Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/260

244 neither physically painful nor yet conventional, but which nevertheless is suitable and unmistakable: the minor. From this we may measure how deeply music is founded in the nature of things and of man. With northern nations, whose life is subject to hard conditions, especially with the Russians, the minor prevails, even in the church music. Allegro in the minor is very common in French music, and is characteristic of it; it is as if one danced while one's shoe pinched.

I add further a few subsidiary remarks. When the key note is changed, and with it the value of all the intervals, in consequence of which the same note figures as the second, the third, the fourth, and so on, the notes of the scale are analogous to actors, who must assume now one rôle, now another, while their person remains the same. That the actors are often not precisely suited to these rôles may be compared to the unavoidable impurity of every harmonic system (referred to at the end of § 52 of the first volume) which the equal temperament has introduced.

Perhaps some may be offended, that, according to this metaphysic of it, music, which so often exalts our minds, which seems to us to speak of other and better worlds than ours, yet really only flatters the will to live, because it exhibits to it its nature, deludes it with the image of its success, and at the end expresses its satisfaction and contentment. The following passage from the "Vedas" may serve to quiet such doubts: "Etanand sroup, quod forma gaudii est, τον pram Atma ex hoc dicunt, quod quocunque loco gaudium est, particula e gaudio ejus est" (Oupnekhat, vol i. p. 405; et iterum, vol. ii. p. 215).