<1> R. MacDougall, "The Structure of Simple Rhythm Forms,"Harv. Psychol. Studies, vol. i, p. 332.
This is well shown in the following passage from a technical treatise on expression in the playing of music. "The efforts which feeling makes to hold to…the shape of the first rhythm, the force which it is necessary to use to make it lose its desires and its habits, and to impose others on it, are naturally expressed by an agitation, that is, by a crescendo or greater intensity of sound, by an acceleration in movement."<1> If a purely technical expression may be pardoned here, it could be said that the motor image,<2> that is, the coordinated muscular tensions which make the group feeling of the fundamental rhythm, is always latent, and becomes conscious whenever anything conflicts with it. Thus it is that we can understand the tremendous rhythmical consciousness in that music which seems most to contradict the fundamental rhythm, as in negro melodies, and rag-time generally; and in general, the livening effect of variation. The motor tension, the "set" becomes felt the moment there is objective interference—just as we feel the rhythm of our going downstairs only when we fail to get the sensation we expect.
<1> M. Lussy,Traite de l'Expression Musicale, Paris, 1874, p. 7. <2>Gestaltsqualitat, literally form-quality.
This principle of the motor image is of tremendous significance, as we shall see, for the whole theory of music. Let it be sufficient to note here that expression, in the form of Gestaltsqualitat, or motor image, is, as a principle, sufficient for the explanation of the most important factors in the experience of rhythm.
But we have dwelt too long on the general characteristics. Although our examples have been drawn mostly from the field of music, the preceding principles apply to all kinds of rhythm, tactual and visual as well as auditory. It is time to show why the rhythm out of all comparison the strongest, most compelling, most full of emotional quality, is the rhythm of music.
It has long been known that there is especially close connection between sounds and motor innervations. All sorts of sensorial stimuli produce reflex contractions, but the auditory, apparently, to a much higher degree. Animals are excited to all sorts of outbreaks by noise; children are less alarmed by visual than by auditory impressions. The fact that we dance to sound rather than to the waving of a baton, or rhythmical flashes of light for instance—the fact that this second proposition is felt at once to be absurd, shows how intimately the two are bound together. The irresistible effects of dance, martial music, etc., are trite commonplaces; and I shall therefore not heap up instances which can be supplied by every reader from his own experience. Now all this is not hard to understand, biologically. The eye mediated the information of what was far enough away to be fled from, or prepared for; the ear what was likely to be nearer, unseen, and so more ominous. As more ominous, it would have to be responded to in action more quickly. So that if any sense was to be in especially close connection with the motor centres, it would naturally be hearing.
The development of the auditory functions points to the same close connection of sound and movement. Sounds affect us as tone, and as impulse. The primitive sensation was one of impulse alone, mediated by the "shake-organs." These shake- organs at first only gave information about the attitude and movements of the body, and were connected with motor centres so as to be able to reestablish equilibrium by means of reflexes. The original "shake-organ" developed into the organs of hearing and of equilibrium (that is, the cochlea and the semicircular canals respectively), but these were still side by side in the inner ear, and the close connection with the motor centres was not lost. Anatomically, the auditory nerve not only goes to those parts of the brain whence the motor innervation emanates, and to the reflex centres in the cerebellum, but passes close by the vagus or pneumogastric nerve, which rules the heart and the vasomotor functions. We have then multiplied reasons for the singular effect of sound on motor reactions, and on the other organic functions which have so much to do with feeling and emotion.
Every sound-stimulus is then much more than sound-sensation. It causes reflex contractions in the whole muscular system; it sets up some sort of cardiac and vascular excitation. This reaction is in general in the direction of increased amplitude of respiration, but diminution of the pulse, depending on a peripheral vaso-constriction. Moreover, this vasomotor reaction is given in a melody or piece of music, not by its continuity, but for every one of the variations of rhythm, key, or intensity,—which is of interest in the light of what has been said of the latent motor image. The obstacle in syncopated rhythm is physiologically translated as vaso-constriction. In general, music induces cardiac acceleration.
All this is of value in showing how completely the attention- motor theory of rhythm applies to the rhythm of sounds. Since sound is much more than sound, but sound-sensation, movement, and visceral change together, we can see that the rhythmical experience of music is, even more literally and completely than at first appeared, an EMBODIED expectation. No sensorial rhythm could be so completely induced in the psychological organism as the sound-rhythm. In listening to music, we see how it is that we ourselves, body and soul, seem to be IN the rhythm. We make it, and we wait to make it. The satisfaction of our expectation is like the satisfaction of a bodily desire or need; no, not like it, it IS that. The conditions and causes of rhythm and our pleasure in it are more deeply seated than language, custom, even instinct; they are in the most fundamental functions of life. This element of music, at least, seems not to have arisen as a "natural language."
The facts of the relations of tones, the elements, that is, of melody and harmony, are as follows. We cannot avoid the observation that certain tones "go together," as the phrase is, while others do not. This peculiar impression of belonging together is known as consonance, or harmony. The intervals of the octave, the fifth, the third, for instance, that is, C-C', C-G, C-E, in the diatonic scale, are harmonious; while the interval of the second, C-D, is said to be dissonant. Consonance, however, is not identical with pleasingness, for different combinations are sometimes pleasing, sometimes displeasing. In the history of music we know that the octave was to the Greeks the most pleasing combination, to medieval musicians the fifth, while to us, the third, which was once a forbidden chord, is perhaps most delightful. Yet we should never doubt that the octave is the most consonant, the fifth and the third the lesser consonant of combinations. We see, thus, that consonance, whatever its nature, is independent of history; and we must seek for its explanation in the nature of the auditory process.
Various theories have been proposed. That of Helmholtz has held the field so long that, although weighty objections have been raised to it, it must still be treated with respect. In introducing it a short review of the familiar facts of the physics and physiology of hearing may not be out of place.
The vibration rates per second of the vibrating bodies, strings, steel rods, etc., which produce those musical tones which are consonant, are in definite and small mathematical ratios to each other. Thus the rates of C-C' are as 1:2; of C-G, C-E, as 2:3, 4:5. In general, the simpler the fraction, the greater the consonance.
But no sonorous body vibrates in one single rate; a taut string vibrates as a whole, which gives its fundamental tone, but also in halves, in fourths, etc., each giving out a weaker partial tone, in harmony with the fundamental. And according to the different ways in which a sonorous body divides, that is, according to the different combination of partial tones peculiar to it, is its especial quality of tone, or timbre. The whole complex of fundamental and partial tones is what we popularly speak of as a tone,—more technically a clang. These physical agitations or vibrations are transmitted to the air. Omitting the account of the anatomical path by which they reach the inner ear, we find them at last setting up vibrations in a many-fibred membrane, the basilar membrane, which is in direct connection with the ends of the auditory nerve. It is supposed that to every possible rate of vibration, that is, every possible tone, or partial tone, there corresponds a fibre of the basilar membrane fitted by its length to vibrate synchronously with the original wave-elements. The complex wave is thus analyzed into its constituents. Now when two tones, which we will for clearness suppose to be simple, unaccompanied by partial tones, sounding together, have vibration rates in simple ratios to each other, the air- waves set in motion do not interfere with each other, but combine into a complex but homogeneous wave. If they have to each other a complicated ratio, such as 500:504, the air- waves will not only not coalesce, but four times in the second the through of one wave will meet the crest of the other, thus making the algebraic sum zero, and producing the sensation of a momentary stoppage of the sound. When these stoppages, or beats, as they are called, are too numerous to be heard separately, as in the interval, say, 500:547, the effect is of a disagreeable roughness of tone, and this we call discord. In other words, any tones which do not produce beats are harmonious, or harmony is the absence of discord. In the words of Helmholtz,<1> consonance is a continuous, dissonance an intermittent, tone-sensation.
<1>Lehre v.d. Tonempfindungen, p. 370, in 4th edition.
Aside from the fact that consonance, as a psychological fact, seems positive, while this determination is negative, two very important facts can be set up in opposition. As a result of experimental investigation, we know that the impression of consonance can accompany the intermittent or rough sound- sensations we know as beating tones; and, conversely, tones can be dissonant when the possibility of beats is removed. Briefly, it is possible to make beats without dissonance, and dissonance without beats.
The other explanation makes consonance due to the identity of partial tones. When two tones have one or more partial tones in common they are said to be related; the amount of identity gives the degree of relationship. Physiologically, one or more basilar membrane fibres are excited by both, and this fact gives the positive feeling of relationship or consonance. Of course the obvious objection to this view is that the two tones should be felt as differently consonant when struck on instruments which give different partial tones, such as organ and piano, while in fact they are not so felt.
But it is not after all essential to the aesthetics of music that the physiological basis of harmony should be fully understood. The point is that certain tones do indeed seem to be "preordained to congruity," preordained either in their physical constitution or their physiological relations, and not to have achieved congruity by use or custom. Consonance is an immediate and fundamental impression,—psychologically an ultimate fact. That it is ultimate is emphasized by Stumpf<1> in his theory of Fusion. Consonance is fusion, that is, unitary impression. Fusion is not identical with inability to distinguish two tones from each other in a chord, although this may be used as a measure of fusion. Consonance is the feeling of unity, and fusion is the mutual relation of tones which gives that feeling.
<1>Beitrage zur Akustik u. Musikwissenschaft, Heft I, Konsonanz u. Dissonanz, 1898.
The striking fact of modern music is the principle of tonality. Tonality is said to be present in a piece of music when every element in it is referred to, gets its significance from its relation to, a fundamental tone, the tonic. The tonic is the beginning and lowest note in the scale in question, and all notes and chords are understood according to their place in that scale. But the conception of the scale of course does not cover the ground, it merely furnishes the point of departure,— the essential is in the reference of every element to the fundamental tone. The tonic is the centre of gravity of a melody.
The feeling of tonality grew up as follows. Every one was referred to a fundamental, whether or not it made with it an harmonious interval. The fundamental was imaged TOGETHER WITH every other note, and when a group of such references often appeared together, the feelings bound up with the single reference (interval-feelings) fused into a single feeling,— the tonality-feeling. When this point is once reached, it is clear that every tone is heard not as itself alone, but in its relations; it is not that we judge of tonality, it is a direct impression, based on a psychological principle that we have already touched on in the theory of rhythm. The tonality- feeling is a feeling of form, or motor image, just as the shape of objects is a motor image. We do not now need to go through all possible experiences in relation to these objects, we POSSESS their form in a system of motor images, which are themselves only motor cues for coordinated movements. So every tone is felt as something at a certain distance from, with a certain relation to, another tone which is dimly imagined. In following a melody, the notes are able to belong together for us by virtue of the background of the tone to which they are related, and in terms of which they are heard. The tonality is indeed literally a "funded content,"—that is, a funded capital of relation.
These are the general facts of tonality. But what is its meaning for the nature of music? Why should all notes be referred to one? Is this, too, an ultimate psychological fact? In answer there may be pointed out the original basic quality of certain tones, and the desire we have to return to them. Of two successive tones, it is always the one which is, in the ratio of their vibration rates, a power of two, with which we wish to end.<1> When neither of two successive tones contains a power of two, we have no preference as to the ending. Thus denoting any tone by 1, it is always to 1 or 2, or 2n that we wish to return, from any other possible tone; while 3 and 5, 5 and 7, leave us indifferent as to their succession. In general, when two tones are related, as 2n:3, 5, 7, 9, 15—in which 2n denotes every power of two, including 2o=1, with the progression from the first to the second, there is bound up a tendency to return to the first. Thus the fundamental fact of melodic sequence may be said to be the primacy of 2 in vibration rates. But 2n, in a scale containing 3, 5, etc., is always what we know as the tonic. The tonic, then, gives a sense of equilibrium, of rest, of finality, while to end on another tone gives a feeling of restlessness or striving.
Now tone-relationship alone, it is clear, would not of itself involve this immediate impulse to end a sequence of notes on one rather than on another. Nor is tonality, in the all- pervasive sense in which we understand it, a characteristic of ancient, or of mediaeval music, while the tendency to end on a certain tone, which we should to-day call the tonic, was always felt. Thus, since complete tonality was developed late in the history of music, while the closing on the tonic was certainly prior to it, the finality of the tonic would seem to be the primary fact, out of which the other has been developed.
We speak to-day, for instance, of dissonant chords, which call for a resolution—and are inclined to interpret them as dissonant just because they do so call. But the desire for resolution is historically much later than the distinction between consonance and dissonance…. "What we call resolution is not change from dissonant to consonant IN GENERAL, but the transition of definite tones of a dissonant interval into DEFINITE TONES of a consonant."<1> The dissonance comes from the device of getting variety, in polyphonic music, by letting some parts lag behind, and the discords which arose while they were catching up were resolved in the final coming together; but the STEPS were all PREDETERMINED.<2> Resolution was inevitably implied by the very principle on which the device is founded. That is, the understanding of a chord as something TO BE RESOLVED, is indeed part of the feeling of tonality; but the ending on the tonic was that out of which this resolution- feeling grew.
<1> Stumpf, op. Cit., p. 33. <2> Grove,Dict. Of Music and Musicians. Art. "Resolution."
Must we, then, say that the finality of the tonic is a unique, inexplicable phenomenon? giving up the nature of melody as a problem if not insoluble, at least unsolved?
The feeling of finality in the return to 2n is explained by Lipps and his followers, from the fact that the two-division is most natural, and so tones of 2n vibrations would have the character of rest and equilibrium. This explanation might hold if we were ever conscious of the two-division as such, in tones —which we are not; so that it would seem to depend on the restful character of a perception which by hypothesis is never present to the mind at all.
The experience is, on the contrary, immediate,—an impression, not a perception; and this immediacy points to the one ultimate fact in musical feeling we have so far discovered. The whole development of the scale, and the complex feeling of tonality, is an expression of the desire for consonance. Every change and correction in the scale has gone to make every note more consonant with its neighbors. And naturally the tonic is the tone with which all other tones have the most unity. Now this "return" phenomenon is a simpler case of the desire for the feeling of unity. The tonic is the epitome of all the most perfect feelings of consonance or unity which are possible in any particular sequence of tones, and is therefore the goal or resting-place after an excursion. The undoubted feeling of equilibrium or repose which we have in ending on the tonic is thus explained. Not that consonance itself, the feeling of unity, is explained. But at any rate consonance is the root of the "return," and of its development into complete tonality.
The history of music is then the explicit development of acoustic laws implicit in every stage of musical feeling. That feeling covers an ever wider field. When Mr. Hadow says that the terms concord and discord are wholly relative to the ear of the listener,<1> and that the distinction between them is not to be explained on any mathematical basis, or by any a priori law of acoustics,—that it is not because a minor second is ugly that we dislike it, for it will be a concord some day,—he is only partly right. The minor second may be a "concord," that is, we may like it, some day; but that will be because w have extended our feeling of tonality to include the minor second. When that day comes the minor second will be so closely linked with other fully consonant combinations that we shall hear it in terms of them, just as to-day we hear the chord of the dominant seventh in terms of its resolution. But the basis will not be convention or custom, except in so far as custom is the unfolding of natural law. The course of music, like that of every other art, is away from arbitrary—though simple—convention, to a complexity which satisfies the natural demands of the organism. The "natural persuasion" of the ear is omnipotent.
<1> W.H. Hadow,Studies in Modern Music, 1893.
It has been said that the feeling of tonality is a motor image or "form-quality" and that the image of the tonic persists throughout every sequence of tones in a melody. Now these are not only felt as having a certain relation to the tonic; that relation is an active one. It was said that we had a positive desire to end on a certain tone, and that a tendency to pass to that tone was bound up with the hearing of another tone. The degree of this tendency is determined by their relation. The key, the tonality, is determined by the consensus of intervals which have been felt as more or less consonant. Then steps in this scale which come near to the great salient points—that is, the points of greatest consonance, which is unity, which is rest—are felt as suggesting them. This is the reason why a semitone progression is felt as so compelling. In taking the scale upward, C to C', that element in the tone- Space already clearly foreshadowed by the previous tones is C'; B is so near that it is almost C'—it seems to cry aloud to be completed by C'. Then the tendency to move from B to C' is especially strong. In the same way a chromatic note suggests most strongly the salient point in the scheme to which it is nearest—and "tends" to it as to a point of comparative rest. The difference between the major and minor scales may be found in the lesser definiteness<1> with which the tendency to progression, in the latter, is felt—"a condition of hovering, a kind of ambiguity, of doubt, to which side the movement shall proceed." We may then understand a melody as ever tending with various degrees of urgency, of strain, to its centre of gravity, the tonic.
<1> F. Weinmann,Zeitschr. f. Psychol., Bd. 35, p. 360.
It is from this point of view that we can see the cogency of Gurney's remark, that when music seems to be yearning for unutterable things, it is really yearning only for the next note. "In this step from the state of rest into movement and return, the coming again to rest; on what circuitous ways, with what reluctances and hesitations; whether quick and decisively or gradually and unnoticed—therein consists the nature of melody."<1>
<1> Weinmann, op. cit.
Or in Gurney's more eloquent description, "The melody may begin by pressing its way through a sweetly yielding resistance to a gradually foreseen climax; whence again fresh expectation is bred, perhaps for another excursion, as it were, round the same centre but with a bolder and freer sweep,…to a point where again the motive is suspended on another temporary goal; till after a certain number of such involutions and evolutions, and of delicately poised leanings and reluctances and yieldings, the forces so accurately measured just suffice to bring it home, and the sense of potential and coming integration which has underlain all our provisional adjustments of expectation is triumphantly justified."<1>
<1> Op. cit., p. 165.
This should not be taken as a more or less poetical account under the metaphor of motion. These "leanings" are literal in the sense that one note does imply another as its natural complement and satisfaction and we seek to reach or make it. The striving is an intrinsic element, not a by-product for our understanding.
There is another point to note. The "sense of potential and coming integration" is a strong factor of melody. If it cannot be said that the first note implies the last, it is at least true that from point to point the next step is dimly foreseen, and this effect is cumulative. If melody is an ever-hindered striving for the goal, at least the hindrances themselves are stations on the way, each one as overcome adding to the final momentum with which the goal is reached. It is like an accumulation of evidence, a constellation of associations. AB foretells C; but ABCDEF rushes yet more strongly upon G. So it is that the irresistibleness, the "unalterable rightness" of a piece of music increases from beginning to end.
The significance of this essential internal necessity of progression cannot be overestimated. The unalterable rightness of music is founded on natural acoustic laws, and this "rightness" is fundamental. A melody is not right because it is beautiful, it is beautiful because it is right. The natural tendencies point out different paths to the goal; and thus different ways of being beautiful; but the nature of the relation between point and point, the nature of the progression, that is, the nature of melody, is the same.
Up to this point we have consistently abstracted from the element of rhythm in melody. Strictly speaking, however, it is impossible to do so. The individuality of a melody is absolutely dependent on its rhythm, that is, on the relative time-value of its tones. Gurney has devoted some amusing pages to showing the trivial, dragging, lustreless tunes that result from ever so slight a change in the rhythm of noble themes, or even in the distribution of rhythmical elements within the bar. The reason for this is evident. The nature of melody in the sense of sequence consists in the varied answers to the demands of the ear as felt at each successive point. Now it is clear that such "answer" can be emphasized, given indifferently, held in suspense, in short, subjected to all kinds of variation as well by the rhythmical form into which it is cast, as by the different choice of possibilities for the tone itself. The rhythm helps out the melody not only by adding to it an independently pleasing element, but, and this is indeed the essential, by reinforcing the intrinsic relations of the notes themselves. Thus it is in the highest degree true that in melody and rhythm we do not have content and form, but that, strictly speaking, the melody is tone-sequence in rhythm.
The intimate bondage of tone-sequence and rhythm is grounded in the identity of their inner nature; both are varieties of the objective conditions of embodied expectation. It is not of the essence of music to satisfy explicit and conscious expectation—to satisfy the understanding. It meets on the contrary a subconscious, automatic need which becomes conscious only in the moment of its contenting. Every moment of progress in a beautiful melody is hailed like an instinctive action performed for the first time. Rhythm is the ideal satisfaction of attention in general with all its bodily concomitants and expressions. Tone-sequence is the satisfaction of attention directed to auditory demands. But the form-quality of rhythm, the form-quality of tonality, is an all but subconscious possession. Together, reinforcing each other in melody, they furnish the ideal arrangement of the most poignant of sense- stimulations.
It is strange that those who would accept the general facts of musical logic as outlined above do not perceive that they have thereby cut away the ground from under the feet of the "natural language" argument. If the principle of choice in the progress of a melody is tone-relationship, the principle of choice cannot also be the cadences of the speaking voice. That musical intervals often RECALL the speaking voice is another matter, as we have said, and to this it may be added that they much more often do not. The question here is only of the primacy of the principle. Thus it would seem that the facts of musical structure constitute in themselves a refutation of the view we have disputed. To say that music arose in "heightened speech" is irrelevant; for the occasion of an aesthetic phenomenon is never its cause. It might as well be said that music arose in economic conditions,— as indeed Grosse, in his "Anfange der Kunst," conclusively shows, without attempting to make this social occasion intrude into the nature of the phenomenon. Primitive decorative art arose in the imitation of the totemic or clan symbols, mostly animal forms; but we have seen that the aesthetic quality of the decoration is due to the demands of the eye, and appears fully only in the comparative degradation of the representative form. In exactly the same way might we consider the "degradation" of speech cadences into real music,—supposing this were really the origin of music. As a matter of fact, however, the best authorities seem to be agreed that the primitive "dance-song" was rather a monotonous, meaningless chant, and that the original pitch- elements were mechanically supplied by the first musical instruments; these being at first merely for noise, and becoming truly vibrating, sonorous bodies because they were more easily struck if they were hard or taut. The musical tones which these hard vibrating bodies gave out were the first determinations of pitch, and of the elements of the scale, which correspond to the natural partial vibrations of such bodies. "The human voice," Wallaschek<1> tells us, "equally admits of any pentatonic or heptatonic intervals, and very likely we should never have got regular scales if we had depended upon the ear and voice only. The first unique cause to settle the type of a regular scale is the instrument." To this material we have to apply only that "natural persuasion of the ear" which we have already explained, to account for the full development of music.
<1>Primitive Music, 1893, p. 156.
The beauty of music, in so far as beauty is identical with pleasantness, consists in its satisfaction of the demands of the ear, and of the whole psychophysical organism as connected with the ear. It is now time to return to a thread dropped at the beginning. It was said that a common way of settling the musical experience was to make musical beauty the object of perception, and musical expression the object, or source, of emotion. This view seems to attach itself to all shades of theory. Hanslick always contrasts intellectual activity as attaching to the form, and emotion as attaching to the sensuous material (that is, the physical effects of motion, loud or soft sound, tempo, etc.). He speaks of the aesthetic criterion of INTELLIGENT gratification. "The truly musical listener" has "his attention absorbed by the particular form and character of the composition," "the unique position which the INTELLECTUAL ELEMENT in music occupies in relation to FORMS and SUBSTANCE (subject)." M. Dauriac in the same way separates the emotion of music<1> as a product of nervous excitations, from the appreciation of it as beautiful. "It is probably that the pleasure caused by rhythm and color prevails with a pretty large number, with the greatest number, over the pleasure in the musical form, pleasure too exclusively PSYCHOLOGICAL for one to be content with it alone….The musical sense implies the intelligence….The theory…applies to a great number of sonorous sensations, and not at all to any musical perceptions." Mr. W.H. Hadow<2> tells us that it is the duty of the musician not to flatter the sense with an empty compliment of sound, but to reach through sensation to the mental faculties within. And again we read "the art of the composer is in a sense the discovery and exposition of the INTELLIGIBLE relations in the multifarious material at his command."<3>
<1> "Le Plaisir et l'Emotion Musicale,"Rev. Philos., Tome 42, No. 7. <2> Op. cit., p. 47. <3> Grove'sDict.Art. "Relationship."
Now it is not hard to see how this antithesis has come about. But that the work of a master is always capable of logical analysis does not prove that our apprehension of it is a logical act. And the preceding discussion has wholly failed to make its point, if it is not now clear that the musical experience is an impression and not a judgment; that the feeling of tonality is not a judgment of tonality, and that though the aesthetic enjoyment of music extends only to those limits within which the feeling of tonality is active, that feeling is more likely than not to be quite unintelligible to the listener. Indeed, if it were not so, we should have to restrict, by hypothesis, the enjoyment of music to those able to give a technical report of what they hear,—which is notoriously at odds with the facts. That psychologist is quite right who holds<1> that psychology, in laying down a principle explaining the actual effect of a musical piece, is not justified in confining itself to skilled musicians and taking no notice of more than nine tenths of those who listen to the piece. But on the understanding that the tonality-feeling acts subconsciously, that our satisfaction with the progression of notes is unexplained by the laws of acoustics and association, we are enabled to bring within the circle of those who have the musical experience even those nine tenths whose intellects are not actively participant.
<1> Lazarus,Das Leben der Seele, ii, p. 323.
The fact is that musical form, in the sense of structure, balance, symmetry, and proportion in the arrangement of phrases, and in the contrasting of harmonies and keys, is different from the musical form which is felt intimately, intrinsically, as the desired, the demanded progress from one note to another. Structure is indeed perceived, understood, enjoyed as an orderly unified arrangement. Form is felt as an immediate joy. Structure it is which many critics have in mind when they speak of form, and it is the confusion between the two which makes such an antithesis of musical beauty and sensuous material possible. The real musical beauty, it is clear, is in the melodic idea; in the sequence of tones which are indissolubly one, which are felt together, one of which cannot exist without the other. Musical beauty is in the intrinsic musical form. And yet here, too, we must admit, that, in the last analysis, structure and form need not be different. The perfect structure will be such a unity that it, too, will be FELT as one—not only "the orderly distribution of harmonies and keys in such a manner that the mind can realize the concatenation as a complete and distinct work of art." The ideal musical consciousness would have an ideally great range; it would not only realize the concatenation, but it would take it in as one takes in a single phrase, a simple tune, retaining it from first not to last. The ordinary musical consciousness has merely a much shorter breath. It can "feel" an air, a movement; it cannot "feel" a symphony, it can only perceive the relation of keys and harmonies therein. With repeated hearing, study, experience, this span of beauty may be indefinitely extended—in the individual, as in the race. But no one will deny that the direct experience of beauty, the single aesthetic thrill, is measured exactly by the length of this span. It is only genius—hearer or composer—who can operate "a longue haleine."
So it is that we must understand the development in musical form from the cut and dried sonata form to the wayward yet infinitely greater beauty of Beethoven; and thence to the "free forms" of modern music. "Infinite melody" is a contradiction in terms, because when the first term cannot be present in consciousness with the last there is nothing to control and direct the progression; and our musical memory is limited. Yet we can conceive, theoretically, the possibility of an indefinite widening of the memory.
It was on some such grounds as these that Poe laid down his famous "Poetic Principle,"—that a long poem does not exist; that "a long poem" is simply a flat contradiction in terms. He says, indeed, that because "elevating excitement," the end of a poem, is "through a psychical necessity" transient, therefore no poem should be longer than the natural term of such excitement. It is clearly possible to substitute for "elevating excitement," immediate musical feeling of the individual. What is the meaning of "feeling," "impression," here? It is the power of entering into a Gestaltsqualitat— a motor group, a scheme in which every element is the mechanical cue to the following. Beauty ceases for the hearer where this carrying power, the "funded capital" of tone- linkings ceases. In just the same way, if rhythm were a perception rather than an impression, we ought to be able to apprehend a rhythm of which the unit periods were hours. Yet we may so bridge over the moments of beauty in experience that we are enabled, without stretching to a breaking-point, to speak of a symphony or an opera as a single beautiful work of art.
But what of the difficulties which such a theory must meet? The most obvious one is the short life of musical works. If musical beauty is founded in natural laws, why does music so quickly grow old? The answer is that music is a phenomenon of expectation as founded on these natural laws. It is the tendency of one note to progress to another which is the basis of the vividness of our experience. We expect, indeed, what belongs objectively to the development of a melody, but only that particular variety of progression to which we have become accustomed. So it is that music which presents only the old, simple progressions gives the greatest sense of ease, but the least sense of effort—the ideal motion not being hindered on its way. Intensity, vividness, would be felt where the progression is less obvious, but felt as "fitting in" when it is once made; and where it is not obvious at all—where the link is not felt, a sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness arises. So it is with music which we know by heart. It is not that we know each note, and so expect it, but that it is felt as necessarily issuing out of the preceding. A piece of poor music, really heterogeneous and unconnected, might be thoroughly familiar, and yet never, in this sense, felt as SATISFYING expectation. In the same way, music in which the progressions were germane to the existing tonality-feeling, while still not absolutely obvious, would not be less quickening to the musical sense, even if learned by heart. It is clear that there is an external and an internal expectation—one, imposed by memory, for the particular piece; the other constituted partly by intrinsic internal relations, partly by the degree to which these internal relations have been exploited. That is, the possibility of musical expectation, and pleasure in its satisfaction, is conditioned by the possession of a tonality- feeling which covers the constituents of the piece of music, but which has not become absolutely mechanical in its action. Just as rhythm needs an obstacle to make the structure felt, so melody needs some variation from the obvious set of relations already won and possessed. If that possession is too complete, the melody becomes as stale and uninteresting as would a 3-4 rhythm without a change or a break.
The test of genius in music, of the width and depth of mastery, is to be able to become familiar without ceasing to be strange. On the other hand, if in music to be great is always to be misunderstood, it is no less true, here as elsewhere, that to be misunderstood is not always to be great. And music may be merely strange, and pass into oblivion, without ever having passed that stage of surprised and delighted acceptance which is the test of its truth to fundamental laws.
But how shall music advance? How shall it set out to win new relations? It is at least conceivable that it takes the method of another art which we have just studied. To get new beauties, it does not say,—Go to, I will add to the beauties I already have! It makes new occasions, and by way of these finds the impulse it seeks. Renoir paints the baigneuse of Montmartre, and finds "the odd, beautiful huddle of lines" in so doing; Rodin portrays ever new subtleties of situation and mood, and by way of these comes most naturally to "the unedited poses." So a musician, we may imagine, comes to new and strange utterances by way of a new and strange motion or cry that he imitates. Out of the various bents and impulses that these give him he chooses the ones that chance to be beautiful. And in time these new beauties have become worn away like the trite metaphors that are now no longer metaphors, but part of the "funded capital." That was a ridiculous device of Schumann's, who found a motif for one of his loveliest things by using the letters of his temporary fair one's name—A B E G G; but it may not be so utterly unlike the procedure by which music grows.
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 strongRelents 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.
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.
Now the word is nothing in itself; it is not sound primarily, but thought. The word is but a sign, a negligible quantity in human intercourse—a counter in which the coins are ideas and emotions—merely legal tender, of no value save in exchange. What we really experience in the sound of a sentence, in the sight of a printed page, is a complex sequence of visual and other images, ideas, emotions, feelings, logical relations, swept along in the stream of consciousness, —differing, indeed, in certain ways from daily experience, but yet primarily of the web of life itself. The words in their nuances, march, tempo, melody add certain elements to this flood—hasten, retard, undulate, or calm it; but it is the THOUGHT, the understood experience, that is the stuff of literature.
Words are first of all meanings, and meanings are to be understood and lived through. We can hardly even speak of the meaning of a word, but rather of what it is, directly, in the mental state that is called up by it. Every definition of a word is but a feeble and distant approximation of the unique flash of experience belonging to that word. It is not the sound sensation nor the visual image evoked by the word which counts, but the whole of the mental experience, to which the word is but an occasion and a cue. Therefore, since literature is the art of words, it is the stream of thought itself that we must consider as the material of literature. In short, literature is the dialect of life—as Stevenson said; it is by literature that the business of life is carried on. Some one, however, may here demur: visual signs, too, are the dialect of life. We understand by what we see, and we live by what we understand. The curve of a line, the crescendo of a note, serve also for wordless messages. Why are not, then, painting and music the vehicles of experience, and to be judged first as evocation of life, and only afterward as sight and hearing? This conceded, we are thrown back on that view of art as "the fixed quantity of imaginative thought supplemented by certain technical qualities,—of color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry," from which is has been the one aim of the preceding arguments of this book to free us.
The holders of this view, however, ignore the history and significance of language. Our sight and hearing are given to us prior to our understanding or use of them. In a way, we submit to them—they are always with us. We dwell in them through passive states, through seasons of indifference; moreover when we see to understand, we do not SEE, and when we hear to understand we do not hear. Only shreds of sensation, caught up in our flight from one action to another, serve as signals for the meanings which concern us. In proportion as action is prompt and effective, does the cue as such tend to disappear, until, in all matters of skill, piano-playing, fencing, billiard-playing, the sight or sound which serves as cue drops almost together out of consciousness. So far as it is vehicle of information, it is no longer sight or sound as such—interest has devoured it. But language came into being to supplement the lacks of sight and sound. It was created by ourselves, to embody all active outreaching mental experience, and it comes into particular existence to meet an insistent emergency—a literally crying need. In short, it is CONSTITUTED by meanings—its essence is communication. Sight and sound have a relatively independent existence, and may hence claim a realm of art that is largely independent of meanings. Not so the art of words, which can be but the art of meanings, of human experience alone.
And yet again, were the evocation of life the means and material of all art, that art in which the level of imaginative thought was low, the range of human experience narrow, would take a low place in the scale. What, then, of music and architecture? Inferior arts, they could not challenge comparison with the poignant, profound, all-embracing art of literature. But this is patently not the fact. There is no hierarchy of the arts. We may not rank St. Paul's Cathedral below "Paradise Lost." Yet is the material of all experience is the material of all art, they must not only be compared, but "Paradise Lost" must be admitted incomparably the greater. No—we may not admit that all the arts alike deal with the material of expression. The excellence of music and architecture, whatever it may be, cannot depend on this material. Yet by hypothesis it must be through the use of its material that the end of beauty is reached by every art. A picture has lines and masses and colors, wherewith to play with the faculty of vision, to weave a spell for the whole man. Beauty is the power to enchant him through the eye and all that waits upon it, into a moment of perfection. Literature has "all thoughts, all passions, all delights"—the treasury of life—to play with, to weave a spell for the whole man. Beauty in literature is the power to enchant him, through the mind and heart, across the dialect of life, into a moment of perfection.
The art of letters, then, is the art whose material is life itself. Such, indeed, is the implication of the approval theories of style. Words, phrases, sentences, chapters, are excellent in so far as they are identical with thought in all its shades of feeling. "Economy of attention," Spencer's familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself, an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching. "All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations."<1> He quotes therewith De Maupassant on Flaubert: "Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but ONE—one form, one mode—to express what I want to say." And adds, "The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!—the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within."…
<1>Appreciations: An Essay on Style.
Thought in words is the matter of literature; and words exist but for thought, and get their excellence as thought; yet, as Flaubert says, the idea only exists by virtue of the form. The form, or the word, IS the idea; that is, it carries along with it the fringe of suggestion which crystallizes the floating possibility in the stream of thought. A glance at the history of language shows how this must have been so. Words in their first formation were doubtless constituted by their imitative power. As Taine has said,<1> at the first they arose in contact with the objects; they imitated them by the grimaces of mouth and nose which accompanied their sound, by the roughness, smoothness, length, or shortness of this sound, by the rattle or whistle of the throat, by the inflation or contraction of the chest.
<1> H. Taine,La Fontaine et ses Fables, p. 288.
This primitive imitative power of the word survives in the so-called onomatapoetic words, which aim simply at reproducing the sounds of nature. A second order of imitation arises through the associations of sensations. The different sensations, auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, motor, and organic have common qualities, which they share with other more complex experiences; of form, as force or feebleness; of feeling, as harshness, sweetness, and so on. It is, indeed, another case of the form-qualities to which we recurred so often in the chapter on music. Clear and smooth vowels will give the impression of volatility and delicacy; open, broad ones of elevation or extension (airy, flee; large, far). The consonants which are hard to pronounce will give the impression of effort, of shock, of violence, of difficulty, of heaviness,—"the round squat turret, black as the fool's heart;" those which are easy of pronunciation express ease, smoothness, fluidity, calm, lightness, (facile, suave, roulade);—"lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon," a line like honey on the tongue, of which physical organ, indeed, one becomes, with the word "tinct," definitely conscious.
In fact, the main point to notice in the enumeration of the expressive qualities of sounds, is that it is the movement in utterance which characterizes them. That movement tends to reproduce itself in the hearer, and carries with it its feeling- tone of ease or difficulty, explosiveness or sweetness long drawn out. It is thus by a kind of sympathetic induction rather than by external imitation that these words of the second type become expressive.
Finally, the two moments may be combined, as in such a word as "roaring," which is directly imitative of a sound, and by the muscular activity it calls into play suggests the extended energy of the action itself.
The stage in which the word becomes a mere colorless, algebraic sign of object or process never occurs, practically, for in any case it has accumulated in its history and vicissitudes a fringe of suggestiveness, as a ship accumulates barnacles. "Words carry with them all the meanings they have worn," says Walter Raleigh in his "Essay on Style." "A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors." Manifold may be the implications and suggestions of even a single letter. Thus a charming anonymous essay on the word "Grey." "Gray is a quiet color for daylight things, but there is a touch of difference, of romance, even, about things that are grey. Gray is a color for fur, and Quaker gowns, and breasts of doves, and a gray day, and a gentlewoman's hair; and horses must be gray….Now grey is for eyes, the eyes of a witch, with green lights in them and much wickedness. Gray eyes would be as tender and yielding and true as blue ones; a coquette must have eyes of grey."
Words do not have meanings, they ARE meanings through their power of direct suggestion and induction. They may become what they signify. Nor is this power confined to words alone; on its possession by the phrase, sentence, or verse rests the whole theory of style. The short, sharp staccato, the bellowing turbulent, the swimming melodious circling sentence ARE truly what they mean, in their form as in the objective sense of their words. The sound-values of rhythm and pace have been in other chapters fully dwelt upon; the expressive power of breaks and variations is worth noting also. Of the irresistible significance of rhythm, even against content, we have an example amusingly commented on by Mr. G.K. Chesterton in his "Twelve Types." "He (Byron) may arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:
'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takesaway,When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dulldecay.'
That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron."
Such, then, are some of the means by which language becomes identical with thought, and most truly the dialect of life. The genius will have ways, to which these briefly outlined ones will seem crude and obvious, but they will be none the less of the same nature. Shall we then conclude that the beauty of literature is here? that, in the words of Pater, from the essay I have quoted, "In that perfect justice (of the unique word)…omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art."
In its last analysis, such a conception of literature amounts to the unimpeded intercourse of mind with mind. Literature would be a language which dispenses with gesture, facial expression, tone of voice; which is, in its halts, accelerations and retardations, emphases and concessions, the apotheosis of conversation. But this clearness,—in the sublime sense, including the ornate and the subtle,—this luminous lucidity,— is it not quite indeterminate? Clearness is said of a medium. WHAT is it that shines through?
Were this clearness the beauty we are seeking, whatever in the world that wanted to get itself said, would, if it were perfectly said, become a final achievement of literature. All that the plain man looks for, we must think rightly, in poetry and prose, might be absent, and yet we should have to acknowledge its excellence. Let us then consider this quality by which the words become what they signify as the specific beauty rather of style than of literature; the mere refining of the gold from which the work of art has yet to be made. Language is the dialect of life; and the most perfect language can be no more than the most perfect truth of intercourse. It must then be through the treatment of life, or the sense of life itself, that we are somehow to attain the perfect moment of beauty.
The sense of life! In what meaning are these words to be taken? Not the completest sense of all, because the essence of life is in personal responsibility to a situation, and this is exactly what in our experience of literature disappears. First of all, then, before asking how the moment of beauty is to be attained, we must see how it is psychologically possible to have a sense of life that is yet purged of the will to live.
All experience of life is a complication of ideas, emotions, and attitudes or impulses to action in varying proportions. The sentiment of reality is constituted by our tendency to interfere, to "take a hand." Sometimes the stage of our consciousness is so fully occupied by the images of others that our own reaction is less vivid. Finally, all conditions and possibilities of reaction may be so minimized that the only attitude possible is our acceptance or rejection of a world in which such things can be. What does it "matter" to me whether or not "the old, unhappy, far-off things" really happened? The worlds of the Borgias, of Don Juan, and of the Russian war stand on the same level of reality. Aucassin and Nicolette are as near to me as Abelard and Heloise. For in relation to these persons my impulse is NIL. I submit to them, I cannot change or help them; and because I have no impulse to interfere, they are not vividly real to me. And, in general, in so far as I am led to contemplate or to dwell on anything in idea, in so far does my personal attitude tend to parallel this impersonal one toward real persons temporally or geographically out of reach.
Now in literature all conditions tend to the enormous preponderance of the ideal element in experience. My mind in reading is completely filled with ideas of the appearance, ways, manners, and situation of the people concerned. I leave them a clear field. My emotions are enlisted only as the inevitable fringe of association belonging to vivid ideas— the ideas of their emotions. So far as all the possibilities of understanding are fulfilled for me, so far as I am in possession of all the conditions, so far do I "realize" the characters, but realize them as ideas tinged with feeling.
Here there will be asseverations to the contrary. What! feel no real emotion over Little Nell, or Colonel Newcome? no emotion in that great scene of passion and despair, the parting of Richard Feverel and Lucy,—a scene which none can read save with tight throat and burning eyes! Even so. It is not real emotion. You have the vivid ideas, so vivid that a fringe of emotional association accompanies them, as you might shudder remembering a bad dream. But the real emotion arises only from the real impulse, the real responsibility.
The sense of life that literature gives might be described as life in its aspect as idea. That this fact is the cause of the peace and painlessness of literature—since it is by his actions, as Aristotle says, that man is happy or the reverse— need not concern us here. For the beauty of literature, and our joy in it, lie not primarily in its lack of power to hurt us. The point is that literature gives none the less truly a sense of life because it happens to be one extreme aspect of life. The literary way is only one of the ways in which life can be met.
To give the sense of life perfectly—to create the illusion of life—is this, then, the beauty of literature? But we are seeking for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. Why should the perfect illusion of life give this, any more than life itself does? So the "vision" of a picture might be intensely clear, and yet the picture itself unbeautiful. Such a complete "sense of life," such clear "vision," would show the artist's mastery of technique, but not his power to create beauty. In the art of literature, as in the art of painting, the normal function is but the first condition, the state of perfection is the end at which to aim.
It is just this distinction that we can properly make between the characteristic or typical in the sense of differentiated, and the great or excellent in literature. In the theory of some writers, perfect fidelity to the type is the only originality. To paint the Russian peasant or the French bourgeois as he is, to catch the exact shade of exquisite soullessness in Oriental loves, to reproduce the Berserker rage or the dull horror of battle, is indeed to give the perfect sense of life. But the perfect, or the complete, sense of life is not the moment of perfect life.
Yet to this assertion two answers might be made. The authors of "Bel-Ami," or "Madame Chrysantheme," or "The Triumph of Death," might claim to be saved by their form. The march of events, the rounding climax, the crystal-clear unity of the finished work, they might say, gives the indispensable union, for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. No syllable in the slow unfolding of exquisite cadences but is supremely placed from the first page to the last. As note calls to note, so thought calls to thought, and feeling to feeling, and the last word is an answer to the first of the inevitable procession. A writer's donnee, they would say, is his own. The reader may only bed—Make me something fine after your own fashion!
And they would have to be acknowledged partly in the right. In that inevitable unity of form there is indeed a necessary element of the perfect moment; but it is not a perfect unity. For the matter of their art should be, in the last analysis, life itself; and the unity of life itself, the one basic unity of all, they have missed. It is a hollow sphere they present, and nothing solid. Henry James has spent the whole of a remarkable essay on D'Annunzio's creations in determining the meaning of "the fact that their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts, and that something is all the while at work undermining that bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of their own office to throw up." The secret is, he avers, that the themes, the "anecdotes," could find their extension and consummation only in the rest of life. Shut out, as they are, from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and assimilation, and so from all hope of dignity, they lose absolutely their power to sway us.
It might be simpler to say that these works lack the first beauty which literature as the dialect of life can have—they lack the repose of centrality; they have no identity with the meaning of life as a whole. It could not be said of them, as Bagehot said of Shakespeare: "He puts things together, he refers things to a principle; rather, they group themselves in his intelligence insensibly around a principle;…a cool oneness, a poised personality, pervades him." But in these men there is no cool oneness, no reasonable soul, and so they miss the central unity of life, which can give unity to literature. Even the apparent structural unity fails when looked at closely; the actions of the characters are seen to be mechanical—their meaning is not inevitable.
The second answer to our assertion that the "sense of life" is not the beauty of literature might call attention to the fact that SENSE of life may be taken as understanding of life. A complete sense of life must include the conditions of life, and the conditions of life involve this very "energetic identity" on which we have insisted. And this contention we must admit. So long as the sense of life is taken as the illusion of life, our words hold good. But if to that is added understanding of life, the door is open to the profoundest excellences of literature. Henry James has glimpsed this truth in saying that no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind. Stevenson has gone further. "But the truth is when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine time heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being seized with such an ample grasp, that even should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be expressed."
The conditions of our being! If we accept, affirm, profoundly rest in what is presented to us, we have the first condition of that repose which is the essence of the aesthetic experience. And from this highest demand can be viewed the hierarchy of the lesser perfections which go to make up the "perfect moment" of literature. Instead of reaching this point by successive eliminations, we might indeed have reached it in one stride. The perfect moment across the dialect of life, the moment of perfect life, must be in truth that in which we touch the confines of our being, look upon our world, all in all, as revealed in some great moment, and see that it is good—that we grasp it, possess it, that it is akin to us, that it is identical with our deepest wills. The work that grasps the conditions of our being gives ourselves back to us completed.
In the conditions of our being in a less profound sense may be found the further means to the perfect moment. Thus the progress of events, the development of feelings, must be in harmony with our natural processes. The development, the rise, complication, expectation, gratification, the suspense, climax, and drop of the great novel, correspond to the natural functioning of our mental processes. It is an experience that we seek, multiplied, perfected, expanded—the life moment of a man greater than we. This, too, is the ultimate meaning of the demands of style. Lucidity, indeed, there must be,— identity with the thought; but besides the value of the thought in its approximation to the conditions of our being, we seek the vividness of that thought,—the perfect moment of apprehension, as well as of experience. It is the beauty of style to be lucid; but the beauty of lucidity is to reinforce the springs of thought.