Before I attempt to describe the peculiar quality which distinguishes music, it will be well to state quite clearly what it cannot do. This can best be understood by a comparison between it and poetry, which of all the arts is nearest to music, because it exists in the element of time, whereas painting and sculpture exist in space. Poetry is made up of words arranged in meaning and euphony. Each of these words signifies an object, idea, or feeling; the word “chair,” for example, has come to mean an object to sit upon. Now, while notes in music are given certain alphabetical names indicating a pitch determined by sound waves, the use of these letters is arbitrary and has no connection with their original hieroglyphic and hieratic significance. The musical sound we call a, for example, means nothing as a sound, has no common or agreed-upon or archæological significance. Combine the note a with c and e in what is known as the common chord and you still have no meaning; combine a with other notes and form a melody from them, and you have perhaps beauty and coherence of form,—a pleasing sequence of sounds,—but still no meaning such as you get from the combination of letters in a word like “chair.” Combine a with a great many other notes into a symphony, and this coherence and beauty may become quite wonderful in effect, but it still remains untranslatable into other terms, and without such definite significance as is attained by combining words in poems. So we say that notes have no significance in themselves; that musical phrases have no meaning as have phrases in language; that melodies are not sentences, and symphonies not poems.
If we compare music with painting or sculpture we find much the same contrast. Just as music does not mean anything in the sense that words do, so it has no “subject” in the sense that Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire has, or Donatello’s David. It does not deal with objects. It cannot portray a ship or a star. It may seem to float, it may flash for a moment, but it does not describe or set forth. Furthermore, it cannot, strictly speaking, give expression to ideas. It may be so serious, so ordered, so equable—as in Bach—that we say its composer was a philosopher, but no item of his philosophy appears. Above all it is unmoral,[1] and without belief or dogma. Too much stress can hardly be laid on this negative quality in music, for it is in this very disability that its greatest virtue lies. I shall refer later to the frequent tendency among listeners to avoid facing this problem by attaching meanings of their own to the music they hear. I need only note in passing that these so-called “meanings” seldom agree, and that the habit is the result either of ignorance of the true office of music, or of mental lassitude toward it. “It is not enough to enjoy yourself over a work of art,” says Joubert; “you must enjoy it.”
Now the one distinguishing quality of music is this: it finds its perfection in itself without relation to other objects. It is what it is in itself alone. It is non-definitive; it does not use symbols of something else; it cannot be translated into other terms. The poet seeks always a complete union of the thing said and the method of saying it. Flaubert seeks patiently and persistently for the one word which shall not only be the exact symbol of his thought, but which shall fit his euphony. The painter so draws his objects, so distributes his colors, and so arranges his composition as to make of them plastic mediums for the expression of his thought, and the greatness of his picture depends first of all and inevitably on his power of fusing his subjects with his technique. In sculpture precisely the same process takes place. Neither of these arts actually copies nature; each “arranges” it for its own purpose.
In music this much-sought union of matter and manner is complete; the thing said and the method of saying it are one and indivisible. It is, as Pater says, “the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression.”
II. THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC
The primal element in music is vibration. Sound-waves in some ordered sequence—silent till they strike our ears—are formed by our ingenuity and sense of order into patterns of beauty. They exist in time, not in space. They are motion. And these vibrations are the very substance of all life; of stars in their courses, of the pulse-beats of the heart, of the mysterious communications from the nerves to the brain, of light, of heat, of color. The plastic arts are static. Painting has the power
“to give
To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity.”