Page:Harmonics - Aristoxenus - Macran.djvu/9



i. is in no sense a universal language. Like its sister, speech, it is determined in every case to a special form by the physical and mental character of the people among whom it has arisen, and the circumstances of their environment. The particular nature of music is no more disproved by the fact that a melody of Wagner speaks to German, French, and English ears alike, than is the particular nature of speech by the fact that the Latin tongue was at one time the recognized vehicle of cultivated thought throughout the civilized world.

Further, this limitation which is common to music and speech leads to a more complete isolation in the case of the former. The primary function of language is to give us representations, whether of the facts of the world and the soul, or of the ideals of thought, or of the fancies of the imagination: and to appeal to our emotions through the representation of such facts, ideals, or fancies. This service, so far as we are capable of perception and feeling, any strange language may be made to render us at the cost of some study. But we are aware that our own language has another power for us; that of waking immediately in us emotions in which are fused beyond all analysis the effects of its very sounds and the feelings that are linked to those sounds by indissoluble association. It is here that begins the real isolation of language, the incommunicable charm of poetry that defies translation. But the whole meaning of music depends upon this immediate appeal to our emotions through the association of feeling with sensation; 1