Pure, complete conceptions cannot take form in other than sensitive natures; sensitive to the influences of life's surroundings, receiving impressions from the bird's song, the flower's perfume, the storm's might, the mountain's grandeur, the rippling stream, the peaceful valley, and filled, at least for the time, with love for God and man; nor could such conceptions pass to expression through intellects that had not been tempered, refined, and broadened to grasp all the resources that tonal science offers.
It is in artificial music only,—born of purpose and not of inspiration,—or in the work of unripe musicians, that science obtrudes itself. In other words, when the means are noticeable, they have either been unskillfully employed, or the composer has been actuated by the ambition to display scholarly qualities regardless of æsthetic considerations.
How often we hear works in which any possible sparks of sensibility and spontaneity have been smothered beneath loads of counterpoint and thematic development, which are devoid of significance because not evolved in logical sequence! Drawing and anatomy are to painting and sculpture, and grammar, rhetoric, and metre are to poetry, what musical science is to musical art, inasmuch as in each the capacity to produce, or to appreciate what others have produced, is largely proportioned to one's knowledge of these structural laws.
Temperament, natural endowments, culture, and habit play such important rôles in creating individual conceptions of beauty that we can only consider as our criterion the judgment of people existing in our own environment.
The first essential of beauty is symmetry. A rose cannot be beautiful unless gracefully formed and poised. The Creator's hand may have tinted it incomparably, may have distilled the daintiest fragrance for its portion, but these will avail naught if it has inherited ungraceful proportions, or if the world has distorted it during its period of growth.
As the rose requires color and perfume to perfect its charms, so each animate and inanimate creation in this world requires its suitable accessories to symmetry.
According to our standard, woman should have a lithe, plastic form, with fluctuating color and an all-pervading fragrance of intellectual modesty; whereas man should have a sinewy form, bold and strong, the color of perfect health, and the fragrance of intellectual fearlessness. Each must possess clearly defined individuality.
God's creations are never exact duplicates, and still we have numerous beautiful roses and women and Apollo-like men, each with appropriate attributes, and each satisfying the æsthetic taste of some one person or class of persons, because of the affinity to that object of the personal ideal which was implanted in this person or these persons by God, and which has been nurtured by conditions of life.
As in everything else that lays claim to beauty, so in music, symmetry must underlie all other attributes. The laws regulating musical symmetry are so rigid, when viewed from one stand-point, and are so elastic when viewed from another and higher, that it is not at all strange that young composers stand aghast when they reach the neutral point of receptivity from which these apparently contradictory conditions first manifest themselves. But these conditions are not really contradictory, for prescribed form is but a properly proportioned and adjusted skeleton, an outlining framework, subject to such modifications as will adapt it to the character of our schemes. These modifications must not, however, involve the use of eccentric lines, or the omission of essential members of the body musical, for such action would result in malformations.