Get its sop and hold its noise,
And leave soul free a little.
Théophile Gautier honestly defined music as 'le plus désagréable de tous les sons.' Charles Lamb rushed from the opera-house to solace his sufferings amid the rattle of the cab wheels. And equally the child Chopin cried with pain at the first sound of the pianoforte, and the child Mozart fainted under the intolerable blare of the trumpet. In all these cases the explanation is the same—a nerve too delicate to endure the stimulus, and an absence of any counteracting influence that could inhibit the sensation.
It is thus wholly erroneous to suppose that there is a gulf fixed between the man who 'has no ear' and the trained musician: on the contrary, the two extremes shade into each other by a thousand varieties of gradation. And this is particularly true of these complex impressions which result from several notes combined in harmony. The stimulus which we receive from a chord is, for obvious reasons, more vehement and acute than that which we receive from any of its constituent notes taken separately; and hence it is in our appreciation of harmonies, more than in any other form of musical effect, that the sensuous side of the art becomes apparent. Now, there is not a single chord in common use at the present day which has not been at some time condemned as a dissonance. The major third was once held to be a discord; so, later, was the dominant seventh; so, within living memory, was the so-called dominant thirteenth. Fifty years ago Chopin's harmony was 'unendurable;' thirty years ago the world accepted Chopin, but shrank in terror from Wagner and Brahms; now, we accept all three, but shake our heads over Goldmark. And the inference to which all this points is, that the terms 'concord' and 'discord' are wholly relative to the ear of the listener. The distinction between them is not to be explained on any mathematical basis, or by any a priori law of acoustics; it is altogether a question of psychology.
At the same time, it may be held, fairly enough, that a composer is bound to write in a manner intelligible to his generation. Volapuk may be the language of the future, but a poet who, at the present day, should publish his epic in that tongue, has only himself to thank if he find no readers. True, but the composer, like the poet, is himself a part of his generation, and, if he write simply and naturally, may be trusted not to pass out of touch with contemporary thought. He is a leader, but it is no part of a leader's business to lose sight of his army. And in Music, it is not the sensuous question which matters, but the intellectual; not the fact of concord or discord, but the way in which they are employed. We still find Monteverde harsh and the Prince of Venosa crude, not because they use sharp dissonances and extreme modulations, but because they fail to justify them on any artistic grounds. They are in this matter children playing with edged tools. So, at the present day, a composer who should end a piece on a minor second would be deliberately violating the established language of the time; and would be reprehensible, not because a minor second is ugly—for it will be a concord some day—but because, in the existing state of Music, it could not be naturally placed at the close of a cadence. Imagine Handel's face on being shown a song which finished on a dominant seventh out of the key. And, having imagined it, turn to Schumann's Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.
Again, supposing that a generation has mainly agreed to find the climax of sensuous pleasure in certain chords—the augmented sixth, the diminished seventh and the like—it by no means follows that a composition is delightful because it contains those particular effects. Everything depends on their relation to their context, or the standpoint from which they are introduced, on the general style of the passage in which they appear. Any amateur purveyor of hymn tunes and waltzes can learn to write them; the difficulty is to present them fitly and properly, and to place them, as points of colour, where they will harmonise with the complete scheme of the work. Even more recondite effects, like the wonderful 'voca me cum benedictis' in Dvořák's Requiem, are quâ sensuous of secondary value. Their true importance lies in their intellectual side, in their function of exhibiting new key relationships or new methods of resolution. And if a chord does not fulfil some such duty, if it does not justify itself by bearing some definite organic part in the total plan, then it is not art but confectionery. Hearers, whose only delight in music arises from the perception of 'sweet' harmonies, are on a par with the schoolboy in Leech's picture, who suggests that the claret would be improved by a little sugar.
From this two conclusions would seem to follow. First, that Music can never be adequately criticised on sensuous grounds, partly because the receptivity of the nerve differs in different temperaments, partly because even where there is an agreement the sensuous side is wholly subordinate to the intellectual. Secondly, as a corollary from this, any musician who deliberately aims at sensuous effects alone, ipso facto, commits artistic suicide. He can be beaten on his own ground by the great masters, and he leaves untouched the whole of that field to the occupation of which they owe their greatness. Finally, it may be added, that sense notoriously grows tired, while mental activity endures. We very soon weary of the average drawing-room ballad, even if it gave us some animal pleasure at the first hearing: but we return again and again to the fugue of Bach or the sonata of Beethoven, because there we find the permanent expression of mind and intelligence. And thus the musical critic may virtually disregard the element of sensation, or at most may allude to it only so far as to show that it is, in Aristotle's phrase, 'obedient to reason.'
Music affects our emotional nature in two ways: partly through the nervous system, partly through the ordinary law of association. It is a commonplace of psychology that our emotions are largely conditioned by physical states in the body,[3] and to this rule music assuredly offers no exception. Under certain circumstances, a current of energy, after passing from the ear to the brain, is transmuted into the nervous movements which constitute the material cause of the simple feelings, and thus we are roused or exhilarated or depressed by means as mechanical as those of any agency in external nature. Here, again, as in sensation itself, much depends upon the receptivity of the nerve. One hearer may be thrown into agitation by an impulse which leaves another comparatively cold, a strong temperament may be vehemently excited by conditions under which a weaker organism is stunned or paralysed. But all who are in any degree susceptible of the influence of music, have experienced some measure of this emotional stimulus, poured into the brain through sensation, and then sublimated in a physical alembic. Among the most conspicuous existing causes may be noted the rapid tremolo of the strings, as in the death song at the end of Tristan, the beat of a recurring figure, as in the 'Ride to the Abyss' of Berlioz' Faust, the reiteration of high notes on the violin, as in much of Dvořák's chamber music, and the restlessness of frequent modulation or uncertain tonality. Any reader who is at the pains to analyse the effect produced upon him by these means of musical expression, will probably agree that they rouse first a particular kind of stimulus in the sense, and then, without any conscious intervention on his own part, a corresponding state of emotional feeling.
Far more important is the influence of association. There is no reason in rerum naturâ why the minor mode should be sad, but our first ancestors noticed that a cry sank in tone as the power of its utterance failed, and hence established a connection between depression of note and waning strength. So began an association of ideas to which, by transmission and inheritance, the pathos of our minor keys is mainly due. Again, the bass naturally suggests gravity and earnestness, because that is the case with the speaking voice. 'No man of real dignity,' says Aristotle, 'could ever be shrill of speech;' and similarly, when we look for serious or dignified music, we expect to find some prominence given to its lower register. Much, too, of this association is due to the motions of our ordinary life: the force that strikes like a blow in the first phrase of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the agitation so often expressed by rapid and irregular movement; the broken voices at the end of the Funeral March in the Eroica; and others of similar kind. Of course music cannot define any specific emotional state: it is far too vague and indeterminate to be regarded as an articulate language; but it undoubtedly can suggest and adumbrate general types of emotion, either by producing their sensuous conditions, or by presenting some form of phrase which we can connect by association with our own experience.
But it is not in this emotional influence that the truest laws of musical criticism are to be sought. Its criterion is nobler than that of sense, partly because it deals with an aspect of our nature which is less animal, partly because it implies a greater degree of skill in the artist; but it is too personal and intimate to afford a satisfactory basis for discussion, and taken by itself, it offers little or no opportunity for the exercise of the higher faculties. In the Journal des Goncourt, there is a well-known passage describing the effect of music on a roomful of highly-strung and unintelligent listeners. The picture is not a little degrading to our humanity: nervous emotion trembling on the verge of hysteria, sentiment that has passed out of rational control, an intoxication of feeling morbid in itself and dangerous in its inevitable reaction. The case may be extreme, the account may be rhetorically exaggerated, but it contains a salutary truth. If we look on music merely as a stimulus to our emotional nature, we are really disregarding all that makes it of permanent value as an art. We are lowering it to the level of sentimental romance or bloodthirsty melodrama. Grant that this form of indulgence is less gross than the direct gratification of the senses, it is not a whit more critical. While we are under its spell, we are as incapable of sane judgment as Rinaldo in Armida's garden; we have abrogated our manhood, we have drugged our reason, we are lying passive and inert at the mercy of an external will.
It is hardly necessary to point out that this state of mere recipience is altogether different from artistic appreciation. Art is not more a riot of the passions than it is a debauch of the senses: it contains, no doubt, sensuous and emotional elements, the importance of which there is no need to undervalue, but it is only artistic if it subordinate them to the paramount claims of reason. Even the purest and noblest emotions do not constitute a sufficient response. We are only in a position to criticise when we have passed through the emotional stage and emerged into the intellectual region beyond. To judge a composition simply from the manner in which it works upon our feelings, is no better than judging a picture or a poem merely from our sympathy with its subject.