic powers, and to stretch those powers to their limit is exhausting. Excitement then becomes a debauch; it leaves the soul less capable of habitual harmony. Especially is such extreme tension disastrous when, as in music, nothing remains to be the fruit of that mighty victory; the most pregnant revelation sinks to an illusion and is discredited when it cannot maintain its inspiration in the world's presence. Everything has its own value and sets up its price; but others must judge if that price is fair, and sociability is the condition of all rational excellence. There is therefore a limit to right complexity in music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by its place in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, is altogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturally place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the few. When elaborate music is the fas.h.i.+on among people to whom all music is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is voluptuousness or fas.h.i.+on, and not music itself.
[Sidenote: Wonders of musical structure.]
Beneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectual essence. Out of simple chords and melodies, which at first catch only the ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal also to the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may be compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque that has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to form, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot do violence to it by its complex artifices--these are types of pure living, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life with order, precision with spontaneity; the flux in them has become rhythmical and its freedom has pa.s.sed into a rational choice, since it has come in sight of the eternal form it would embody. The musician, like an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than they from material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth; every step opens up new vistas, every decision--how unlike those made in real life!--multiplies opportunities, and widens the horizon before him, without preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at any point, to trace the other possible paths leading thence through various magic landscapes. Pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is balanced by its entire spontaneity, and, while it has no external significance, it bears no internal curse. It is something to which a few spirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberal commonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour, the fruits of which many may enjoy. Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, where order is free, refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By a.n.a.logy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in other regions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, as the Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical.
[Sidenote: Its inherent emotions.]
It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, all about nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a political animal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moral affinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and married with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it is wedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotions which music and life arouse in common. For sound, in sweeping through the body and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress, provokes no less interest than does any other physical event or premonition. Music can produce emotion as directly as can fighting or love. If in the latter instances the body's whole life may be in jeopardy, this fact is no explanation of our concern; for many a danger is not felt and there is no magic in the body's future condition, that it should now affect the soul. What touches the soul is the body's condition at the moment; and this is altered no less truly by a musical impression than by some protective or reproductive act. If emotions accompany the latter, they might as well accompany the former; and in fact they do. Nor is music the only idle cerebral commotion that enlists attention and presents issues no less momentous for being quite imaginary; dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life so absorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts, as can delirium in sickness, or delusion in what pa.s.ses for health.
[Sidenote: In growing specific they remain unearthly.]
There is perhaps no emotion incident to human life that music cannot render in its abstract medium by suggesting the pang of it; though of course music cannot describe the complex situation which lends earthly pa.s.sions their specific colour. It is by fusion with many suggested emotions that sentiment grows definite; this fusion can hardly come about without ideas intervening, and certainly it could never be sustained or expressed without them. Occasions define feelings; we can convey a delicate emotion only by delicately describing the situation which brings it on. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do this for common life, and the pa.s.sions, as music renders them, are always general. But music has its own subst.i.tute for conceptual distinctness.
It makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise than a.s.sociation with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form.
We may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary pa.s.sions, music creates a new realm of form far more subtly impa.s.sioned than is vulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory which has already become somewhat cla.s.sical and worn, but music has no end of new situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodies to all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny beats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling; we cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor can we wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But in music there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling us back to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothing delightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its own instinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, we must call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression.
Each phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no human situation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they are altogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native to the pa.s.sing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.
[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no object in nature.]
There is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feeling for the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singular privilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulate and express those depths of human nature which can speak no language current in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it remains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part of our pa.s.sions from this pathological plight, and gives them some other function than merely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutually representative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experience is pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is also rational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have a meaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animal soul as a dream might fuse them, however incongruous the situation they depict might be in waking life; they are significant only if this moment's product can meet and conspire with some other thought speaking of what elsewhere exists, and uttering an intuition that from time to time may be actually recovered. The art of distributing interest among the occasions and vistas of life so as to lend them a constant worth, and at the same time to give feeling an ideal object, is at bottom the sole business of education; but the undertaking is long, and much feeling remains unemployed and unaccounted for. This objectless emotion chokes the heart with its dull importunity; now it impedes right action, now it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from primary functions which, though their operation is half known, have only base or pitiful a.s.sociations in human life; so that they trouble us with deep and subtle cravings, the unclaimed _Hinterland_ of life. When music, either by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both at once, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling, it accordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb speak, and plucks from the animal heart potentialities of expression which might render it, perhaps, even more than human.
[Sidenote: Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable form.]
By its emotional range music is appropriate to all intense occasions: we dance, pray, and mourn to music, and the more inadequate words or external acts are to the situation, the more grateful music is. As the only bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of place only where emotion itself is absent. If it breaks in upon us in the midst of study or business it becomes an interruption or alternative to our activity, rather than an expression of it; we must either remain inattentive or pa.s.s altogether into the realm of sound (which may be unemotional enough) and become musicians for the nonce. Music brings its sympathetic ministry only to emotional moments; there it merges with common existence, and is a welcome subst.i.tute for descriptive ideas, since it co-operates with us and helps to deliver us from dumb subjection to influences which we should not know how to meet otherwise.
There is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, together with a certain poverty of form; the power felt is out of proportion to the interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain, at once strained and idle. At such a moment music is a blessed resource. Without attempting to remove a mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it a congruous filling. Thus the mood is justified by an ill.u.s.tration or expression which seems to offer some objective and ideal ground for its existence; and the mood is at the same time relieved by absorption in that impersonal object. So entertained, the feeling settles. The pa.s.sion to which at first we succ.u.mbed is now tamed and appropriated. We have digested the foreign substance in giving it a rational form: its energies are merged in that strength by which we freely operate.
In this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest emotions.
Matter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacities which a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into this new channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forth close to the ground, far below the point where the other boughs separate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in common with its parent. Somewhat in this fas.h.i.+on music diverts into an abstract sphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at which human understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which other branches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Those elementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his special methods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind intensity.
[Sidenote: All essences are in themselves good, even the pa.s.sions.]
There is consequently in music a sort of Christian piety, in that it comes not to call the just but sinners to repentance, and understands the spiritual possibilities in outcasts from the respectable world. If we look at things absolutely enough, and from their own point of view, there can be no doubt that each has its own ideal and does not question its own justification. l.u.s.t and frenzy, revery or despair, fatal as they may be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are not perverse in themselves: each searches for its own affinities, and has a kind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or draw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as so many forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a different life. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal flux makes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such att.i.tudes is the ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That such strains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot be required of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by all that enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find a world to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to have created that in which it found itself expressed. But such satisfaction has been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at least postponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since the equilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcerted harmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its own perfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep into being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world.
Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware of being potential G.o.ds. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenial paradise? Why should each, made evil now only by an advent.i.tious appellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there is a piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that are perverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decides to treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a piety towards things altogether lovely, when it is only s.p.a.ce and matter that are wanting for their perfect realisation?
[Sidenote: Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.]