In the creations of art, on the contrary, feeling, the spirit of life, is added to the pure idea, and this new element of individual character introduced into the thought is, in its infinite subtlety, sufficient to produce the immense variety which exists in the poetic and artistic creations of different men, of different ages, and of different nations. And the reason of this is very simple; it is because the heart is the seat of distinctive personality. We never love men for what they know; we love them for what they feel and are. It is consequently feeling which is the principle of union among men.
Thus it is through art and literature alone that national individualities really communicate with each other; it is through them that what is characteristic in each is made known to all; it is through them that embittered, long-seated, and deeply-rooted national prejudices must be dissipated; through them that the fusion of minds, violently hostile to each other only because of their mutual ignorance and misconception of character, must eventually be effected. Before the means of constant intercommunication, daily becoming more rapid and perfect, shall have compassed the whole earth with their lines of lightning, before all nations shall be known to one another as inhabitants of the same city—the artists, through art and literature, will have confided to the human heart of their brethren their own most sacred feelings, the hidden beatings of their life-pulse, so that when the material barriers separating souls shall fall, when steam and iron shall subdue space and time, men of distant climes will no longer stand as strangers to one another, but meet with all the enthusiasm of near and dear friends long since initiated in all the holy and tender secrets of the home hearth; the due place of affection, honor, and gratitude ready for all true souls at the sacred fireside of appreciative fraternal love.
It is remarkable that the art marked and conditioned by the necessity of the most perfect unity, the art almost exclusively intended for the expression of and appeal to the feelings of the soul, the art without material model of any kind, and consequently the most ideal and original of all, in which the pulse of time itself marshals the tones in order, symmetry, and proportion, coloring them with the joys and woes, hopes and fears of humanity—should now be undoubtedly entering upon a new era of far higher and wider development. This fact contains a germ which is to blossom in the most brilliant bloom; the crowning flower in that living unity, which is, indeed, the 'manifest Destiny' of our race.
There is certainly something exceedingly remarkable in the unitive powers of music. In the first place, its present popularization cannot fail to multiply the relations of men with one another, as each separate instrument, like an arithmetical figure, has an absolute, as well as a relative value. It may not be sufficient in itself to produce harmony; but when placed in UNION with others, it gains a double or triple value, according to the part assigned it in a musical Whole. A single jar in time or tune spoils the entire effect of the marvellous variety and order, attained in the utter oneness of any good musical work. The desire to increase the limits of art, to multiply its delicious emotions, will infallibly lead those who cultivate this ethereal study to frequent reunions, in order that they may produce the Beautiful in more fulness, obtain a greater variety of effect and tone, cradled, as it must ever be in music, in the bosom of the strictest unity.
Music has its own trinity, composed of Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony. Rhythm is the pulse of time; the tones register its heart beats and manifest its soul, its melody; harmony is the concurrent sympathy or antagonism elicited by its annunciation in the invisible realm in which it moves. Unity is first manifested in the rhythm; then, as the tones consecutively follow each other, the succeeding one always born and growing immediately from the one just expiring, in the consequent melody; and lastly, as the tones progress simultaneously, hand to hand, and heart to heart, with the single line or passion of the melody, conditioned and responding to it in all its varied phases—(the individual and collective, the soul and its surroundings)—the grand diapason of harmony rolls on—and the magic unity of music is complete! Hence, part of its power over men. But like all organic, basic life-principles, its relations with the human spirit defy analysis. Its unitive influence cannot be denied, even by those who do not feel its charm. Let them but consider that no public act of humanity implying the primeval unity of the race, is considered complete without it, and they must be convinced that it is pre-eminently the art of social union. When an entire nation collects as a band of brothers to resist aggression, to repel invasion, it is music, the unitive art, which animates them to seek death itself to resist wrongs which would burden all, its very rhythm keeping in massive unison, together, the tread of thousands, causing all hearts to throb in one measure, and so regulating the most heterogenous masses that they move as it were as one mighty man. And in all public acknowledgments of our collective dependence as one race upon the one God, music alone is considered sufficiently symbolic and tender to express the universal sense of helplessness, of generic trust in His marvellous mercy.
Music blesses the innocent bride with the first chant of forever united, and consequently holy love. It hallows at the baptismal font the introduction of the infant into the mystical oneness of the children of Christ. Even at the grave it softens human sorrow by its heavenly whisperings of eternal union in the bosom of Infinite love.
France is ever ready to receive Italian, Sclavonic, and German artists with characteristic and appreciative enthusiasm; and America applauds with naïve rapture that skill, as yet, alas! foreign to her native soil.
'I pant for the music which is divine,
My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine;
Loosen the notes in a silver shower;
Like an herbless plain, for the gentle rain,
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.
'Let me drink of the spirit of that sweet sound—
More—oh, more—I am thirsting yet!
It loosens the serpent which care has bound
Upon my heart to stifle it;
The dissolving strain, in every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.'
Shelley.
Artists and litterateurs are the true representatives of the countries in which they live; because they alone reveal to us the secret throbbings of the great national heart; and the warm and sympathetic feelings which they excite in foreign climes, are golden links drawing more closely the ties of mutual understanding and affection, welding them together in that generous reciprocal esteem and comprehension, which is destined to unite all climes and tongues.
'A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.'