Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Color/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN MUSIC AND MOBILE COLOUR
Some of the contentions put forward on behalf of a mobile colour art will, of course, be questioned, if not altogether disputed by some people—especially by those to whom the subject is new, and, perhaps, not infrequently by those whose chief interests are centred in music or in science.
They will be further explained and defended as we proceed.
Meanwhile, for the sake of argument, let us assume that there is something to be said for them, and let us endeavour to make the whole question clearer by examining more carefully the points of resemblance between music and colour, and seeing what grounds there are for using the term "Colour-Music" in speaking of this new colour art.
First, let us ask ourselves, what is the place of music amongst the arts, and as an influence in modern civilization?
If we look at the matter dispassionately, I think we shall come to the conclusion that the whole use and influence of music rests upon its power of stimulating the emotional faculties. Whether the emotions aroused by it are identical with those of our ordinary life and experience, or whether, as some philosophic writers think, they are of a some-what different and special kind, belonging, as it were, to a higher plane of feeling, matters little for the moment. The fact remains that music interests, refreshes, invigorates, saddens, or makes us glad through its action upon the emotional side of our nature, and is a language without words, through which the mind of the musician can speak to the mind of the hearer.
For instance, it is used almost universally to stimulate religious emotions and aspirations. It helps to put the mind into an attitude for receiving religious impressions and assimilating religious truths. As it fills the vaulted roof of the cathedral and echoes through its aisles, we feel the better able to understand the thoughts and realize the faith of the builders expressed in the very stones around us.
In the concert-room, is not the mental refreshment, the keen interest aroused, and the pleasure we receive mainly due to the emotional effect of music upon us? Our admiration for the technical dexterity of the executant, as also our interest in the personality of the composer's methods, counts for something; but music which consists only of dexterities, not based upon a theme acting upon the emotional imagination—music which expresses nothing beyond mechanical perfection—surely takes a very secondary place in our estimation.
Music, again, finds another use, as Plato re-marked long ago, in stimulating the military spirit, in maintaining the soldier's courage and making him forget his exhaustion.
In a word, emotion, of one kind or another, is always called into play by music, whether it be of the kind which is aroused in the concert-room or the church, in the ballroom or on the battlefield.
The foundations of music, therefore, as has been said, rest upon this capability of arousing emotional feeling, and it seems very remarkable that so great an art, and one which makes so wide an appeal to the human race, should have been thus based and built upon these subtle psychological sensations.
The action which colour has upon us in its harmonies and contrasts, its varying strength and delicacy, its power of giving joy or pain, is also, to a large extent, an emotional one; and if a mobile colour art be attacked because it rests upon this appeal to emotion, music must be attacked on the same grounds.
If, on the other hand, we frankly admit, as I think we must, that emotional appeal is at the root of all art, then it may well be profitable to go on and examine the further points of resemblance between a mobile colour art and music.