that we apply the word imitation even to this last way of representing things; since words are no true likeness of, but only customary signs for, the thing they represent. And those arts we cannot call imitative at all, which by combinations of abstract sound or form express and arouse emotions unattended by the recognizable likeness, idea or image of any definite thing.
Now the emotions of music when music goes along with words, whether in the shape of actual song or even of the instrumental accompaniment of song, are no doubt in a certain sense attended with definite ideas; those, namely, which are expressed by the words themselves. But the same ideas Non-imitative character of music. would be conveyed to the mind equally well by the same words if they were simply spoken. What the music contributes is a special element of its own, an element of pure emotion, aroused through the sense of hearing, which heightens the effect of the words upon the feelings without helping to elucidate them for the understanding. Nay, it is well known that a song well sung produces its intended effect upon the feelings almost as fully though we fail to catch the words or are ignorant of the language to which they belong. Thus the view of Aristotle cannot be defended on the ground that he was familiar with music only in an elementary form, and principally as the direct accompaniment of words, and that in his day the modern development of the art, as an art for building up constructions of independent sound, vast and intricate fabrics of melody and harmony detached from words, was a thing not yet imagined. That is perfectly true; the immense technical and intellectual development of music, both in its resources and its capacities, is an achievement of the modern world; but the essential character of musical sound is the same in its most elementary as in its most complicated stage. Its privilege is to give delight, not by communicating definite ideas, or calling up particular images, but by appealing to certain organic sensibilities in our nerves of hearing, and through such appeal expressing on the one part and arousing on the other a unique kind of emotion. The emotion caused by music may be altogether independent of any ideas conveyable by words. Or it may serve to intensify and enforce other emotions arising at the same time in connexion with the ideas conveyed by words; and it was one of the contentions of Richard Wagner that in the former phase the art is now exhausted, and that only in the latter are new conquests in store for it. But in either case the music is the music, and is like nothing else; it is no representation or similitude of anything whatsoever.
But does not instrumental music, it will be said, sometimes really imitate the sounds of nature, as the piping of birds, the whispering of woods, the moaning of storms or explosion of thunder; or does it not, at any rate, suggest these things by resemblances so close that they almost amount in the strict An objection and its answer. sense to imitation? Occasionally, it is true, music does allow itself these playful excursions into a region of quasi-imitation or mimicry. It modifies the character of its abstract sounds into something, so to speak, more concrete, and, instead of sensations which are like nothing else, affords us sensations which recognizably resemble those we receive from some of the sounds of nature. But such excursions are hazardous, and to make them often is the surest proof of vulgarity in a musician. Neither are the successful effects of the great composers in evoking ideas of particular natural phenomena generally in the nature of real imitations or representations; although passages such as the notes of the dove and nightingale in Haydn’s Creation, and of the cuckoo in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the bleating of the sheep in the Don Quixote symphony of Richard Strauss, must be acknowledged to be exceptions. Again, it is a recognized fact concerning the effect of instrumental music on those of its hearers who try to translate such effect into words, that they will all find themselves in tolerable agreement as to the meaning of any passage so long as they only attempt to describe it in terms of vague emotion, and to say such and such a passage expresses, as the case may be, dejection or triumph, effort or the relaxation of effort, eagerness or languor, suspense or fruition, anguish or glee. But their agreement comes to an end the moment they begin to associate, in their interpretation, definite ideas with these vague emotions; then we find that what suggests in idea to one hearer the vicissitudes of war will suggest to another, or to the same at another time, the vicissitudes of love, to another those of spiritual yearning and aspiration, to another, it may be, those of changeful travel by forest, field and ocean, to another those of life’s practical struggle and ambition. The infinite variety of ideas which may thus be called up in different minds by the same strain of music is proof enough that the music is not like any particular thing. The torrent of varied and entrancing emotion which it pours along the heart, emotion latent and undivined until the spell of sound begins, that is music’s achievement and its secret. It is this effect, whether coupled or not with a trained intellectual recognition of the highly abstract and elaborate nature of the laws of the relation, succession and combinations of sounds on which the effect depends, that has caused some thinkers, with Schopenhauer at their head, to find in music the nearest approach we have to a voice from behind the veil, a universal voice expressing the central purpose and deepest essence of things, unconfused by fleeting actualities or by the distracting duty of calling up images of particular and perishable phenomena. “Music,” in Schopenhauer’s own words, “reveals the innermost essential being of the world, and expresses the highest wisdom in a language the reason does not understand.”
Aristotle endeavoured to frame a classification of the arts, in their
several applications and developments, on two grounds—the nature
of the objects imitated by each, and the means or instruments
employed in the imitation. But in the case of
music, as it exists in the modern world, the first part of
Definition
of music.
this endeavour falls to the ground, because the object imitated has,
in the sense in which we now use the word imitation, no existence.
The means employed by music are successions and combinations of
vocal or instrumental sounds regulated according to the three
conditions of time and pitch (which together make up melody) and
harmony, or the relations of different strains of time and tone cooperant
but not parallel. With these means, music either creates
her independent constructions, or else accompanies, adorns, enforces
the imitative art of speech—but herself imitates not; and may be
best defined simply as a speaking or time art, of which the business is to
express and arouse emotion by successions and combinations of regulated
sound.
That which music is thus among the speaking or time-arts, architecture is among the shaping or space-arts. As music appeals to our faculties for taking pleasure in non-imitative combinations of transitory sound, so architecture appeals to our faculties for taking pleasure in non-imitative Non-imitative character of architecture. combinations of stationary mass. Corresponding to the system of ear-effects or combinations of time, tone and harmony with which music works, architecture works with a system of eye-effects or combinations of mass, contour, light and shade; colour, proportion, interval, alternation of plain and decorated parts, regularity and variety in regularity, apparent stability, vastness, appropriateness and the rest. Only the materials of architecture are not volatile and intangible like sound, but solid timber, brick, stone, metal and mortar, and the laws of weight and force according to which these materials have to be combined are much more severe and cramping than the laws of melody and harmony which regulate the combinations of music. The architect is further subject, unlike the musician, to the dictates and precise prescriptions of utility. Even in structures raised for purposes not of everyday use and necessity, but of commemoration or worship, the rules for such commemoration and such worship have prescribed a more or less fixed arrangement and proportion of the parts or members, whether in the Egyptian temple or temple-tomb, the Greek temple or herōon, or in the churches of the middle ages and Renaissance in the West.
Hence the effects of architecture are necessarily less full of various, rapturous and unforeseen enchantment than the effects of music. Yet for those who possess sensibility to the pleasures of the eye and the perfections of shaping art, the architecture of the great ages has yielded combinations which, so far Analogies of architecture and music. as comparison is permissible between things unlike in their materials, fall little short of the achievements of music in those kinds of excellence which are common to them both. In the virtues of lucidity, of just proportion and organic interdependence of the several parts or members, in the mathematic subtlety of their mutual relations, and of the transitions from one part or member to another, in purity and finish of individual forms, in the character of one thing growing naturally out of another and everything serving to complete the whole—in these qualities, no musical combination can well surpass a typical Doric temple such as the Parthenon at Athens. None, again, can well surpass some of the great cathedrals of the middle ages in the qualities of sublimity, of complexity, in the power both of expressing and suggesting spiritual aspiration, in the invention of intricate developments and ramifications about a central plan, in the union of majesty in the main conception with fertility of adornment in detail. In fancifulness, in the unexpected, in capricious and far-sought opulence, in filling the mind with mingled enchantments of east and west and south and north, music can hardly do more than a building like St Mark’s at Venice does with its blending of Byzantine elements, Italian elements, Gothic elements, each carried to the utmost pitch of elaboration and each enriched with a hundred caprices of ornament, but all working together, all in obedience to a law, and “all beginning and ending with the Cross.”
In the case of architecture, however, as in the case of music, the
non-imitative character must not be stated quite without exception
or reserve. There have been styles of architecture in
which forms suggesting or imitating natural or other
phenomena have held a place among the abstract forms
Exceptional and limited admission
of imitative forms in architecture.
proper to the art. Often the mode of such suggestions
is rather symbolical to the mind than really imitative to
the eye; as when the number and relations of the heavenly
planets were imaged by that race of astronomers, the Babylonians,
in the seven concentric walls of their great temple,
and in many other architectural constructions; or as when
the shape of the cross was adopted, with innumerable slight varieties
and modifications, for the ground plan of the churches of Christendom.
Passing to examples of imitation more properly so called,
it may be true, and was, at any rate, long believed, that the aisles
of Gothic churches, when once the use of the pointed arch had been
evolved as a principle of construction, were partly designed to evoke
the idea of the natural aisles of the forest, and that the upsoaring
