2. Music is a moral agent. Through the medium of the nervous system, the direct interpreter of emotion, it calls into play the higher faculties; its language is that of sentiment Furthermore, the motives which have presided over particular musical combinations establish links between the composer and the listener. We sigh with Bellini in the finale of La Somnambula; we shudder with Weber in the sublime phantasmagoria of Der Freischutz; the mystic inspirations of Palestrina, the masses of Mozart, transport us to the celestial regions, toward which they rise like a melodious incense. Music awakens in us reminiscences, souvenirs, associations. When we have wept over a song, it ever after seems to us bathed in tears.
A celebrated pianist tells me that, in a city where he was giving concerts, he became acquainted with a charming young girl. He was twenty years old, and had all the poetic and generous illusions of that romantic age. She was sixteen. They loved each other without daring to confess it, and perhaps without knowing it themselves. But the hour of separation came: he was passing his last evening at her house. Observed by the family, he could only furtively join hands with her at the moment of parting. The poem was but commenced, to be arrested at the first page: he never saw her again. Disheartened, distracted with grief, he wandered through the dark streets, until at two in the morning he found himself again under her windows. She too was awake. Their thoughts, drawn together by that divine tie which merits the name of love only in the morning of life, met in unison, for she was playing gently in the solitude of her chamber the first notes of a mazurka which they had danced together. "Tears came to my eyes," said my friend, "on hearing this music, which seemed to me sublime; it was the stifled plaint of her heart; it was her grief which exhaled from her fingers; it was the eternal adieu. For years I believed this mazurka to be a marvellous inspiration, and it was not till long after, when age had dispelled my illusions and obliterated the adored image, that I discovered it was only a vulgar and trivial commonplace: the gold was changed to brass."
The old man, chilled by years, may be insensible to the pathetic accents of Rossini, of Mozart: but repeat to him the simple songs of his youth, the present vanishes, and the illusions of the past come back again. I once knew an old Spanish general who detested music. One day I began to play to him my "Siege of Saragossa," in which is introduced the "Marcha Real" (Spanish national air), and he wept like a child. This air recalled to him the immortal defence of the heroic city, behind the falling walls of which he had fought against the French, and sounded to him, he said, like the voice of all the holy affections expressed by the word home. The mercenary Swiss troops, when in France and Naples, could not hear the "Ranz des Vaches" (the shepherd song of old and rude Helvetia) without being overcome by it. When from mountain to mountain the signal of revolt summoned to the cause the three insurgent Cantons, the desertions caused by this air became so frequent that the government prohibited it. The reader will remember the comic effect produced upon the French troops in the Crimea by the Highlanders marching to battle to the sound of the bagpipe, whose harsh, piercing notes inspired these brave mountaineers with valor, by recalling to them their country and its heroic legends. Napoleon III. finds himself compelled to allow the Arab troops incorporated into his army their barbarous tam-tam music, lest they revolt. The measured beat of the drum sustains the soldier in long marches which otherwise would be insupportable. The Marseillaise contributed as much toward the republican victories of 1793, when France was invaded, as the genius of General Dumouriez.
3. Music is a complex agent. It acts at once on life, on the instinct, the forces, the organism. It has a psychological action. The negroes charm serpents by whistling to them; it is said that fawns are captivated by a melodious voice; the bear is aroused with the fife; canaries and sparrows enjoy the flageolet; in the Antilles, lizards are enticed from their retreats by the whistle; spiders have an affection for fiddlers; in Switzerland, the herdsmen attach to the necks of their handsomest cows a large bell, of which they are so proud, that, while they are allowed to wear it, they march at the head of the herd; in Andalusia, the mules lose their spirit and their power of endurance, if deprived of the numerous bells with which it is customary to deck these intelligent animals; in the mountains of Scotland and Switzerland, the herds pasture best to the sound of the bagpipe; and in the Oberland, cattle strayed from the herd are recalled by the notes of the trumpet.
Donizetti, a year before his death, had lost all his faculties, in consequence of a softening of the spinal marrow. Every means was resorted to for reviving a spark of that intellect once so vigorous; but all failed. In a single instance only he exhibited a gleam of intelligence; and that was on hearing one of his friends play the septette of his opera of "Lucia." "Poor Donizetti!" said he; "what a pity he should have died so soon!" And this was all.
In 1848, after the terrible insurrection which made of Paris a vast slaughter-house, to conceal my sadness and my disgust I went to the house of one of my friends, who was superintendent of the immense insane asylum in Clermont-sur-Oise. He had a small organ, and was a tolerably good singer. I composed a mass, to the first performance of which we invited a few artists from Paris and several of the most docile inmates of the asylum. I was struck with the bearing of the latter, and asked my friend to repeat the experiment, and extend the number of invitations. The result was so favorable, that we were soon able to form a choir from among the patients, of both sexes, who rehearsed on Saturdays the hymns and chants they were to sing on Sunday at mass. A raving lunatic, a priest, who was getting more and more intractable every day, and who often had to be put in a strait-jacket, noticed the periodical absence of some of the inmates, and exhibited curiosity to know what they were doing. The following Saturday, seeing some of his companions preparing to go to rehearsal, he expressed a desire to go with them. The doctor told him he might go on condition that he would allow himself to be shaved and decently dressed. This was a thorny point, for he would never attend to his person, and became furious when required to dress; but, to our great astonishment, he consented at once. This day he not only listened to the music quietly, but was detected several times joining his voice with that of the choir. When I left Clermont, my poor old priest was one of the most constant attendants at the rehearsals. He still had his violent periods, but they were less frequent; and when Saturday arrived, he always dressed himself with care, and waited impatiently for the hour to go to chapel.
To resume: Music being a physical agent,—that is to say, acting on the individual without the aid of his intelligence; a moral agent,—that is to say, reviving his memory, exciting his imagination, developing his sentiment; and a complex agent,—that is to say, having a physiological action on the instinct, the organism, the forces, of man,—I deduce from this that it is one of the most powerful means for ennobling the mind, elevating the morals, and, above all, refining the manners. This truth is now so well recognized in Europe that we see choral societies—Orpheons and others—multiplying as by enchantment, under the powerful impulse given them by the state. I speak not simply of Germany, which is a singing nation, whose laborious, peaceful, intelligent people have in all time associated choral music as well with their labors as with their pleasures; but I may cite particularly France, which counts to-day more than eight hundred Orpheon societies, composed of workingmen. How many of these, who formerly dissipated their leisure time at drinking-houses, now find an ennobling recreation in these associations, where the spirit of union and fraternity is engendered and developed! And if we could get at the statistics of crime, who can doubt that they would show it had diminished in proportion to the increase of these societies? In fact, men are better, the heart is in some sort purified, when impregnated with the noble harmonies of a fine chorus; and it is difficult not to treat as a brother one whose voice has mingled with your own, and whose heart has been united to yours in a community of pure and joyful emotions. If Orpheon societies ever become established in America, be assured that bar-rooms, the plague of the country, will cease, with revolvers and bowie-knives, to be popular institutions.
Music, when employed in the service of religion, has always been its most powerful auxiliary. The organ did more for Catholicism in the Middle Ages than all its preaching; and Palestrina and Marcello have reclaimed and still reclaim more infidels than all the doctors of the Church.
We enter a house of worship. Still under the empire of the external world, we carry there our worldly thoughts and occupations; a thousand distractions deter us from religious reflection and meditation. The word of the preacher reaches the ear indeed, but only as a vague sound. The sense of what is said is arrested at the surface, without penetrating the heart. But let the grand voice of the organ be heard, and our whole being is moved; the physical world disappears, the eyes of the soul open; we bow the head, we bend the knee, and our thoughts, disengaged from matter, soar to the eternal regions of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.