Beauty & Art - A Collection of Essays. Vernon Lee
to judge, tells us we can only examine. Thus, as in ethics, so also in æsthetics, modern philosophy has given us the means instead of the aim, the analysis instead of the judgment; let us therefore ask it only how much of human character and emotion music can express; the question how much of it music ought to express must be answered by something else: by that artistic instinct whose composition and mechanism and origin scientific psychology may perhaps some day explain, but whose unformulated, inarticulate, half-unconscious dicta all the scientific and logical formulæ in the world can never replace. As yet, however, we have to deal only with the question how much of human character and emotion music can express, and by what means it does so; and here modern psychology, or rather the genius of Herbert Spencer, is able to answer us. Why does dance music cheer us, and military music inspirit us, and sacred music make us solemn? A vague sense of the truth made æstheticians answer, for well-nigh two centuries, "by the force of association." Dance music cheers us because we are accustomed to hear it in connection with laughing and quips and cranks; military music inspirits us because we are accustomed to hear it in connection with martial movements and martial sights; sacred music depresses us because we are accustomed to hear it at moments when we are contemplating our weakness and mortality; 'tis a mere matter of association. To this easy-going way of disposing of the problem there was an evident and irrefutable objection: but why should we be accustomed to hear a given sort of music in connection with these various conditions of mind? Why should dance music, and martial music, and sacred music all have a perfectly distinct character, which forbade, from the very first, their being exchangeable? If it is a matter of association of ideas, tell us why such characters could have been kept distinct before the association of ideas could have begun to exist? To this objection there was no reply; the explanation of musical expression by means of association of ideas seemed utterly hollow; yet the confused idea of such an association persisted. For it was, after all, the true explanation. If we ask modern psychology the reason of the specific characters of the various sorts of music, we shall again be answered: it is owing to the association of ideas. But the two answers, though apparently identical, are in fact radically different. The habit of association existed, according to the old theory, between various mental conditions and various sorts of music, because the two were usually found in connection; hence no explanation why, before habit had created the association, there should have been any connection, and, there being no connection, no explanation why the habit and consequently the mental association should ever have been formed. According to the modern theory, on the contrary, the habit of association is not between the various mental conditions and the various styles of music; but between specific mental conditions and specific sounds and movements, which sounds and movements, being employed as the constituent elements of music, give to the musical forms into which they have been artistically arranged that inevitable suggestion of a given mental condition which is due to memory, and become, by repetition during thousands of years, an instinct ingrained in the race and inborn in the individual, a recognition rapid and unconscious, that certain audible movements are the inevitable concomitants of certain moral conditions. The half-unconscious memory become part and parcel of the human mind, that, just as certain mental conditions induce a movement in the muscles which brings tears into the eye or a knot into the throat, so also certain audible movements are due to the muscular tension resulting from mental buoyancy, and certain others to the muscular relaxation due to mental depression, this half-unconscious memory, this instinct, this inevitable association of ideas, generated long before music existed even in the most rudimentary condition, carried with the various elements of pitch, movement, sonority, and proportion into the musical forms constructed out of these elements, this unconscious association of ideas, this integrated recollection of the inevitable connection between certain sounds and certain passions is the one main cause and explanation of the expressiveness of music. And when to it we have added the conscious perception, due to actual comparison, of the resemblance between certain modes of musical delivery and certain modes of ordinary speaking accentuation, between certain musical movements and certain movements of the body in gesticulation; when we have completed the instinctive recognition of passion, which makes us cry or jump, we know not why, by the rapidly reasoned recognition of resemblance between the utterance of the art and the utterance of human life, which, when we listen for instance to a recitative, makes us say, "This sentence is absolutely correct in expression," or, "No human being ever said such a thing in such a manner;" when we have the instinctive perception of passion, and the conscious perception of imitation; and we have added to these two the power of tone and harmony, neither of them connected in any way with the expression of emotion, but both rendering us, by their nervous stimulant, infinitely more sensitive to its expression; when we have all this, we have all the elements which the musician can employ to bring home to us a definite state of mind; all the mysterious unspoken, unwritten words by means of which Mozart can describe to us what Beaumarchais has described in clear, logical, spoken, written words—the page Cherubino.
Now let us see how much of Cherubino can be shown us by these mere musical means. Cherubino is childish, coquettish, sentimental, amorous, timid, audacious, fickle; he is self-conscious and self-unconscious, passionately troubled in mind, impudently cool in manner; he is brazen, calm, shy, fluttered; all these things together. Sometimes in rapid alternation, sometimes all together in the same moment; and in all this he is perfectly consistent, he is always one and the same creature. How does the playwright contrive to make us see all this? By means of combinations of words expressing one or more of these various characteristics, by subtle phrases woven out of different shades of feeling, which glance in irridescent hues like a shot silk, which are both one thing and another; by means also of various emotions cunningly adapted to the exact situation, from the timid sentimentality before the countess, down to the audacious love-making with the waiting-maid; by means, in short, of a hundred tiny strokes, of words spoken by the page and of the page, by means of dexterously combined views of the boy himself, and of the reflection of the boy in the feelings of those who surround him. Thus far the mere words in the book; but these words in the book suggest a thousand little inflections of voice, looks, gestures, movements, manners of standing and walking, flutter of lips and sparkle of eyes, which exist clear though imaginary in the mind of the reader, and become clearer, visible, audible in the concrete representation of the actor.
Thus Cherubino comes to exist. A phantom of the fancy, a little figure from out of the shadow land of imagination, but present to our mind as is this floor upon which we tread, alive as is this pulse throbbing within us. Ask the musician to give us all this with his mere pitch, and rhythm and harmony and sonority; bid him describe all this in his language. Alas! in the presence of such a piece of work the musician is a mere dumb cripple, stammering unintelligible sounds, tottering through abortive gestures, pointing we know not whither, asking we know not for what. Passionate music? And is not Othello passionate? Coquettish music? and is not Susanna coquettish? Tender music? and is not Orpheus tender? Cool music? and is not Judas Maccabæus cool? Impudent music? And is not the snatch of dance tune of a Parisian grisette impudent? And which of these sorts of music shall fit our Cherubino, be our page? Shall we fuse, in wonderful nameless abomination of nonsense, all these different styles, these different suggestions, or shall, as in a masquerade, this dubious Cherubino never seen with his own face and habit, appear successively in the musical trappings of Othello, of Orpheus, of Susanna, of Judas Maccabæus, and of the Grisette? Shall we, by means of this fusion, or this succession of musical incongruities, have got one inch nearer to Cherubino? Shall we, in listening to the mere wordless combination of sounds, be able to say, as we should with the book or the actors before us, this is Cherubino? What, then, can music give us, with all its powers of suggestion and feeling, if it cannot give us this? It can give us one thing, not another: it can give us emotion, but it cannot give us the individual whom the emotion possesses. With its determined relations between the audible movement and the psychical movement, it can give us only musical gesture, but never musical portrait; the gesture of composure or of violence, the solemn tread of self-possessed melody, the scuffling of frantically rushing up and down, of throbbing, quivering, gasping, passion-broken musical phrases; it can give us the rhythm which prances and tosses in victory, and the rhythm which droops, and languishes, and barely drags itself along for utter despair. All this it can give us, even as the painter can give the ecstatic bound-forwards of Signorelli's "Calling of the Blessed," or the weary, dreary enfolding in gloomy thought of Michael Angelo's "Jeremiah:" this much, which we can only call gesture, and which expresses only one thing,