Lamartine has said, with truth, "Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends." In fact, music is a psycho-physical phenomenon. In its germ, it is a sensation; in its full development, an ideal. It is sufficient not to be deaf to perceive music, at least, if not to appreciate it. Even idiots and maniacs are subject to its influence. Not being restricted to any precise sense, going beyond the mere letter, and expressing only states of the soul, it has this advantage over literature, that every one can assimilate it to his own passions, and adapt it to the sentiments which rule him. Its power, limited in the intellectual order to the imitative passions, is in that of the imagination unlimited. It responds to an interior, indefinable sense possessed by all,—the ideal.
Literature is always objective: it speaks to the understanding, and determines in us impressions in keeping with the determined sense which it expresses. Music, on the contrary, may be, in turn, objective and subjective, according to the disposition in which we find ourselves at the moment of hearing it. It is objective when, affected only by the purely physical sensation of sound, we listen to it passively, and it suggests to us impressions. A march, a waltz, a flute imitating the nightingale, the chromatic scale imitating the murmuring of the wind in the "Pastoral Symphony," may be taken as examples.
It is subjective when, under the empire of a latent impression, we discover in its general character an accordance with our psychological state, and we assimilate it to ourselves; it is then like a mirror in which we see reflected the movements which agitate us, with a fidelity all the more exact from the fact that, without being conscious of it, we ourselves are the painters of the picture which unrolls itself before our imagination.
Let me explain. Play a melancholy air to a proscript thinking of his distant home; to a deserted lover; to a mother mourning the loss of a child; to a vanquished warrior;—and be assured they will all appropriate to themselves the plaintive harmonies, and fancy they detect in them the accents of their own grief.
The fact of music is still a mystery. We know that it is composed of three principles,—air, vibration, and rhythmic symmetry. Strike an object in an exhausted receiver, and it produces no sound, because no air is there; touch a ringing glass, and the sound stops, because there is no vibration; take away the rhythm of the simplest air by changing the duration of the notes that compose it, and you render it obscure and unrecognizable, because you have destroyed its symmetry.
But why, then, do not several hammers striking in cadence produce music? They certainly comply with the three conditions of air, vibration, and rhythm. Why is the accord of a third so pleasing to the ear? Why is the minor mode so suggestive of sadness? There is the mystery,—there the unexplained phenomenon.
We restrict ourselves to saying that music, which, like speech, is perceived through the medium of the ear, does not, like speech, call upon the brain for an explanation of the sensation produced by the vibration on the nerves; it addresses itself to a mysterious agent within us, which is superior to intelligence, since it is independent of it, and makes us feel that which we can neither conceive nor explain.
Let us examine the various attributes of the musical phenomenon.
1. Music is a physical agent. It communicates to the body shocks which agitate the members to their base. In churches the flame of the candles oscillates to the quake of the organ. A powerful orchestra near a sheet of water ruffles its surface. A learned traveller speaks of an iron ring which swings to and fro to the murmur of the Tivoli Falls. In Switzerland I excited at will, in a poor child afflicted with a frightful nervous malady, hysterical and catalyptic crises, by playing in the minor key of E flat. The celebrated Doctor Bertier asserts that the sound of a drum gives him the colic. Certain medical men state that the notes of the trumpet quicken the pulse and induce slight perspiration. The sound of the bassoon is cold; the notes of the French horn at a distance, and of the harp, are voluptuous. The flute played softly in the middle register calms the nerves. The low notes of the piano frighten children. I once had a dog who would generally sleep on hearing music, but the moment I played in the minor key he would bark piteously. The dog of a celebrated singer whom I knew would moan bitterly, and give signs of violent suffering, the instant that his mistress chanted a chromatic gamut. A certain chord produces on my sense of hearing the same effect as the heliotrope on my sense of smell and the pine-apple on my sense of taste. Rachel's voice delighted the ear by its ring before one had time to seize the sense of what was said, or appreciate the purity of her diction.
We may affirm, then, that musical sound, rhythmical or not, agitates the whole physical economy,—quickens the pulse, incites perspiration, and produces a pleasant momentary irritation of the nervous system.