FEELING
“Feeling” is generally understood to mean tenderness, pathos, and extravagance, of expression. But how much more does the marvelous flower “Emotion” enfold! Restraint and forbearance, renunciation, power, activity, patience, magnanimity, joyousness, and that all-controlling intelligence wherein feeling actually takes its rise.
It is not otherwise in Art, which holds the mirror up to Life; and still more outspokenly in Music, which repeats the emotions of Life—though for this, as I have said, taste and style must be added; Style, which distinguishes Art from Life.
What the amateur and the mediocre artist attempt to express, is feeling in little, in detail, for a short stretch.
Feeling on a grand scale is mistaken by the amateur, the semi-artist, the public (and the critics too, unhappily!), for a want of emotion, because they all are unable to hear the longer reaches as parts of a yet more extended whole. Feeling, therefore, is likewise economy.
Hence, I distinguish feeling as Taste, as Style, as Economy. Each a whole in itself, and each one-third of the Whole. Within and over them rules a subjective trinity: Temperament, Intelligence, and the instinct of Equipoise.
These six carry on a dance of such subtility in the choice of partners and intertwining of figures, in the bearing and the being borne, in advancing and curtesying, in motion and repose, that no loftier height of artistry is conceivable.
When the chords of the two triads are in perfect tune, Fantasy may—nay, must—associate with Feeling; supported by the Six, she will not degenerate, and out of this combination of all the elements arises Individuality. The individuality catches, like a lens, the light-impressions, reflects them, according to its nature, as a negative, and the hearer perceives the true picture.
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In so far as taste participates in feeling, the latter—like all else—alters its forms of expression with the period. That is, one aspect or another of feeling will be favored at one time or another, onesidedly cultivated, especially developed. Thus, with and after Wagner, voluptuous sensuality came to the fore; the form of intensification of passion is still unsurmounted by contemporary composers. On every tranquil beginning followed a swift upward surge. Wagner, in this point insatiable, but not inexhaustible, turned from sheer necessity to the expedient, after reaching a climax, of starting afresh softly, to soar to a sudden new intensification.