Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/213

 FINE ARTS 203 are thus for him varieties of imitation. He says, indeed, most music and dancing, as if he was aware that there were exceptions, but he does not indicate what the exceptions are ; and under the head of imitative music, he distinctly reckons some kinds of instrumental music without words. But in our own more precise usage, to imitate is necessarily to imitate some individual thing, some definite reality of experience; and we can only call those imitative arts which tell us of such things, either by showing us their actual like ness, as sculpture does in solid form, and as painting does by means of lines and colours on a plane surface, or else by calling up ideas or images of them in the mind, as poetry and literature do by means of words. It is by a stretch of ordinary usage that we apply the word imitation even to this last way of representing things ; since words are no true likeness of, but only arbitrary signs for, the thing they re present. And those arts we cannot call imitative at all which by indefinite utterance or expression produce in us emotions unattended by the recognizable likeness, idea, or image of anything. Now the emotions of music, when music goes along with words, whether in the shape of actual song, or even of the instrumental accompaniment of song, are no doubt in a certain sense attended with definite ideas. But the ideas then in question are the ideas expressed by the words them selves ; and the same ideas would be conveyed to the mind equally well by the same words if they were not sung or accompanied, but simply spoken. What the music contri butes is a special element of its own, an element of pure emotion which heightens the effect of the words upon the feelings, without in the least helping to elucidate them for the understanding. Nay, it is well known that a song pro duces its intended effect upon the feelings almost as well though we fail to catcli the words or are ignorant of the language to which they belong. Thus the view of Aristotle cannot be defended on the ground that he was familiar with music only in an elementary form, and principally as the direct accompaniment of words, and that in his day the modern development of the art, as an art for building up immense constructions of independent sound, glorious and intricate fabrics of melody and harmony detached from words, was a thing neither imagined nor imaginable. That is perfectly true ; but the essential character of musical sound is the same in its most elementary as in its most complicated stage. Its privilege is to give delight, not by communicating definite ideas, or calling up particular images, but by expressing on the one part, and arousing on the other, a unique kind of emotion. The emotion caused by music may be altogether independent of any ideas con- veyable by words. Or it may serve to intensify and enforce other emotions arising at the same timo in connexion with the ideas conveyed by words ; and a distinguished composer and energetic musical reformer of our own day insists that in the former phase the art is now exhausted, and that only in the latter are new conquests in store for it. But in either case the music is the music, and is like nothing else; it is no representation or similitude of anything whatsoever. But does not instrumental music really, it may be urged, sometimes imitate the sounds of nature, as the piping of birds, the whispering of woods, the moaning of storms, or very explosion of the thunder; or does it not at any rate suggest these things by resemblances so close that they almost amount to imitation 1 Occasionally, it is true, music does allow itself these playful excursions into a region of quasi-imitation or mimicry. It modifies the char acter of its abstract sounds into something, so to speak, more concrete, and, instead of sensations which are like nothing else, affords us sensations which recognizably re semble those wn receive from some of the sounds of nature. But such excursions are hazardous, and to make them often is the surest proof of vulgarity in a musician. Neither are those effects of the great composers in accompanying the verbal descriptions of natural phenomena, which we recog nize as most appropriate to the phenomena described, generally in the nature of real imitations or representations of them. The notes of the dove and nightingale in Haydn s Creation must be acknowledged to be instances of true though highly idealized imitation ; but in such other instances of direct, obvious, and suggestive appropriateness of the music to the words as even the &quot; Hailstone &quot; chorus and the &quot; Darkness &quot; chorus of the Israel in Egypt, the music in no true sense imitates the phenomena, or shows us hoio fire mingled with the hail ran along upon the ground, or how there came over all the land of Egypt thick dark ness even a darkness which might be felt. Again, it is an acknowledged fact concerning the operation of instru mental music on its hearers, that all hearers will find them selves in tolerable agreement as to the meaning of any passage so long as they only attempt to describe it in terms of vague emotion, and to say, such and such a passage ex presses, as the case may be, dejection or triumph, effort or the relaxation of effort, eagerness or languor, suspense or fruition, anguish or glee. But their agreement comes to an end the moment they begin to associate, in their interpreta tion, definite ideas with these vague emotions ; then we find that what suggests in idea to one hearer the vicissitudes of war will suggest to another, or to the same at another time, the vicissitudes of love, to another those of spiritual yearn ing and aspiration, to another, it may be, those of changeful travel by forest, champaign, and ocean, to another those of life s practical struggle and ambition. The infinite variety of the ideas which may thus be called up in different minds by the same strain of music is proof enough that the music is not like any particular thing. The torrent of entrancing emotion which it pours along the heart, emotion latent and undivined until the spell of sound begins, that is music s achievement and its secret ; the ideas which may spring up in attendance on the emotion are no more than as the rain bow colours which come and go in the torrent spray. It is perhaps hardly necessary to add, that the latest physiological explanation of the source of -music s power within us in no way shakes or interferes with this funda mental character of the art. According to that explanation, the charm of musical sounds depends on susceptibilities which have gone on accumulating in the fibres of the human constitution, by hereditary transmission through uncounted generations, ever since our brute progenitors found favour with their mates by wooing them (as other brutes are known to woo theirs now) with love-cries which in their regulated time and pitch contained the rudimentary elements of music. If this explanation is true, that does not of course mean that the musical utterance of to-day is any copy or imitation of those aboriginal love-cries ; only that it is an infinitely complex and remote development of faculties which had in them their earliest exercise. Aristotle endeavoured to frame a classification of the arts, Dcfini- in their several applications and developments, on two tion of grounds the nature of the objects imitated by each, and m the means or instruments employed in the imitation. But in the case of music the first part of this endeavour falls to the ground, because the object imitated has, in truth, no existence. The means employed by music are successions and combinations of vocal or instrumental sounds regulated according to the three conditions of time or interval, tone or pitch (which together make up melody), and harmony, or the relations of different strains of time and tone co- operant but not parallel. With these means, music either creates her independent constructions, or else accompanies, adorns, enforces, the imitative art of speech but herself imitates not ; and may best be defined simply aa a speaking