But what provision must be made for the emotions of music? It
cannot be that the majority of musicians, who are strangely
enough the very ones to insist that music is merely the
language of emotion, are utterly and essentially wrong. Nor
has it been attempted to prove them so. The beauty of music,
we have sought to show, grows and flowers out of tone-relations
alone, consists in tone-sequences alone. But it has not been
said that music did not arouse emotion, nor that it might not
on occasion even express it.
It is in fact now rather a commonplace in musical theory, to
show the emotional means which music has at its command; and
I shall therefore be very brief in my reference to them. They
may be shortly classed as expressive by association and by
direct induction. Expressive by association are passages of
direct imitation: the tolling of bells, the clash of arms, the
roar of wind, the hum of spinning wheels, even to the bleating
of sheep and the whirr of windmills; the cadence of the voice
in pleading, laughter, love; from such imitations we are
REMINDED of a fact or an emotion. More intimate is the
expression by induction; emotion is aroused by activities
which themselves form part of the emotions in question. Thus
the differences in tempo, reproduced in nervous response, call
up the gayety, sadness, hesitation, firmness, haste, growing
excitement, etc., of which whole experiences these movement
types form a part.
These emotions, as has often been shown, are absolutely
general and indefinite in their character, and are, on the
whole, even in their intensity, no measure of the beauty of
the music which arouses them. Indeed, we can get intense
emotion from sound which is entirely unmusical. So, too,
loudness, softness, crescendo, diminuendo, volume, piercingness,
have their emotional accompaniments. It is to Hanslick that
we owe the general summing up of these possibilities of
expression as "the dynamic figures of occurrences." How
this dynamic skeleton is filled out through association, or
that special form of association which we know as direct
induction, is not hard to understand on psychological grounds.
It is not necessary to repeat here the reasons for the literally
"moving" appeal of sound-stimulations, which have been already
detailed under the subject of rhythm.
Yet there still remains a residue of emotion not entirely
accounted for. It has been said that these, the emotions
expressed, or aroused, are more or less independent of the
intrinsic musical beauty. But it cannot be denied that there
is an intense emotion which grows with the measure of the
beauty of a piece of music, and which music lovers are yet
loth to identify with the so-called general aesthetic emotion,
or with the "satisfaction of expectation," different varieties
of which, in fusion, we have tried to show as the basis of the
musical experience. The aesthetic emotion from a picture is
not like this, they say, and a mere satisfaction of expectation
is unutterably tame. This is unique, aesthetic, individual!
I believe that the clue to this objection in the natural impulse
of mankind to confuse the intensity of an experience with a
difference in kind. But first of all, there must be added to
our list of definite emotions from music, those which attach
themselves to the internal relations of the notes. Gurney has
said that when we feel ourselves yearning for the next
unutterable, we are really yearning for the next note. That
is the secret! Each one of those tendencies, demands, leanings,
strivings, returns, as between tone and tone in a melody, is
necessarily accompanied by the feeling-tone which belongs to
such an attitude. And it is to be noted that all the more
poignant emotions we get from music are always stated in terms
of urgency, of strain, of effort. That is because these
emotions, and these alone, are inescapable in music since they
are founded on the intrinsic relations of the notes themselves.
It is just for this reason, too, that music, just in proportion
to its beauty, is felt, as some one says, like vinegar on a
wound, by those in grief or anxiety.
"I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong
Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes."
It is the yearning that is felt most strongly, the more vividly
are the real musical relations of the notes brought out.
Music expresses and causes tension, strain, yearning, through
its inner, its "absolute" nature. But it does more; it satisfies
these yearnings. It not only creates an expectation to satisfy
it, but the expectation itself is of a poignant, emotional,
personal character. What is the emotion that is aroused by such
a satisfaction?
The answer to this question takes us back again to that old
picturesque theory of Schopenhauer--that music is the
objectification of the will. Schopenhauer meant this in a
metaphysical, and to us an inadmissible sense; but I believe
that the psychological analysis of the musical experience which
we have just completed shows that there is another sense in
which it is absolutely true.
The best psychological theory of the experience of volition
makes it the imaging of a movement or action, followed by
feelings of strain, and then of the movement carried out.
The anticipation is the essential. Without anticipation, as
in the reflex, winking, the action appears involuntary.
Without the feeling of effort or strain, as in simply raising
the empty hand, the self-feeling is weaker. When all these
three elements, IMAGE, EFFORT, SUCCESS, are present most
vividly, the feeling is of triumphant volition. Now my thesis
is--the thesis toward which every though of the preceding has
pointed--that the fundamental facts of the musical experience
are supremely fitted to bring about the illusion and the
exaltation of the triumphant will.
The image, dimly foreshadowed, is given in the half-consciousness
of each note as it appears, and in that sense of coming
integration already recognized. The proof is the shock and
disappointment when the wrong note is sounded; if we had not
some anticipation of the right, the wrong one would not shock.
The strain we have in the effort of the organism to reach the
note, the tendency to which is implicit in the preceding. The
success is given in the coming of the note itself.
All this is no less true of rhythm--but there the expectation
is more mechanical, less conscious, as has been fully shown.
The more beautiful, that is, the more inevitably, irresistibly
right the music, the more powerful the influence to this illusion
of the triumphant will. The exaltation of musical emotion is
thus the direct measure of the perfection of the relations--the
beauty of the music. This, then, is the only intimate, immediate,
intrinsic emotion of music--the illusion of the triumphant will!
One word more on the interpretation of music in general aesthetic
terms. All that has been said goes to show that music possesses
to the very highest degree the power of stimulation. Can we
attribute to it repose in any other sense than that of satisfying
a desire that it arouses? We can do so in pointing out that
music ever returns upon itself--that its motion is cyclic. Music
is the art of auditory implications; but more than this, its
last note returns to its first. It is as truly a unity as if
it were static. We may say that the beauty of a picture is only
entered into when the eye has roved over the whole canvas, and
holds all the elements indirectly while it is fixated upon one
point. In exactly the same way music is not beauty unless it
is ALL there; at every point a fusion of the heard tone with
the once heard tones in the order of their hearing. The melody,
as a set of implications, is as ESSENTIALLY timeless as the
picture. By melody too, then, is given the perfect moment, the
moment of unity and completeness, of stimulation and repose.
The aesthetic emotion for music is then the favorable stimulation
of the sense of hearing and those other senses that are bound up
with it, together with the repose of perfect unity. It has a
richer color, a more intense exaltation in the illusion of the
triumphant will, which is indeed the peculiar moment for the
self in action.
VI
THE BEAUTY OF LITERATURE
VI
THE BEAUTY OF LITERATURE
I
THAT in the practice and pleasure of art for art's sake there
lurks an unworthy element, is a superstition that recurs in
every generation of critics. A most accomplished and modern
disciple of the gay science but yesterday made it a reproach
to the greatest living English novelist, that he, too, was
all for beauty, all for art, and had no great informing
purpose. "Art for art's sake" is clearly, to this critic's
mind, compatible with the lack of something all desirable for
novels. Yet if there is indeed a characteristic excellence
of the novel, if there is something the lack of which in a
novel is rightly deplored, then the real art for art's sake
is bound to include this characteristic excellence. If an
informing purpose is needed, no true artist can dispense
with it. Otherwise art for art's sake is a contradiction
in terms.
The critic I have quoted merely voices the lingering Puritan
distrust of beauty as an end in itself, and so repudiates
the conception of beauty as containing all the excellences
of a work of art. He thinks of beauty as cut up into small
snips and shreds of momentary sensations; as the sweet sound
of melodious words and cadences; or as something abstract,
pattern-like, imposed from without,--a Procrustes-bed of
symmetry and proportion; or as a view of life Circe-like,
insidious, a golden languor, made of "the selfish serenities
of wild-wood and dream-palace." All these, apart or
together, are thought of as the "beauty," at which the
artist "for art's sake" aims, and to that is opposed the
nobler informing purpose. But the truer view of beauty
makes it simply the epitome of all which a work of art ought
to be, and thus the only end and aim of every work of art.
The beauty of literature receives into itself all the
precepts of literature: there is no "ought" beyond it.
And art for art's sake is but art conscious of its aim, the
production of that all-embracing beauty.
What, then, is the beauty of literature? How may we know
its characteristic excellences? It is strange how, in all
serious discussion, to the confounding of some current ideas
of criticism, we are thrown back, inevitably, on this concept
of excellence! The most ardent of impressionists wakes up
sooner or later to the idea that he has been talking values
all his life. The excellences of literature! They must
lie within the general formula for beauty, yet they must be
conditioned by the possibilities of the special medium of
literature. The general formula, abstract and metaphysical
as it must be, may not be applied directly; for abstract
thought will fit only that art which can convey it; hence
the struggle of theorists with painting, music, and
architecture, and the failure of Hegel, for instance, to
show how beauty as "the expression of the Idea" resides in
these arts. But if the general formula is always translated
relatively to the sense-medium through which beauty must
reach the human being, it may be preserved, while yet
affirming all the special demands of the particular art.
Beauty is a constant function of the varying medium. The
end of Beauty is always the same, the perfect moment of
unity and self-completeness, of repose in excitement. But
this end is attained by different means furnished by
different media: through vision and its accompanying
activities; through hearing and its accompanying activities;
and for literature, through hearing in the special sense
of communication by word. It is the nature of this medium
that we must further discover.