THE GENERAL IDEA OF PROGRESS
It may be objected that my persuasion in Chapter I that music is the
imagination of love _in sound_ and in Chapter II that music is also
the experience of life-and-death _in sound_ are two conclusions not
only extraordinary in themselves but different. It will be seen that
they are not irreconcilable. My conception of the nature of music
must, if true, be such as to include all music, the music of Sullivan,
Puccini, Elgar and the Jazz-Kings as well as the music of Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, and Wagner; the songs of the folk, old and new, peasant and
urban, as well as the songs of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. There is no
difficulty in this.
We have seen that the development of music is analogous to the
development of language. That this must be so is obvious when we
understand that both music and language are mental structures
contemporary with the human mind, reflecting its development and
having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing. No arts have
been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell.
The reason for this gives us a clue to the character of progress in
general. The senses of smell and taste are too intimate, too physically
diffused, too direct or primitive in effect to be controlled by the
mind. We may say that the body now short-circuits in these sensations
and that the mind is cut out. But when, in the past, the sense of
touch developed into the more complicated organs of the eye and the
ear[1] which made touch _at a distance_ possible, then what the mind
sensed was more highly organized and less direct and amorphous. Smells
and tastes may be compared with noises before the mind has organized
them into musical sounds, or with sensations which have not yet passed
through the imagination and become organized into emotions and ideas.
It would seem that the history of man is the history of this process of
organization and that the organizations differ more from one another
than do the senses from which they grew. A Chinaman, for instance, is
much more like an Englishman in his body than in his language; he can
have a child by an Englishwoman with whom he is unable to speak.[2]
What we think is understanding Chinese music when we hear it is
merely recognition of that organization of vibration, which we call
musical sounds, an organization common to the human ear in all mankind.
The major part of popular music consists of stringing these sounds
together for the mere pleasure of recognizing them--pleasure in their
organization as contrasted with the unorganized mass of mere noise
out of which they have been selected; also its use of them in simple
combinations expressing simple emotions--sensations of rudimentary
organization--which again are common to all mankind. It is because
language is not an organization of the merely visual or auditory
sensations made by the physical eye and ear with which almost
everybody is born (there _are_ colour-blind and tone-deaf people) but
a post-natal acquired and complicated mental construction that it is
totally unintelligible until learnt. So Chinese music does not mean the
same to us as to a Chinaman, nor does European music mean the same to
him as to a European, because it is not merely a construction of the
ear, but is also in some although in varying degree a construction of
the mind. Just as it took a multitude of lives and deaths to evolve the
human eye and ear--organs with which all men are now born--so it has
taken many generations of that mental development we call culture and
tradition to create a language that was more than onomatopoeia, and a
music that was more than recognizable and, therefore, agreeable sounds.
There is, and I maintain there can be no absolute, universal, pure art
immediately intelligible to all men. It was the false idea that music
was purely sensual which led Pater to think that music was such an art
and that all other arts should attain its perfection. The development
of every art is a development farther and farther away from the mere
sensations upon which it is founded, and these developments make a web
of experience which is constantly being rewoven and renewed (probably
without a single strand ever being lost or destroyed) and, without
this, music would dissolve into meaningless sounds. We look upon the
eye and the ear as beautiful complex creations of life. We think of
them as physical entities because their creation is so far back in
life that it belongs to the sub-human or animal epoch, and so they
have become physical things, if not material objects. But this power
of becoming _physical_ (life taking on flesh, the spirit achieving
form) or _material_ (electricity becoming molecules of hydrogen, lead,
etc.) is the process which I have described as death; and as that
necessary and important death, death the complement of life. But, as I
have already shown, a third kind of death, other than the material and
the physical, is that of _intellectual_ structure--known variously as
tradition, belief, dogma, logic, technique or, most comprehensively,
as knowledge. Just as a multitude of deaths were necessary to the
evolution of the eye and the ear so a multitude of deaths (an
Encyclopædia is a mental cemetery) are necessary to the evolution of
the mind. The past experience of music which every trained musician
possesses is such knowledge. If he merely repeats it, copies out of
the past stored in his mind, in the mind of his generation, in the
culture he and his generation have inherited, he is a mere academic
musician and not a creative artist. But there are degrees in this as
in everything else. It is not the possession of the tradition which
makes a musician academic and lifeless, it is the failure to use the
traditions to express himself; and this is a failure in musical life.
A musical mind which is a mere body of musical tradition is like a
detached ear or a plucked out eye--an ear which does not hear or an
eye which does not see. The life of hearing is not in the organ, not
in what has been heard--of which it is the physical representation,
the _death-shape_--it is in creation, the hearing of a new thing. And
creation is that movement from life to death, from soul to substance,
from the spirit to the form which is the imagining forth of love, for
love alone is a creative motive.
And the forms of love vary from the flowering and seeding of plants
to the music of Beethoven. It is not a progress from bad to good, it
is not a retrogression from good to bad. It is rather a process which
fills the Universe with death--death in myriads of lovely forms, from
the form of the wood-violet to the form of the symphony. And this
process is life. And life increasing the varieties of death is the
general principle of progress. What is the purpose of this process?
We do not know. But we can say that its purpose is delight. _Ecstasy
clothing Himself in a thousand Forms._ The Universe delighting in
itself preserves itself in death, for in death the imagination of the
spirit is made immortal.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] How was this achieved? No biologist can tell us, but we shall not
go far wrong in seeing here again the created organs of Desire.
[2] Here we can find a conclusive argument in proof of the superiority
of sentiment to sense in sexual experience. Sentiment is non-existent
among animals and it is very faint in the lower human types but in the
highest European types it now almost completely controls the sexual
sense.