The question can, however, be tolerably settled by turning over the
means which enable music to awaken emotion--emotion which we recognise
as human, as distinguished from the mere emotion of pleasure attached
to all beautiful sights and sounds. Once we have understood what these
means are, we can enquire to what extent they are employed in the
music of various schools and epochs, and thus judge, with some chance
of likelihood, whether the music which strikes us as serene and
vigorous could have affected our ancestors as turbid and enervating.
'Tis a dull enough psychological examination; but one worth making,
not merely for the sake of music itself, but because music, being the
most emotional of all the arts, can serve to typify the good or
mischief which all art may do, according to which of our emotions it
fosters.
* * * * *
'Tis repeating a fact in different words, not stating anything new, to
say that all beautiful things awaken a specific sort of emotion, the
emotion or the mood of the beautiful. Yet this statement, equivalent
to saying that hot objects give us the sensation of heat, and wet
objects the sensation of wetness, is well worth repeating, because we
so often forget that the fact of beauty in anything is merely the fact
of that thing setting up in ourselves a very specific feeling.
* * * * *
Now, besides this beauty or quality producing the emotion of the
beautiful, there exist in things a lot of other qualities also
producing emotion, each according to its kind; or rather, the
beautiful thing may also be qualified in some other way, as the thing
which is useful, useless, old, young, common, rare, or whatever you
choose. And this coincidence of qualities produces a coincidence of
states of mind. We shall experience the feeling not merely of beauty
because the thing is beautiful, but also of surprise because it is
startling, of familiarity because we meet it often, of attraction
(independently of beauty) because the thing suits or benefits us, or
of repulsion (despite the beauty) because the thing has done us a bad
turn or might do us one. This is saying that beauty is only one of
various relations possible between something not ourselves and our
feelings, and that it is probable that other relations between them
may exist at the same moment, in the same way that a woman may be a
man's wife, but also his cousin, his countrywoman, his school-board
representative, his landlady, and his teacher of Latin, without one
qualification precluding the others.
Now, in the arts of line, colour, and projection, the arts which
usually copy the appearance of objects existing outside the art, these
other qualities, these other relations between ourselves and the
object which exists in the relation of beauty, are largely a matter of
superficial association--I mean, of association which may vary, and of
which we are most often conscious.
We are reminded by the picture or statue of qualities which do not
exist in it, but in its prototype in reality. A certain face will
awaken disgust when seen in a picture, or reverence or amusement,
besides the specific impression of beauty (or its reverse), because we
have experienced disgust, awe, amusement in connection with a similar
face outside the picture.
So far, therefore, as art is imitative, its non-artistic emotional
capacities are due (with a very few exceptions) to association; for
the feelings traceable directly to fatigue or disintegration of the
perceptive faculty usually, indeed almost always, prevent the object
from affecting us as beautiful. It is quite otherwise when we come to
music. Here the coincidence of other emotion resides, I believe, not
in the _musical thing itself_, not in the musician's creation without
prototype in reality, resembling nothing save other musical
structures; the coincidence resides in the elements out of which that
structure is made, and which, for all its complexities, are still very
strongly perceived by our senses. For instance, certain rhythms
existing in music are identical with, or analogous to, the rhythm of
our bodily movements under varying circumstances: we know
alternations of long and short, variously composed regularities and
irregularities of movement, fluctuations, reinforcements or
subsidences, from experience other than that of music; we know them in
connection with walking, jumping, dragging; with beating of heart and
arteries, expansion of throat and lungs; we knew them, long before
music was, as connected with energy or oppression, sickness or health,
elation or depression, grief, fear, horror, or serenity and happiness.
And when they become elements of a musical structure their
associations come along with them. And these associations are the more
powerful that, while they are rudimentary, familiar like our own
being, perhaps even racial, the musical structure into which they
enter is complete, individual, _new_: 'tis comparing the efficacy of,
say, Mozart Op. So-and-so, with the efficacy of somebody sobbing or
dancing in our presence.
So far for the associational power of music in awakening emotions. But
music has another source of such power over us. Existing as it does in
a sequence, it is able to give sensations which the arts dealing with
space, and not with time, could not allow themselves, since for them a
disagreeable effect could never prelude an agreeable one, but merely
co-exist with it; whereas for music a disagreeable effect is
effaceable by an agreeable one, and will even considerably heighten
the latter by being made to precede it. Now we not merely associate
fatigue or pain with any difficult perception, we actually feel it; we
are aware of real discomfort whenever our senses and attention are
kept too long on the stretch, or are stimulated too sharply by
something unexpected. In these cases we are conscious of something
which is exhausting, overpowering, unendurable if it lasted:
experiences which are but too familiar in matters not musical, and,
therefore, evoke the remembrance of such non-musical discomfort, which
reacts to increase the discomfort produced by the music; the reverse
taking place, a sense of freedom, of efficiency, of strength arising
in us whenever the object of perception can be easily, though
energetically, perceived. Hence intervals which the ear has difficulty
in following, dissonances to which it is unaccustomed, and phrases too
long or too slack for convenient scansion, produce a degree of
sensuous and intellectual distress, which can be measured by the
immense relief--relief as an acute satisfaction--of return to easier
intervals, of consonance, and of phrases of normal rhythm and length.
Thus does it come to pass that music can convey emotional suggestions
such as painting and sculpture, for all their imitations of reality,
can never match in efficacy; since music conveys the suggestions not
of mere objects which may have awakened emotion, but of emotion
itself, of the expression thereof in our bodily feelings and
movements. And hence also the curious paradox that musical emotion is
strong almost in proportion as it is vague. A visible object may, and
probably will, possess a dozen different emotional values, according
to our altering relations therewith; for one relation, one mood, one
emotion succeeds and obliterates the other, till nothing very potent
can remain connected with that particular object. But it matters not
how different the course of the various emotions which have expressed
themselves in movements of slackness, agitation, energy, or confusion;
it matters not through what circumstances our vigour may have leaked
away, our nerves have been harrowed, our attention worn out, so long
as those movements, those agitations, slackenings, oppressions,
reliefs, fatigues, harrowings, and reposings are actually taking place
within us. In briefer phrase, while painting and sculpture present us
only with objects possibly connected with emotions, but probably
connected with emotions too often varied to affect us strongly; music
gives us the actual bodily consciousness of emotion; nay (in so far as
it calls for easy or difficult acts of perception), the actual mental
reality of comfort or discomfort.