Of earth and heaven!”[3]
Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on forever. The battle of Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of history, the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, not because they were wise, but because they were wise and beautiful.
There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence depended on it. Carlyle, for example, was more caustic than usual when he discussed poetry. His comment on Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” ran thus: “A wonderful book, one of the most wonderful ever written. I re-read it all through—all made out of an ‘Old Bailey’ story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting.” Yet the best part of “Sartor Resartus” is its beauty, and there are in “The French Revolution” many passages of quite perfect poetic imagery and characterization without which it would lose much of its value. What we call “Carlyle” is no longer a man; nor is it a philosophy, or a history; it is nothing but a style, a manner of saying things—an individual, characteristic, and strange blend of hard and soft, of high and low, of rugged and tender, all struggling with a Puritanical conscience. So we say that beauty is the lodestone by which all life is tested.
No game can be perfectly played unless the physical motions are timed in beauty; no machine will act save in perfect synthesis; no character is strong until it attains a harmony within itself. Beauty is the matrix in which life shall be finally moulded.
All forms of artistic expression, then, require that we shall see the object not as fact but as art. If it is fact—that is, merely an isolated object or event—it remains insignificant until some artist catches it up into the wider realm in which it belongs and sets it forth in some form of beauty. If we accept this conception of all the arts as seeking the inner sense of things, as portraying life in its essence rather than in its outward manifestations, we shall be able to understand the peculiar power of music. It becomes then, not merely a series of sounds arranged so as to be euphonious and pleasing to the ear, but a book of life which contains the ultimate expression of our instinct and of our wisdom. The Third Symphony of Beethoven, for example, gives us a more convincing presentment of heroic struggle than is to be found in the other arts or in literature, first, because it has the power to present it in the element of time, which is an essential part of any heroic deed; second, because it presents it as a quality disassociated from a particular heroism and therefore elevated into a type and made eternal; and third, because it presents it in conjunction with those other qualities without which there can be no heroism at all. (For no quality in life or element in nature exists for us save as the opposite or reverse of something else. What we call light is comprehensible only as the opposite of darkness; love is the opposite of hate, cold of heat, and so forth.)
Each of the other arts has one or two of these qualities; none has all of them. The novelist, for example, can use the first and last but not the second. Meredith’s “Vittoria” is an ideal presentment of the struggle for Italian unity, but the heroism which constitutes the essence of the book has to find expression through actual persons. So the greatest virtue of music lies not alone in its peculiar unification of matter and manner, its artistic perfection, but in the power which that gives it to create a world not based on the outward and the visible, but on that invisible realm of thought, feeling, and aspiration which is our real world. For if there is any one certain historical fact, it is that from the earliest times until now man has continually sought some escape from reality, some building up of a perfect world of ideal beauty which should still his eternal dissatisfaction with the imperfections and inconsistencies of his own life. It is in the very nature of his situation that he should seek some perfection somewhere. So he has tried to paint this perfection on canvas, idealizing life and nature into a satisfying form of beauty; or he has carved a physical perfection in marble to deify himself and give himself a place in nature; or he has built up for himself a world of magical words in which all his noblest dreams strive for expression. Everywhere and always he has had this dream, which has saved him when all else failed. And the noblest of his dreamers have been those whose imaginations have transcended the limitations of the actual and brought it into relation with the unknown.
Music, obeying the great laws that underlie all life and to which all the arts are subject, having for its means of expression the most plastic of all media, depending on intuitive perception of truth, not compelled to perpetuate objects, dealing with that larger part of man’s being which lies hidden beneath both his acts and his thoughts,—that which Carlyle calls “the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious,”—music is the one perfect medium for this dream of humanity. In its expression of human emotions it enjoys the inestimable advantage of entire irrelevance. It does not have to develop a character or person, but only an attribute or quality. The “Eroica” symphony, for example, has all the force of a mythological epic in which the heroes are pure spirit-types of humanity, of no age or time—gods, if you will, and above human limitations.
This is the quality of music that makes it precious to us. It builds for us an immaterial world—not made of objects, or theories, or dogmas, or philosophies, but of pure spirit—a means of escape from the thralldom of every day.