It is possible that the old heading “Arts and Sciences” has been
responsible for some of the barrenness which is so conspicuous a
feature of æsthetic theory. For the heading seems usually to have
suggested, not only that there is a difference between the arts and the
sciences, but that the difference is of a fundamental kind. For the
purposes of æsthetic theory the various arts are assumed to have more
in common than any one of them has with any of the sciences. We find
the writer on æsthetics expounding his principles in chapters headed
Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Music; but it is rare indeed to find the
argument extended to mathematics and physics. Yet there is no evidence
that such omissions are due to deliberate reflection; the philosopher
has not decided, after examination, that the sciences are unæsthetic
objects; we must assume that accidents of taste and education have
prevented him from paying attention to what may conceivably be useful
data for the formulation of a theory of æsthetic. Within the last two
or three generations scientific men have been thinking and writing
a good deal about the philosophic basis and implications of their
study, and it is significant that this inquiry has led many of them
to insist on the æsthetic character of the satisfactions that science
affords. The late Henri Poincaré, in particular, has shown that
scientific theories are akin to works of art, and in this country, Dr.
Norman Campbell has asserted his belief that great men of science are
essentially great artists. The point of view is an interesting one,
and suggests that fresh light may be thrown upon æsthetic problems by
a new grouping of their subject-matter. Instead of putting the arts
and the sciences on opposite sides of the fence, it may be helpful to
see whether certain members of these two groups have not a natural
affinity with one another, and so gain hints for a different and more
comprehensive classification.
It is noteworthy, in this respect, that music has always occupied an
exceptional position among the arts. Pater tried to relate it to other
arts by saying it was the art to which all others aspire:
The arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law
or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely
realises; and one of the chief functions of æsthetic criticism,
dealing with the products of art, new or old, is to estimate the
degree in which each of these products approaches, in this sense, to
musical law.
It is characteristic of Pater’s criticism, and of much of the criticism
of his school, that it exists, as it were, within a world of its own.
The meanings to be attached to his most important terms are always
suggested or insinuated; they are never defined. The method is useful,
perhaps even necessary, in dealing with a complex and elusive object,
and where appeal is made to perceptions which lie on the fringe of
consciousness. But it runs the grave danger of becoming altogether
too tenuous to be intelligible when we make direct reference to the
object it is supposed to illuminate. When, for instance, Pater says
of the best music, “the end is not distinct from the means, the form
from the matter, the subject from the expression,” we become acutely
aware of the absence of definition in each of these primary terms
directly we think of any actual composition. We feel, indeed, that the
terminology is not natural; in contemplating a poem the mind may be
naturally impelled to distinguish between subject and expression as a
kind of first effort in analysis; it is doubtful whether, in listening
to music, this direction for analysis ever presents itself. So that
to say that in music subject and expression are identical is not to
say anything useful about music, but merely to declare that that kind
of analysis is irrelevant. It is very probable that nothing is to be
gained by first making distinctions which have a meaning for other arts
and then bringing music into the scheme by saying that for music such
distinctions become meaningless.
But if we are to maintain that this kind of criticism is irrelevant,
then music becomes not only an isolated art but the art of which we
know least. If it cannot be accommodated as an example within the
general body of æsthetic criticism, the criticism that uses such terms
as Pater uses, then whatever general conclusions the multifarious
writings of the last two centuries on the “beautiful” may be considered
to have reached are not applicable to music. In this extremity it is
natural, nowadays, to become “scientific.” Comparative studies are
undertaken: the music of Java is compared with the music of Bach: the
evolution of musical devices is made clear; the psychological condition
of the patient under music is examined: the time taken for the right
degree of hypnosis to be induced is determined. That such methods may
one day stumble upon important facts it would be rash to deny, but
nothing has yet been reached which illuminates the particular problem
that music presents. We are frankly of the opinion that, so far, the
difficult utterances of certain mystical or semi-mystical writers throw
more light on the real nature of music than do those of common sense.
Among such writers on music Schopenhauer is notorious; and it is worth
while to dwell a little on his speculations, fantastic as they may
seem, since they contain an element common to all such interpretations,
which does serve to isolate the essential problem of music. In
Schopenhauer’s æsthetic the object of all arts, except music, is to
lead, by the description of objects, to the recognition of the Ideas
(Platonic) whose appearance in multiplicity constitutes the world.
All arts, therefore, have a transcendental function; their aim is to
reveal to us the Platonic world of eternal essences or Ideas. But they
have to raise us to this region _via_ the objects of experience;
in that sense they are also, therefore, concerned with the world of
appearance and are dependent upon it. The case is different with music.
Music is not concerned with the external world either as a symbol or as
a reality. It is not even, in Schopenhauer’s language, concerned with
the Ideas, but refers directly to that “Will” which, in Schopenhauer’s
philosophy, underlies the Ideas themselves. The essence of his theory
is given in the following passage:
... so ist die Musik, da sie die Ideen übergeht, auch von der
erscheinenden Welt ganz unabhängig, ignoriert sie schlechthin, könnte
gewissermaassen, auch wenn die Welt gar nicht wäre, doch bestehen:
was von den anderen Künsten sich nicht sagen lässt. Die Musik ist
nämlich eine so unmittelbare Objektivation und Abbild des ganzen
Willens, wie die Welt selbst es ist, ja wie die Ideen es sind, deren
vervielfältigte Erscheinung die Welt der einzelnen Dinge ausmacht.
Or, as he says a little later on, the world may be regarded as embodied
music.
It is not likely that anyone will take Schopenhauer’s philosophy of
music seriously; and even those who are sympathetic to his general
view are not likely to find their sense of the ludicrous undisturbed
by his identification of bass notes with the planets, tenor notes with
the vegetable world, and so on. The intensity of his response to music
and his humourless courage have led him to what are perhaps the most
fantastic statements in all his writings. But what is worth noting is
that so imaginative and fertile a speculator, because he was genuinely
sensitive to music, had to give it a profoundly isolated position in
his æsthetic. In so doing we think he recognised one very important
difference between music and the other arts. It is true that music is
independent of the world of experience in a way that other arts are
not. It is true that there is a sense in which Schopenhauer is right
when he says that music would exist even if the world did not. We
can see what is meant if we compare the development of a “dramatic”
piece of music, such as the first movement of Beethoven’s C minor
Symphony, with a great tragedy. The tragedy, as a condition of success,
must make reference to our experience of life. The ostensible matter
of the tragedy, the characters and incidents, must not violate our
conception of reality if they are to be accepted. The tragedy must be
plausible. Such considerations obviously do not apply to music. It is
meaningless to say that the development of a composition must satisfy
our sense of probability. Yet there is a meaning in saying that its
development seems either arbitrary or inevitable. The analogy that
immediately presents itself is a chain of logical reasoning, as in
the sustained development of a mathematical theorem. Such development
is independent of all experience; the mind is obeying none but its
own laws, and is paying no attention to any alien elements. And it is
this characteristic of mathematics which seems responsible for the
fascination the study possesses for its devotees.
Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of
nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos,
where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at
least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the
actual world,
says Mr. Bertrand Russell in a typical passage. A strain of romantic
eloquence seems, indeed, to be inseparable from the writings of
mathematicians on their subject. But the analogy can be pressed more
closely. There are elegant and inelegant mathematical demonstrations,
those which merely “command assent,” as Lord Rayleigh said, and those
which provide a very high degree of æsthetic satisfaction. In these
latter demonstrations the mind seems to be moving with more swiftness
and freedom; the whole demonstration seems to flower in a natural
and spontaneous way; we have the impression of _inevitability_.
Mathematical elegance, as Poincaré has put it, “n’est autre chose que
la satisfaction due à je ne sais quelle adaptation entre la solution
que l’on vient de découvrir et les besoins de notre esprit.” It is
as if there were a mode of living natural to the human spirit, an
_unadapted_ life, a life free from the necessity of accommodating
itself to the elements, so largely alien, of the actual world.
Mathematics is the expression of this life so far as the intellect is
concerned. Is it too much to say that music is a fuller embodiment of
this free life?
If we are to say this we must acknowledge that more than the intellect
is capable of this free life, that there is a logic of the emotions as
well as of the mind. This assumption is not difficult to make; indeed,
if we reflect on our experience of some compositions, such as, to take
the same example, the first movement of the C minor Symphony, it is
difficult to avoid making it. And, in considering the matter from this
point of view, we may gain some results useful for musical criticism
in general. The theme of the movement in question is characteristic
of many of Beethoven’s themes in that it does not serve merely as a
kind of structural skeleton on which a composition is to be built. In
this respect it differs from, for instance, many of Bach’s themes.
The theme immediately, in its ominous and arresting quality, throws
the mind into a certain state of expectancy, a state where a large
number of happenings, but only the happenings belonging to a certain
class, can logically follow. As an analogous vague yet restricted
initial preparation we may instance the entry of the witches at the
beginning of _Macbeth_. As the music proceeds this rich, but more
or less definite, state in the hearer becomes more and more precise,
more and more subtle. It is, as it were, explored and shown in all
its height and depth. What was pregnant in the theme is exhibited
to us in all its extent, its definiteness, and its force. The theme
was the entrance to a world. And we have the consciousness of logic,
of _inevitability_, because at no point are we constrained. We
exult because we are free; this is how we, too, would move but for
our fetters, our alien, arbitrary fetters from which, for this time,
we have been freed. And in none of this, unless we have incurably
literary minds, are we ever reminded of experience. This life is no
life that we have lived or that, on this planet, we could live. Music
is as independent of the world as mathematics, but it cannot, like a
system of geometry, even be applied to the real world as an hypothesis.
It is even doubtful how far the emotions it expresses, when it is
merely expressing emotion, correspond to those of real life. The
sorrow of the bereaved father is not the same thing as the sorrow
of the bereaved lover, but music can express sorrow with thousands
of _nuances_. It is customary to say that the emotions of music
are generalised emotions; that its sorrow, for instance, is a kind of
common denominator of all sorrows. But the exact opposite seems to be
the case. The situations of real life, like the resources of language,
are probably too limited to afford correspondences to the immense
variety of emotions expressible in music. The musician is as free as
the non-Euclidean geometer to create worlds which have no objective
counterpart.
It is natural, therefore, in comparing the arts, that we should class
mathematics and music together, since they resemble one another by
their most intimate characteristics and differ, in these respects,
from all other arts. It is worth noting, in this connection, that it
is only in mathematics and music that we have the creative infant
prodigy. Experience and learning, compared with what we vaguely call
“instinct” or “gift,” play a comparatively insignificant rôle; the
boy mathematician or musician, unlike other artists, is not utilising
a store of impressions, emotional or other, drawn from experience or
learning; he is utilising inner resources so obviously independent of
experience that, like Plato’s slave, he seems to have brought them
with him from some anterior life. And the artistic progress of a
musician, if it be a true progress, means primarily that he is making
ever more accessible the riches of this inner life. It is difficult
to avoid mysticism, or at least Platonism, at this point. But here
again it seems to us that Schopenhauer understood something essential.
When he says that music, like the Platonic ideas, is an embodiment
of the “Will” that underlies all things, he does at least say that
what is revealed to us by a composition is something other than the
“personality” of the composer. The function of music is not, like
that of literature, to illuminate this world, but there is a world it
illuminates--a world at least as vast and independent of this one as
that mathematical “cosmos” described by Mr. Bertrand Russell.
There is much music, of course, which suggests no such mystical
fancies. With most of Wagner’s music, for instance, there is no hint
of other worlds, but rather a gorgeous colouring of this one--or of
those aspects of this one which excite romantic poets with strong
bodily appetites who can assume the background of the vigorous
material prosperity of the nineteenth century. Such music is fully
comparable with a certain kind of literature; all it lacks is the
definiteness of statement, and hence the intellectual clarity, which
the use of language affords. It may be even more powerful and subtle
than literature can be--_Tristan und Isolde_ expresses certain
emotions with immense adequacy. But it is not doing something which
music alone can do; and, for that reason, it throws very little light
on the peculiar problem of music. For the peculiar problem of music
consists in its independence, in its power of transporting us to a
world which is not otherwise revealed. To Schopenhauer, to whom both
the world and music were embodiments of the same Will, there was a
musical equivalent for every experience; and, it would seem to follow,
for every musical utterance there is a corresponding experience.
The two worlds are independent, but there exists between them, as a
mathematician would say, a one-to-one correspondence. Yet he very
strangely goes on to accept the theory that a musical utterance is a
kind of generalisation of a number of distinct experiences. He points
out that the musical setting of a poem, for instance, will serve for a
number of similar poems. It is the “kernal” of all these poems which
is given directly by the music. But it is equally true that the same
poem will serve for several musical settings. When Beethoven, as one
of sixty-three composers, composed his setting of Carpani’s poem “In
questa tomba oscura,” he probably composed the best setting, since it
is the only one that has survived; but among the other sixty-two there
must have been many which, in Schopenhauer’s phrase, were expressions
of the “kernal” of the poem. The fact seems to be that, unless music
is deliberately illustrative, it is not concerned with what is
otherwise expressible. That is why musicians are always dissatisfied
with “literary” descriptions of music. However good in their own kind
they may be, they are always felt to be irrelevant and even, in some
way, a degradation of the actual musical utterance. It is felt that
they exhibit a certain insensitiveness or lack of taste, as in that
curiously popular image which likens twin hills to a woman’s breasts.
As compared with literature, music is abstract. It is independent, as
literature is not, of the facts of life. But just as there is some
music which approaches to the condition of literature, so there is some
literature which approaches to the condition of music. Such literature,
while it is concerned with the world of experience, as literature must
be, is concerned with that world as symbol and not as reality. Such
literature, we might say, is not concerned to illuminate the world
of what we here call experience, but to reveal something about the
soul of man itself--or, if we prefer scientific jargon to mystical,
to deal with the normally subconscious rather than with the normally
conscious. Both kinds of literature have been called realistic, but
they are realistic from entirely different points of view. Dostoevsky,
for instance, regarded the realism of such writers as Zola as trivial.
And can _Macbeth_ be regarded as a realistic work, on the basis of
the French conception of realism? _Macbeth_ is, indeed, a striking
example of the extent to which literature can approach the condition
of music. The whole apparatus of the play, the witches, the characters,
the incidents, are so obviously not presented for their own sakes, but
as symbols through which an overwhelming perception was to be conveyed.
Here the fact that the literary artist must accommodate himself to the
laws of the real world, that he must satisfy our sense of probability,
seems hardly a hindrance. Our sense of probability is, indeed,
purposely lulled by the entrance of the witches at the beginning. We
are made aware that not the real world alone is concerned. In this
respect the supernatural “machinery” of _Macbeth_ performs an
altogether different function from that in _Hamlet_. The whole of
_Hamlet_ is perfectly realistic in the tight sense. But the fact
that literature must always use symbols differentiates it utterly from
music. And just as we have seen that real life may present no analogies
to what is revealed in music, so it may happen that the literary artist
who has access to a wide and deep inner life may find no symbols, such
as are essential to literary art, to convey his perceptions. Mr. T.
S. Eliot has stated that _Hamlet_ is an artistic failure because
the whole play, considered as presentation in terms of symbols, does
not adequately convey the emotions or perceptions we confusedly feel
Shakespeare is trying to express. Whether or not Mr. Eliot is correct
in his instance, his general thesis is perfectly sound. Even if
_Hamlet_ could be re-written so as to satisfy Mr. Eliot, it is
still true that there are some perceptions, states of mind, emotions,
or whatever one likes to call them, which it is very difficult to
believe are expressible in literature at all. Santayana gives a neat
but somewhat trivial instance in one of his essays where he says that
there is no human incident or group of incidents which can serve as a
fitting symbol for pure radiant joy--a sort of prolonged, exultant,
celestial state of joy. A shadow, to the mature mind, lies over the
brightest and most delightful of life’s happenings. He suggests that a
poet who should try to imitate music in this respect could do little
but write the word “Joy!” with exclamation marks. He could write
nothing else that was unambiguous. And, indeed, a symbol is always
ambiguous unless, like the symbols of the mathematician, its meaning is
completely exhausted by its symbolic intent. The symbol distracts; it
brings with it a crowd of irrelevant associations, and for that reason,
even when the symbols are most superbly handled, as in _Macbeth_,
the resultant communication is less definite than with music. But the
very great, the immense, importance of literature lies in the fact that
it can, partially at least, shape the facts of life so as to make them
consonant with the nature of man. If experience can furnish symbols
which express the deepest needs and aspirations of the soul, then life
can be, at least partially, illuminated. For man can understand nothing
which is not consonant with his own nature. The literature which truly
illuminates life is the literature which interprets life most fully
in terms of our own emotions and aspirations. In this sense not only
all literature, but all science, is anthropomorphic. Science is only
possible in so far as it is logical. That is to say, the universe can
only be understood in so far as its happenings are obedient to the laws
of man’s own mind. In its relation to mathematics, where the mind pays
no attention to the arbitrary conditions of experience, physics plays
something of the same part as is played by literature in its relation
to music. Both physics and literature, in their universal function,
are concerned with a world which _need_ not obey the laws native
to the spirit of man. Such illumination as they can give is dependent
upon, as it were, what correspondences they can find. The revelation of
life afforded by _The Brothers Karamazov_, for instance, consists
in relating the phenomena of life to the deepest impulses of the spirit
of man. Only so does life become in any measure truly comprehended;
and it is in this respect that such works differ from those reports
on life where we may recognise and assent to everything, but where
our comprehension of anything is not deepened. Such works as _The
Brothers Karamazov_ may be called philosophic, if we use the word to
include something other than purely intellectual understanding.
We have suggested that, if mathematics may be taken as the intellectual
analogue of music, then it is not perhaps too far-fetched to say that
such a science as physics may be taken as the intellectual analogue
of literature, since both are concerned to interpret what we call the
real in terms of what we call the ideal, while the two former arts
are not concerned with the real. And the question arises whether the
arts, mathematics, and music, which are not concerned to illuminate
experience, are worthy of serious attention. In the case of mathematics
the answer is not doubtful, since it has repeatedly shown itself
applicable to real happenings, however little notions of utility may
have played a part, or need have played a part, in its creation. Even
the most remote mathematical theorems are not certainly immune from
practical application. But no such claim can be made for music, and
it is for that reason that to some philosophers music is a pleasing
but essentially trivial art. To such philosophers music, while it may
suggest spiritual profundities, is, after all, saying nothing of any
possible significance. The adventures of the soul that it depicts are
less significant even than a stage fight. Its one justification is the
pleasure it affords; it takes us out of ourselves in a way no other art
can do, and after this refreshing interregnum we return to the things
that matter. It may be so; we can give no proof that it is not so; we
can only say we find the point of view incredible. On this point,
again, we certainly find the mystical view of Schopenhauer, if less
intelligible, at least more convincing than that of common sense.