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Musical Courier 1895-06-26: Vol 30 Iss 799, 1895
20 lines. Read by computer on 25 September 2026. Printed page 23. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Beautiful in Music: Its Sources and Media of Impression.
3Music is undoubtedly the most catholic of all arts, in that it affords the most varied forms of pleasure and allows of being shared in by the most widely different capacities of the human mind. The philosopher, the scientist, the man of soul and the man of pleasure all equally find in music a fund of interest. How absurd, then, with so many different fields of observation, to argue, as some do, the conditions and essential principles of the art from the observation only of some single and restricted province! What makes art criticism—and, beyond all, musical criticism—so difficult is for this very reason, that so many factors contribute to the total impression received, all of which must be estimated at their just importance. At the same time there are also certain things which have to be just as carefully eliminated, while having no real aesthetic significance.
5These necessary elements range from the purely sensuous to the symbolical and ideal, along with the intellectual and the emotional. As already remarked, the error has been in many instances to prefer one or another of these to the subordination, disparagement or exclusion of the rest, in the elaboration of some theory of the "beautiful." We must bear in mind that sensory impressions alone are not fully aesthetic. There may be a highly cultivated physical faculty or sense, yet unless the mind "reflects," as it were, upon the impression imparted to it there is no aesthetic perception proper. Thus with savages in their native state, the faculties of sight, hearing and smell become very highly developed; yet, notwithstanding, the superior aesthetic sense is lying dormant all the time. The real distinction is this—while these naive "children of nature" do undoubtedly enjoy a keener use of certain senses in their observation of natural phenomena, they still take no interest in the sensory impressions for their own sake, apart from certain gross physical gratifications. Cultivated men, though their organs may be much duller in comparison, yet perceive and enjoy qualities in the object to which the savage is blind or otherwise insensible.
7Art, though it brings into power the highest of our intellectual powers, is yet founded after all upon sensuous impression, and conditions the same as an essential, indispensable factor. There are certain minds, for example, which take an interest in the severer elements of classic musical composition—the formal design, the contrapuntal involution of parts, &c.—but which do not participate (or but slightly, in comparison) in that requisite sensuous and elementary enjoyment of the musical "sound material." For these music is too much a mental exercise to be art in the perfect sense of the term, and for their pleasure to be truly aesthetic. Granted musical art is required to do something more than afford a mere "ear tickling" occupation; but then, again, it may not enter into competition with such things, say, as mathematical problems. A necessary postulate of any art is that the works therein shall primarily appeal to and interest the senses—namely, those either of hearing or sight.
9Again, there has to be corrected that misapprehension of the distinction between the emotion in art, and that excited (or supposed to be excited) by the ordinary experience of life, which has been provocative of such absurd teaching. Likewise, it must not be considered any longer a vain endeavor to seek after a positive definition of the "beautiful." M. Véron is quite right in his treatment of this question. The quest of the beautiful, as of some absolute existence, is about as chimerical as was the search for the philosopher's stone. Owing to the contention, lasting now over a century and a half, as to the nature of the beautiful—in which theorists have been led to adopt either the sensory, the intellectual, or the ideal elements in art as the prime factors—we have not reached yet much beyond the first stage in our prosecution of the subject.
11We have been so long in deciding what music is capable of expressing, what it has or has not to do with "emotions," that it need not appear strange if some should have been brought to think that the aesthetic science comprised nothing beyond the discussion of this elementary question. It is clear that we must have some consensus of opinion on the points suggested before proceeding further. One can hardly contest the great importance of a proper view upon these matters. Any old-fashioned notion still obtaining as to what is being represented in or called forth by music must seriously interfere with the rightful apprehension of any musical work, if not, indeed, in a sense prevent it from being heard at all.
13If the Spencerian theory be correct, then the primitive stirrings of art were unaccompanied by any tokens of art consciousness on the part of the worker. The notion of art, on the one hand, as devoted exclusively to the ends of gratification—or, on the other, of its serving some utilitarian purpose—were as yet non-differentiated, if indeed there was hereupon any reflection at all. This is important to note, and in the comparative study of ancient and modern art it must be preserved in mind. Finally, we get sentiment developed as the grand distinctive characteristic of modern art.
15All the nuances of aesthetic impressions lying between the wide bounds of the pleasing and the displeasing—the spiritual transformations of purely physiological sensations—become invested by the popular fancy with all manner of fictional interest and meaning. Much of this attached significance in art, as Darwin and Spencer imagine, owes itself to hereditarily transmitted influences. Vague as such factor in arts must necessarily be, it follows that the complete aesthetic impression is impossible to be described. In musical art the representation is not that of concrete things, but of the subjective nature in relation to things. If, however, the aesthetic impressions are not to be described in words, it is not so much that they are indefinite in their nature—this is the mistake which many fall into, who need to be reminded that words may not be for all things the proper test of definiteness—if all attempts to reconvey the impression through the medium of words should result, as they almost invariably do, in producing widely varying, sometimes wholly opposite, effects; this does not by any means infer vagueness or indeterminate-ness in the impression itself. As to the aesthetic impressions—apart from all fanciful superimpositions, or from the restrictions of a word interpretation—it may safely be asserted that these are in all instances alike. We are all agreed as to the broader aesthetic categories; only in the nicer distinctions of these it may be that the sense of the one person may be less sensitive or critical than that of the other; but here it is obviously a question of educated taste, of degree, and not one of difference in kind.
17The apprehension of beauty in an outward object is not always so simple and immediate an act as is commonly supposed, for the reasons that the impressions of an aesthetic kind are, as above remarked, themselves of frequent complexity in nature. Every aesthetic impression is, in the first place, a sensuous one; then the intellect is called into operation, in observations of comparison, &c. (whether consciously instituted or not). Indeed, much of that which we get to regard as unconscious mental observation is, after all, but the outcome—the "reflex cerebral action"—of oft-repeated conscious mental acts. Lastly, the "feeling" (for want of a better term) endows it partly with what it unconsciously brings (the common association of ideas), partly with an intentional coupling of fanciful images, analogies, &c. Musical audition is not altogether that passive reception of impressions as generally supposed; it is, or should be, at the same time an active intellectual and spiritual exercise. But these stages in the formation of the total aesthetic perception are accomplished with lightning rapidity. That which addresses us as the beautiful is the original cause of something else than mere physical sensation, or the pleasurable stirring of mental activities—that mystic something which has eluded the analytical grasp of all the eager investigators in the field from Aristotle down to Helmholtz, which some writers (as we have already seen) attribute partly to awakened reminiscences of pre-mundane existence; others (of a more rationalistic turn of mind) to the admiration and sympathy excited for the man himself as well as for his work, but which, containing as it does so much of the subjective quality, we find it impossible to scientifically define. In the words of Goethe, it is "Ein Mystiches, over and beyond the subject and contents of the work." As Hauptmann also remarks: "The essential qualities of a work of art, those which impart to its character of the beautiful, are precisely those which defy and escape analysis." This, if admitted, might seem to point to the logical conclusion that aesthetics (musical), as a science, is impossible; if precisely that element in art which is the most precious and essential has to be eliminated, how shall we proceed further? And, again, upon another hand, where subjective feeling plays such an important part, as we have admitted it to do in this art, but is yet so variable, how can there be any question of a scientific determination of such a factor?
19If we aimed now, in the former respect, at a defining, categorizing, and interpreting of this subtle beauty-essence in the art, the objection here raised might certainly be fatally serious. But we perceive that this is not the proper province of our study; we have much to perform which,
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