I have alluded already to the fact that, perhaps because of the part
of actual participating work which it entails, music is the art which
has most share in life and of life, nowadays. It seems probable
therefore that its especial mission may be to keep alive in us the
feeling and habit of art, and to transmit them back to those arts of
visible form to which it owes, perhaps, the training necessary to its
own architectural structure and its own colour combinations. Compared
with the arts of line and projection, music seems at a certain moral
disadvantage, as not being applicable to the things of everyday use,
and also not educating us to the better knowledge of the beautiful and
significant things of nature. In connection with this kind of
blindness, music is also compatible (as we see by its flourishing in
great manufacturing towns) with a great deal of desecration of nature
and much hand-to-mouth ruthlessness of life. But, on the other hand,
music has the especial power of suggesting and regulating emotion, and
the still more marvellous faculty of creating an inner world for
itself, inviolable because ubiquitous.
And, therefore, with its audible rhythms and harmonies, its restrained
climaxes and finely ordered hierarchies, music may discipline our
feelings, or rather what underlies our feelings, the almost
unconscious life of our nerves, to modalities of order and selection,
and make the spaceless innermost of our spirit into some kind of
sanctuary, swept and garnished, until the coming of better days.