Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/200

MTJSIC. 164 MTJSIC. which by widening ami ilt-epening human percep- tion and emotion tends to preserve and improve the race." This is but an amplification of Schiller's remark. And Art is but the play-im- pulse immeasurably elevated, yet at its roots possessing a sham objective character. The earliest form of musical art, the pantJimimic dance, was "an expression of muscular force simulat- ing the acts of life." It was symbolical, it ex- pressed a feeling, a state of mind. In its genesis art was play of a semi-physiological character. Primitive dancing comprised music and poetry in solution; later on they became separate and independent arts. Rhvthm. the father of or- ganized music, played a big role, for rhytlim is cosmic, it is manifested in the heart beat — the imit of measure for all the temporal arts — the fides and the movements of the bodies in the interstellar depths. Dancing accompanied by rudimentary songs — perhaps of only two or tliree tones — is the first step of the musical art. Emotions were translated in the rough, yet effectively; the pantomime of the savages is al- ways clear, attempting as it does the expression of love, anger, terror, hatred, and happiness. How much the sexual attributes play in the be- ginnings of art we cannot say, but music in the light of modern researches may no longer be called the Heavenly Maid. Far from it. indeed, for as Havelock Ellis truthfully says: "In music the most indefinite and ]irof(nind mysteries are revealed and placed outside us as a gracious, marvelous globe; the very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world. That is why no other art smites us with .so powerfully religious an appeal as music; no other art tells us such old forgotten .secrets about ourselves. It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primi- tive sexual traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted. . . . The sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering, more ancient than any as a source of beauty. . . . Beauty is the child of love." Music is an emotion become lesthetic. Human beings, as Kibot says, began by thinking that Ijeautiful which resendiled themselves. Primitive art was addressed to the individual of our own species. As it became more disinterested, it exhibited religious qualities, and eventually was transformed into a ritual, a ceremony for the expression of awe or thankfulness to the deity. It had a specific character and one that had hut remote alhliations with our modern conceptions of art. The natural extrusion of .sympathy, the conquest of nature by the intellect, has given us two of the most modern arts; music and land.scape painting. Neither of these had any real existence in the 01<l-Vorld civilizations; indeed, a feeling for nature in poetry and painting may be said to date from yesterday. The jiatient flowering of savage, rhythmic cries into the score nf a Beethf)ven symphony is only cimipar.able — to men- tion purely human processes — to the evolution from a South Se.a Islander's simple mud hut to the magnificent complexities of a Gothic cathe- dral. I'rom the sheltering needs of the body comes the nohle art of architecture; from the so- cial needs of intercourse, self-expression, come poetry and music. Roth were the irrepressible and the irresponsible exhibition of surplus energy-, of the play impulse. .And on this side is music purely sensuous. Kant defines the Beautiful ns that which "through the harmony of its form with the fac- ulty of human knowledge awakens a disinterested, universal, and necessary satisfaction." We are now another remove fiom the utilitarian; for in a certain sense all art is useless, inasmuch as it bestows no material benefits. Its beauty is its excuse for being, and music being the least representative of the arts, copying no material forms, is therefore easily the most ideal of all the arts and the most inutile. Apprehended in time and not in space, it addresses itself to the imagination. And here we are confronted by the crux of Hanslick and other jesthcticians of the formal. "Definite feelings and emotions are unsusceptible of being embodied in music," he de- clares. JIusic does not express emotion, it ex- presses itself. It is sound-play; it consists of exquisite arabesques ; it is a formal pattern of tone, and all the wonderful things attributed to it exist only in the overlieated imagination of its hearers. Precisely so, and it is this almost mi- raculous suhjectivizing process that proves the weakness of Hanslick's thesis. No other art at- tacks so powerfully the emotions. "Music acts like a burn, like cold, heat, or a caressing con- tact, ilusic acts on the muscular system, on the circulation, the respiration . . . and is the most dependent on physiological conditions. The primary effect is a physical one." Beauquier says:. "Musical vibration is only one particular mode of perceiving the imivcrsal viliration. ^Musical art is the art of sensibility par excellence, since it regulates the great phenomena of vibration into which all external perceptions resolve themselves, and transfers it from the region of the unconscious, in which it w.as hidden, to that of consciousness." Again Ribol : "While certain arts at once awaken ideas which give a determination to the feelings, music acts inverse- ly. It creates dispositions depending on the organic state and on nervous activity, which we translate by the vague terms — joy, tenderness, serenity, tranqxiillity. uneasiness. On this canvas the intellect embroiders its designs at ])leasure, varying according to individual peculiarities." Let us admit, then, with Hanslick and the for- malists that music does not express emotion; yet this does not preclude the idea of an emotional content in the listener, who projects his per- sonality into the forms. In nuisic the forms and the subject are identical: we cannot dissociate the pattern of the love theme in Tristan nnd Isolde from its emotional effect. The sound once set in motion, we are at liberty to dream, to thrill, to weep, to sigh with all the moods super- induced by a master. And this playing upon our nerves, our imagination, is intentional. In mod- ern times music has l)ecome an instrument of overpowering emotional significance. Eighteenth- century music with its gay scheme of decoration, its pretty recurring patterns, its play of forms, and its frecdnm fnim the overwrought, the in- tense, can well be utilized liy Iliinslick as an ex- ample of music for music's sake. It expressed little in the latter-day connotation of the word; so to modern music, especially Beethoven, we might truthfully give the title of classic, as it fulfills many of the requisites of antique art; its dignity, symmetry, grandeur, and profound emotional quality. The position of the formalist school is based on a half truth. . study of the nature of emotions would have cleared the groimd long ago of inciunbering verbalisms. Ribot de-