Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/139

Rh to express these ideas strike me as accurate, perhaps, but always as unsatisfying, and that is the impression I gain from your own. Not that that is your fault; it is the fault of language itself which, indeed, must fall short here. If you ask me what was in my mind while composing a particular song, I answer, the song itself precisely as it stands. And if, indeed, there was in any case some particular word or particular sentence in my thoughts, I can tell no one what it was, precisely because that word does not carry the same significance to one person that it does to another, and it is only the song itself that can express the same meaning, or suggest the same emotion, to one as to the other.

Resignation, melancholy, worship, a hunting call; these words do not call up the same feeling in two different persons; what is resignation to one is melancholy to another, while a third person attaches no definite significance to either. If one were a downright keen hunter by nature, perhaps the hunting call would come to signify to one pretty much the same thing as worship, and the notes of a horn be veritably a sort of anthem. We should hear nothing in it but the hunting call, and however much we might discuss it with the huntsman we should never come to an agreement. The word would still be many-sensed, and yet we should both understand the music.

Will you let that pass for an answer to your question? It is, at least, the only answer I know how to make, and it is nothing itself but words of doubtful significance.