WHAT WE SEE AND HEAR.
"You must feel the mountains above you while you work upon your
little garden."--_Phillips Brooks._[23]
Somewhere else we shall have some definite lessons in music-thinking.
Let us then devote this Talk to finding out what is suggested to us by
the things we see and hear.
Once a boy wrote down little songs. When the people asked him how he
could do it, he replied by saying that he made his songs from thoughts
which most other people let slip. We have already talked about thought
and about learning to express it. If a person of pure thought will
only store it up and become able to express it properly, when the time
comes he can make little songs or many other things; for all things
are made of thought. The poem is stored-up thought expressed in words;
the great cathedral like the one at Winchester, in England, or the one
near the Rhine, at Cologne, in Germany, is stored-up thought expressed
in stone. So with the picture and the statue: they are stored-up
thought on canvas and in marble.[24] In short, we learn by looking at
great things just what the little ones are; and we know from poems and
buildings and the like, that these, and even commoner things, like a
well-kept garden, a tidy room, a carefully learned lesson, even a
smile on one's face result, every one of them, from stored-up thought.
We can consequently make a definition of THINGS by saying they are
what is thought. Things are made of thought. Even if you cannot
understand this fully now, keep it by you and as you grow older its
truth will be more and more clear. It will be luminous. Luminous is
just the word, for it comes from a word in another language and means
_light_. Now the better you understand things the more _light_ you
have about them. And out of this you can understand how well ignorance
has been compared with darkness. Hence, from the poem, the building,
the painting, the statue, and from commoner things we can learn, as it
was said in a previous Talk, that music is stored-up thought told in
beautiful tones.
Now let us heed the valuable part of all this. If poems, statues, and
all other beautiful things are made out of stored-up thought (and
commoner things are, too), we ought to be able, by studying the
things, to tell what kind of a person it was who thought them; or, in
other words, who made them. It is true, we can. We can tell all the
person's thought, so far as his art and principal work are concerned.
Nearly all his life is displayed in the works he makes. We can tell
the nature of the man, the amount of study he has done, but best of
all we can tell his meaning. The face tells all its past history to
one who knows how to look.[25] His intentions are everywhere as plain
as can be in what he does.
Thus you see there is more in a person's work than what we see at the
first glance. There are reflections in it as plain as those in a
mountain lake. And as the mountain lake reflects only what is _above_
it, so the work of the musician, of the artist, of any one in fact,
reflects those thoughts which forever hover above the others. Thoughts
of good, thoughts of evil, thoughts of generosity, thoughts of selfish
vanity, these, _and every other kind_, are so strongly reflected in
the work we do that they are often more plainly seen than the work
itself. And with the works of a great artist before us we may find out
not only what he did and what he knew, but what he felt _and even what
he did not want to say_.
We now know what music-thinking is. Also, we see why the young
musician needs to learn to think music. Really, he is not a musician
until he can think correctly in tone. And further than this, when we
have some understanding of music-thought we not only think about what
we play and hear, but we begin to inquire what story it tells and what
meaning it should convey. We begin to seek in music for the thought
and intention of the composer, and, little by little, even before we
know it, we begin to seek out what kind of mind and heart the composer
had. We begin really to study his character from the works he has left
us.
We have now taken the first really intelligent step toward knowing for
ourselves something about common and classic music. Later on, as our
ability increases, this will be of great value to us. We begin to see,
bit by bit, what the author intended. That is the real test of it all.
We do not want to find mere jingle in music, we want music that says
something. Even a very young child knows that "eenty meenty meiny moe"
is not real sense, though it is a pleasant string of sounds to say in
a game.
Thus we learn to look into what we hear and into what we see and try
to find how much thought there is in it, and the kind of thought it
is. We want to know if goodness is expressed; if the best work of the
man is before us, or if, for a lower reason, his selfishness and
vanity are most prominent. And let us remember that as we seek these
things in the works of others, so others of thoughtful kind will watch
our doings, our playing, our speech, our little habits, and all to see
what our intentions are each time we express ourselves. They will look
to see what thoughts we are putting into our doings, whether thoughts
of goodness or of selfishness. And our actions will always be just as
good as the thought we put into them.
Now a great and a common mistake is, that sometimes we hope by some
mysterious change, as in a fairy tale, that they will be better than
what we intend. But in the first days let us learn that this is not
possible.