Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/542

 algebraic terms or simple numbers, as the above illustrations prove. It transfigures the spoken word in song. For its performance gymnastic exercises are required. Its expressions are like words, in being either conventional or imitative, or partly both; and, unlike words, in that their meaning can not change. It does not describe soul-states or cause their formation after reflection, like poetry, but reveals and induces them immediately, and so surely that Beethoven's sonatas are so many psychologic records.

The composer is more bound by natural laws than other artists, and yet is so free that his productions more nearly resemble actual creations. Music, in its threefold nature, appeals to man in his threefold nature. With great splendor of manifestation an orchestra engages the ear, and sometimes powerfully affects the nervous system; whatever is surveyable in the music occupies the intellect, and its signification affects the soul. It is not so much art-calculated as science inspired.

Here is ample evidence that a mere "physiological basis" is insufficient for the artist, and the advice that he should form a new art, less dependent upon gorgeous harmonies, is equally futile. For, although a composer exercises greater power over music than the philologist over language (who can only explain and classify roots already existing, being powerless to provide a new one), yet still the course of music is propelled by forces that can not be long or successfully opposed. No one affects to believe that steam, electricity, etc., will be set aside at the bidding of Mr. Ruskin.

Modern compositions are the natural expression of our time. Even the music of Mozart and Haydn seems to be truly Arcadian, compared with that of Beethoven and Schumann. It is comparatively artless, cheerful, and free from sighs. The works of these later writers rise to loftier heights and sink to deeper depths, reveling in a larger scale of human passion than those of their predecessors. Here aspirations, longings, strivings, are portrayed with a vividness that mirrors the spirit of the age. This music is not, like Tennyson's "Sleeping Beauty," "a perfect form in perfect rest," but is as in a state of evolution. It wears not so much the expression of Raphael's Madonnas—of the peaceful faith of the cloister—as that of strong, earnest men, exercised with honest doubts in the battle of the creeds. We can not turn back, or remain still; the cry is "Onward!" and, for good or for evil, we must proceed. Our art, side by side with the civilization it represents, will continue to grow, and then perhaps begin to decay, and finally give place to another still more glorious.