The impression made by music can only be similar even—in character and intensity—where the hearers are equally endowed and cultured, and are equally conditioned mentally to surrender themselves to its influence. As long as each member of the human family is distinguished by individuality, so long will the impressions made by the intangible elements in art be diverse.
Suggestiveness is the highest quality with which a poet, an orator, a painter, a sculptor, or a musician can endow his productions. Its existence implies a clear conception, rooted in sentiment and adequately expressed through adaptable means, but well within the line of demarcation which separates logical terseness from redundancy.
Who can listen to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, or Wagner and not find himself in a dreamland, peopled not so much by children of the great master's brain, as by the offspring of his own fancy? These results are the fruits of suggestiveness.
Routine often leads to diffuseness; the lack of it always results in illogical and inadequate expression; but routine directed by genius seldom fails to discover the vital line which marks the boundary of completeness. On one side of this line we have inland waters, flowing from the author's fancy: on the other, and fed therefrom, the open sea of semi-conscious cerebration, with its capricious winds and tidal currents.
If a writer succeed in enlisting our sympathies, the flow of his thoughts will impart the impetus requisite to carry us beyond this line; but here his direct influence ceases, for the stream of his fancies becomes merged in the ocean of each of our lives' memories, hopes, and experiences, and each having received an impulse comporting with his receptivity and habits of mind, sails away upon his course propelled by unfettered imagination.
MUSICAL INTELLIGENCE.
A symphony is like an epic poem; its salient points rather than its rounded whole appeal to the average reader or listener. The striking episodes of unfamiliar compositions in large form, are prone to come out into undue prominence, and so blind us to their true significance as phases of sequential development. The sustained effort, and experience demanded by a symphony, are the supreme tests of a composer. We therefore have no right to an opinion in regard to the merits or demerits of a large earnest work until study and hearing have, in our understanding, joined its episodes and given them importful continuity.
Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner were endowed with great talent, which indefatigable energy advanced to genius. They worked upon a plane far above other men. We cannot hope to feel what they felt while creating, but we can work, the while knowing that as we approach their level in knowledge and experience our minds will better assist our understanding of their conceptions. Their joys, their sorrows, their triumphs, their every sentiment should find response in our hearts; but the impression made by music can only be distinct after we have made ourselves acoustically receptive, after our natures have become attuned like æolian harps to responsiveness when waves of melody strike upon them.
Our minds can be sounding-boards, which gather and reflect upon our souls the tone pictures we hear. A wooden surface must be smooth, properly formed, and perfectly poised, or it will not collect, focus, and reflect sound effects. In the same way our mental sounding-boards must be properly prepared, or they will not collect details and reflect sentiments. This preparation involves the use of all available means for shaping, refining, and poising. The earnest study of any branch of learning broadens, and the contemplation of the beautiful in nature and art quickens, the perceptions.
Pedantry—another name for self-sufficient ignorance—will warp and so distort our reflector as to mar its efficiency, making it unjust alike to the subject and to us.