Music pays for the immense power that has been given it; it awakens more than any other art the sentiment of the infinite, because it is vague, obscure, indeterminate in its effects. It is just the opposite art to sculpture, which bears less towards the infinite, because every thing in it is fixed with the last degree of precision. Such is the force and at the same time the feebleness of music, that it expresses every thing and expresses nothing in particular. Sculpture, on the contrary, scarcely gives rise to any reverie, for it clearly represents such a thing and not such another. Music does not paint, it touches; it puts in motion imagination, not the imagination that reproduces images, but that which makes the heart beat, for it is absurd to limit imagination to the domain of images.[126] The heart, once touched, moves all the rest of our being; thus music, indirectly, and to a certain point, can recall images and ideas; but its direct and natural power is neither on the representative imagination nor intelligence, it is on the heart, and that is an advantage sufficiently beautiful.
The domain of music is sentiment, but even there its power is more profound than extensive, and if it expresses certain sentiments with an incomparable force, it expresses but a very small number of them. By way of association, it can awaken them all, but directly it produces very few of them, and the simplest and the most elementary, too,—sadness and joy with their thousand shades. Ask music to express magnanimity, virtuous resolution, and other sentiments of this kind, and it will be just as incapable of doing it, as of painting a lake or a mountain. It goes about it as it can; it employs the slow, the rapid, the loud, the soft, etc., but imagination has to do the rest, and imagination does only what it pleases. The same measure reminds one of a mountain, another of the ocean; the warrior finds in it heroic inspirations, the recluse religious inspirations. Doubtless, words determine musical expression, but the merit then is in the word, not in the music; and sometimes the word stamps the music with a precision that destroys it, and deprives it of its proper effects—vagueness, obscurity, monotony, but also fulness and profundity, I was about to say infinitude. I do not in the least admit that famous definition of song:—a noted declamation. A simple declamation rightly accented is certainly preferable to stunning accompaniments; but to music must be left its character, and its defects and advantages must not be taken away from it. Especially it must not be turned aside from its object, and there must not be demanded from it what it could not give. It is not made to express complicated and factitious sentiment, nor terrestrial and vulgar sentiments. Its peculiar charm is to elevate the soul towards the infinite. It is therefore naturally allied to religion, especially to that religion of the infinite, which is at the same time the religion of the heart; it excels in transporting to the feet of eternal mercy the soul trembling on the wings of repentance, hope, and love. Happy are those, who, at Rome, in the Vatican,[127] during the solemnities of the Catholic worship, have heard the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolese, on the old consecrated text! They have entered heaven for a moment, and their souls have been able to ascend thither without distinction of rank, country, even belief, by those invisible and mysterious steps, composed, thus to speak, of all the simple, natural, universal sentiments, that everywhere on earth draw from the bosom of the human creature a sigh towards another world!
Between sculpture and music, those two opposite extremes, is painting, nearly as precise as the one, nearly as touching as the other. Like sculpture, it marks the visible forms of objects, but adds to them life; like music, it expresses the profoundest sentiments of the soul, and expresses them all. Tell me what sentiment does not come within the province of the painter? He has entire nature at his disposal, the physical world, and the moral world, a churchyard, a landscape, a sunset, the ocean, the great scenes of civil and religious life, all the beings of creation, above all, the figure of man, and its expression, that living mirror of what passes in the soul. More pathetic than sculpture, clearer than music, painting is elevated, in my opinion, above both, because it expresses beauty more under all its forms, and the human soul in all the richness and variety of its sentiments.
But the art par excellence, that which surpasses all others, because it is incomparably the most expressive, is poetry.
Speech is the instrument of poetry; poetry fashions it to its use, and idealizes it, in order to make it express ideal beauty. Poetry gives to it the charm and power of measure; it makes of it something intermediary between the ordinary voice and music, something at once material and immaterial, finite, clear, and precise, like contours and forms the most definite, living and animated like color, pathetic and infinite like sound. A word in itself, especially a word chosen and transfigured by poetry, is the most energetic and universal symbol. Armed with this talisman, poetry reflects all the images of the sensible world, like sculpture and painting; it reflects sentiment like painting and music, with all its varieties, which music does not attain, and in their rapid succession that painting cannot follow, as precise and immobile as sculpture; and it not only expresses all that, it expresses what is inaccessible to every other art, I mean thought, entirely distinct from the senses and even from sentiment,—thought that has no forms,—thought that has no color, that lets no sound escape, that does not manifest itself in any way,—thought in its highest flight, in its most refined abstraction.
Think of it. What a world of images, of sentiments, of thoughts at once distinct and confused, are excited within us by this one word—country! and by this other word, brief and immense,—God! What is more clear and altogether more profound and vast!
Tell the architect, the sculptor, the painter, even the musician, to call forth also by a single stroke all the powers of nature and the soul! They cannot, and by that they acknowledge the superiority of speech and poetry.
They proclaim it themselves, for they take poetry for their own measure; they esteem their own works, and demand that they should be esteemed, in proportion as they approach the poetic ideal. And the human race does as artists do: a beautiful picture, a noble melody, a living and expressive statue, gives rise to the exclamation—How poetical! This is not an arbitrary comparison; it is a natural judgment which makes poetry the type of the perfection of all the arts,—the art par excellence, which comprises all others, to which they aspire, which none can reach.
When the other arts would imitate the works of poetry, they usually err, losing their own genius, without robbing poetry of its genius. But poetry constructs according to its own taste palaces and temples, like architecture; it makes them simple or magnificent; all orders, as well as all systems, obey it; the different ages of art are the same to it; it reproduces, if it pleases, the classic or the Gothic, the beautiful or the sublime, the measured or the infinite. Lessing has been able, with the exactest justice, to compare Homer to the most perfect sculptor; with such precision are the forms which that marvellous chisel gives to all beings determined! And what a painter, too, is Homer! and, of a different kind, Dante! Music alone has something more penetrating than poetry, but it is vague, limited, and fugitive. Besides its clearness, its variety, its durability, poetry has also the most pathetic accents. Call to mind the words that Priam utters at the feet of Achilles while asking him for the dead body of his son, more than one verse of Virgil, entire scenes of the Cid and the Polyeucte, the prayer of Esther kneeling before the Lord, the choruses of Esther and Athalie. In the celebrated song of Pergolese, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, we may ask which moves most, the music or the words. The Dies iræ, Dies illa, recited only, produces the most terrible effect. In those fearful words, every blow tells, so to speak; each word contains a distinct sentiment, an idea at once profound and determinate. The intellect advances at each step, and the heart rushes on in its turn. Human speech idealized by poetry has the depth and brilliancy of musical notes; it is luminous as well as pathetic; it speaks to the mind as well as to the heart; it is in that inimitable, unique, and embraces all extremes and all contraries in a harmony that redoubles their reciprocal effect, in which, by turns, appear and are developed, all images, all sentiments, all ideas, all the human faculties, all the inmost recesses of the soul, all the forms of things, all real and all intelligible worlds!