But, letting alone the possibility of art acting as a poison for the
soul, there remains an important question. As I said, although art is
one of the most wholesome of our soul's activities, there are yet
kinds of art, or (since it is a subjective question of profit or
damage to ourselves) rather kinds of artistic effect, which, for some
evident reason, or through some obscure analogy or hidden point of
contact awaken those movements of the fancy, those states of the
emotions which disintegrate rather than renew the soul, and accustom
us rather to the yielding and proneness which we shun, than to the
resistance and elasticity which we seek throughout life to increase.
I was listening, last night, to some very wonderful singing of modern
German songs; and the emotion that still remains faintly within me
alongside of the traces of those languishing phrases and passionate
intonations, the remembrance of the sense of--how shall I call
it?--violation of the privacy of the human soul which haunted me
throughout that performance, has brought home to me, for the hundredth
time, that the Greek legislators were not so fantastic in considering
music a questionable art, which they thought twice before admitting
into their ideal commonwealths. For music can do more by our emotions
than the other arts, and it can, therefore, separate itself from them
and their holy ways; it can, in a measure, actually undo the good they
do to our soul.
But, you may object, poetry does the very same; it also expresses,
strengthens, brings home our human, momentary, individual emotions,
instead of uniting with the arts of visible form, with the harmonious
things of nature, to create for us another kind of emotion, the
emotion of the eternal, unindividual, universal life, in whose
contemplation our souls are healed and made whole after the
disintegration inflicted by what is personal and fleeting.
It is true that much poetry expresses merely such personal and momentary
emotion; but it does so through a mechanism differing from that of music,
and possessing a saving grace which the emotion-compelling mechanism
of music does not. For by the very nature of the spoken or written
word, by the word's strictly intellectual concomitants, poetry, even
while rousing emotion, brings into play what is most different to
emotion, emotion's sifter and chastener, the great force which reduces
all things to abstraction, to the eternal and typical: reason. You
cannot express in words, even the most purely instinctive,
half-conscious feeling, without placing that dumb and blind emotion in
the lucid, balanced relations which thought has given to words;
indeed, words rarely, if ever, reproduce emotion as it is, but
instead, emotion as it is instinctively conceived, in its setting of
cause and effect. Hence there is in all poetry a certain reasonable
element which, even in the heyday of passion, makes us superior to
passion by explaining its why and wherefore; and even when the poet
succeeds in putting us in the place of him who feels, we enter only
into one-half of his personality, the half which contemplates while
the other suffers: we _know_ the feeling, rather than _feel_ it.
Now, it is different with music. Its relations to our nerves are such
that it can reproduce emotion, or, at all events, emotional moods,
directly and without any intellectual manipulation. We weep, but know
not why. Its specifically artistic emotion, the power it shares with
all other arts of raising our state of consciousness to something more
complete, more vast, and more permanent--the specific musical emotion
of music can become subservient to the mere awakening of our latent
emotional possibilities, to the stimulating of emotions often
undesirable in themselves, and always unable, at the moment, to find
their legitimate channel, whence enervation and perhaps degradation of
the soul. There are kinds of music which add the immense charm, the
subduing, victorious quality of art, to the power of mere emotion as
such; and in these cases we are pushed, by the delightfulness of
beauty and wonder, by the fascination of what is finer than ourselves,
into deeper consciousness of our innermost, primæval, chaotic self:
the stuff in which soul has not yet dawned. We are made to enjoy what
we should otherwise dread; and the dignity of beauty, and beauty's
frankness and fearlessness, are lent to things such as we regard,
under other circumstances, as too intimate, too fleeting, too obscure,
too unconscious, to be treated, in ourselves and our neighbours,
otherwise than with decorous reserve.
It is astonishing, when one realises it, that the charm of music, the
good renown it has gained in its more healthful and more decorous
days, can make us sit out what we do sit out under its influence:
violations of our innermost secrets, revelations of the hidden
possibilities of our own nature and the nature of others; stripping
away of all the soul's veils; nay, so to speak, melting away of the
soul's outward forms, melting away of the soul's active structure, its
bone and muscle, till there is revealed only the shapeless primæval
nudity of confused instincts, the soul's vague viscera.
When music does this, it reverts, I think, towards being the nuisance
which, before it had acquired the possibilities of form and beauty it
now tends to despise, it was felt to be by ancient philosophers and
law-givers. At any rate, it sells its artistic birthright. It
renounces its possibility of constituting, with the other great arts,
a sort of supplementary contemplated nature; an element wherein to
buoy up and steady those fluctuations which we express in speech; a
vast emotional serenity, an abstract universe in which our small and
fleeting emotions can be transmuted, and wherein they can lose
themselves in peacefulness and strength.