It is, perhaps, scarcely a less fatal objection to the indiscriminate practice of harmony, that even the restricted pleasure which it conveys is, from want of education in this peculiar art, incapable of being at all enjoyed by the vast majority of hearers.
The best practical illustration, indeed, of the relative value of melody and harmony arises from observing their effects on the mind and the expression of the features. The English people, being chiefly of Gothic origin, have a fair capability of apprehending coexisting related sounds, and their conduct while hearing them will furnish this illustration.
Let any one, then, observe the effect of these sounds in the finest harmonies produced at our Opera-house. An affected look of knowingness, an insincere grin, passes from one face to another, and occasionally, when some one who really understands the matter gives a bold and loud rap with his stick,—believing that there must now certainly be something very fine, they very innocently break into a long paroxysm of applause, and they repeat this as often as the courageous fellow with the stick chooses to give them the signal, each secretly thinking how devilish stupid he must be not really to enjoy what everybody else is so highly delighted with.
See, however, the same faces when a simple melody breaks out from the chaos of the harmony: waiting for no prompter, pleasure instantly beams on every face, and truth and nature have a triumph in that deep and universal sympathy which art and affectation are utterly incapable of achieving.
The practice of harmony has, indeed, been borrowed by us from the boors of Russia, Bohemia, and Swabia, whose broad and flat configuration of head seems to be as much connected with this practice as their coldness and apathy are utterly opposed to musical feeling, which has no existence independent of passion.
So natural and universal is melody, that even many quadrupeds are powerfully affected by it, while not one seems to be influenced by harmony.
Such then is the kind of music which, originally borrowed from these boors, the influence of a few amateurs has rendered fashionable among the half-civilized people of Europe,—for we must call those half-civilized who have no perception of the fundamental necessity and transcendent beauty of simplicity in all the fine arts, those sole tests of the highest civilization.
In Greece, where alone those arts reached the highest perfection, the purest simplicity characterized every one of their productions; and there, accordingly, harmony—as in general a complex and idle decoration, in no way promoting expression, the end of music, but, on the contrary, defeating its purpose, was, we are told, absolutely proscribed.
Even if this fact had not been recorded, the slightest knowledge of the genius of Grecian art would prove that it must have been so; and we might as safely have predicted that they no more loaded their melodies with Gothic or Sclavonic harmonies than their temples with Gothic traceries[66].
The analogy is perfectly strict; for these gingerbread traceries are not more unproductive of great or good effect than harmonies are; nor are the barn-like temples which they cover more ugly in their general form than the meagre airs which harmonies are intended to decorate.