So we say that in wisdom the qualities we call insight, feeling, and imagination must find for themselves some more plastic medium of expression than language. And when that plastic medium, though non-definitive, has those qualities of coherence, continuity, and form which are essential to all intellectual expression, we are justified in calling it “intellectual.” Let us take for our specific illustration the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. It is impossible to imagine this as an expression of feeling only, untouched by thought or by imagination. The inevitable conclusion arrived at by any person who understands it is that the feeling is absolutely controlled by the mind, and that it is imagination that gives it its extraordinary effect. Compare it with the first movement of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathétique Symphony” where emotion runs riot; the difference is as great as that between “Victory” and “The Deemster.” Compare it with a symphony by Mendelssohn, and the contrast is as vivid as that between a novel by Meredith and one by Miss Braddon. Beethoven’s music contains, in the first place, themes whose import all completely receptive persons feel to be profound. (That these themes do not so impress others is due either to atrophy of the musical faculty, to mental lassitude, or to lack of experience of great music.) These themes are presented in such design as not only to make the whole movement entirely coherent, but to give it a sense of rushing onward to an inevitable conclusion. So intensive is their treatment that almost the whole five hundred or more measures grow out of the original theme or thesis, some fifteen measures long. So imaginative is it that it seems to gather to itself all related things in heaven and earth and fuse them into one. In short, we must say that this music emanates from the mind of a great man, who has subjected emotion to the control of the will and who has exercised that highest function of the mind that we call imagination.
May we not say, then, that this is wisdom? Shall we deny it because it cannot be spelled out word by word? Shall we not rather say that music is a means of expressing the deepest wisdom, that which defies categorical expression? May we not accept Schopenhauer’s saying: “Music is an image of the will”? Are we not justified in stating that music is even an expression of the deepest relation with the visible and invisible world which the soul of man is capable of experiencing, and that these relations, inexpressible in more concrete manifestations, are expressible in music? The pathos and resignation and courage in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven are not his or yours or mine; they are the qualities themselves in their infinite being, more true, more noble, more pure than his or yours or mine. May we not, then, even go so far as to say that music tells us the deepest truths of human life; that “it comes,” as Symonds says, “speaking the highest wisdom in a language our reason does not understand because it is older and deeper and closer than reason?”
IV. “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY”
I have already stated that the other arts have for their ideal that fusing of subject and expression which in music is complete, and I have further stated that the purpose or object of music is to present emotion ordered and guided by the mind and illumined by the imagination. In this latter respect all the arts are alike. It is in the very nature of their being that they seek to find the heart of the great secret. The purpose of painting and sculpture is not to present objects as objects, but to set them forth in such harmonious perfection of line and color and rhythm as will reveal their deepest significance. The greatest examples of the plastic arts cannot be understood through sense-perception of objects. Rembrandt is a greater painter than Bougereau, not only because he has superior technique, but because he has deeper insight. This is why the “subject” in painting is comparatively unimportant.
It is the same with literature. In “Jane Eyre” the “subject” is more tangible and vivid than in “Villette,” but the latter is the finer book, because the technical skill is greater, the insight deeper. “There are no good subjects or bad subjects,” says Hugo; “there are only good poets and bad poets.” Any subject is interesting when a master-mind presents it in full significance. A custom-house is a prosaic thing, and a custom-house that has neither exports nor imports, but only a few sleepy old pensioners dozing in the sun, might be thought a dull subject for a writer; but Hawthorne’s imagination and subtlety of literary expression clothe it with both beauty and significance. Even the noblest and most tragic deeds find their best justification in a sublime harmony of beauty. The Greeks knew this well. Euripides, in “The Trojan Women,” puts on the lips of Hecuba these words:—
“Had He not turned us in his hand, and thrust
Our high things low and shook our hills as dust,
We had not been this splendor, and our wrong
An everlasting music for the song