Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/585

 584 CRITICAL NOTICES : unavoidable. On the details of Mr. Gurney's exposition, such as- the difference between music and architecture, our critic has pertinent and valuable observations. He urges that, though it is impossible to receive the different sensuous moments of tune, melodic interval and rhythm in isolation, this does not prevent our approximately estimating the emotive value of each. He con- cedes much to Mr. Gurney as to the organic unity of each new musical creation, and yet he shows how in every case we are able to some extent to refer the pleasing result of the whole to definite elements. The source of Mr. Guruey's error, says our critic, is a. strong scepticism as to the things of psychology, and along with this a credulity as to the things of acoustics. In order to establish this more fully, he examines Helmholtz's theory of harmony, which is in a measure accepted by Mr. Gurney as by myself. He tells us that this doctrine has for the last twenty years excited more and more opposition in Germany, and that it will finally have to be given up. Though the upper or partial tones have a, determining influence on the timbre of a tone, they have none or only a very subordinate one on consonance and the feeling of harmony. According to Prof. Stumpf, consonance consists in the tendency of tones to coalesce (a "Verschmelzungsverhaltniss"), and the pleasurable feeling of harmony springs in the first place out of the perception of this relation, though it is reinforced by other ideas and feelings that attach themselves to this perception. But the author's own theory is too briefly suggested to be quite intelligible. As may easily be seen from this brief sketch of Prof. Stumpf's argument, its drift is to lift musical enjoyment above the level of mere sensuous pleasure, and at the same time to rescue it from the domain of the unconscious, whether conceived of as obscure reminiscence of ancestral feeling or as a process of unconscious computation. Prof. Stumpf has a wholesome love of clear day- light and clings to the belief in the explicability of things. In dealing with the mysteries of musical emotion he has had to subject this conviction to the severest strain. He seems to confess that we can at present only very imperfectly discern the different threads of consciousness that are intertwined in the impression produced by music. And in spite of his direct attack on Mr. Spencer's theory, he appears, as we have seen, to attribute no inconsiderable part of the effect of music to associations with speech. The main point of difference between him and Mr. Spencer seems to be that he would set little store by heredity, but view such associations as built up during the life of the individual by means of a separate experience and comparison of each. Here Prof. Stumpf is taking up safe ground. Yet it strikes one as arbitrary to exclude altogether the co-operation of inherited association here. The common view is that primitive speech exhibited quasi-musical changes of tone much more abundantly and distinctly than our modern highly evolved speech; and it