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Any discussion of the art of music,—of its significance in relation to ourselves, of its æsthetic qualities, or of methods of teaching it,—to be comprehensive, must be based on a clear recognition of the one important quality which is inherent in it, which distinguishes it from the other arts and which gives it its peculiar power. Painting and sculpture are definitive. It is not possible to create a great work in either of these mediums without a subject taken from life; for, however imaginative the work may be, it must depict something. In painting, for example, the very soul of a religious belief may shine from the canvas,—as in the Sistine Madonna,—but that belief cannot be there presented without physical embodiment. And when the physical embodiment is reduced to its simplest terms, as in some of Manet’s paintings, there is still the necessity of portrayal; Manet’s wonderful light and opalescent color must fall on an object. Turner paints a mystical landscape, a mythological vale, such as haunts the dreams of poets, but it is impossible for him to produce the illusion by itself; the vale is a vale, human beings are there. Sculpture, which makes its effects by the perfection of its rhythms around an axis, and by its shadows,—effects of the most subtle and, at the same time, of the most elemental kind,—it, too, must portray; the emotion must take form and substance, and that form must be drawn from the outward, visible world.

In poetry the same limitations exist. It, too, must deal in human life with a certain definiteness. But the greatest poetry is continually struggling to slough off the garment of reality and free the soul from its trammels. It trembles on the verge of music, seeking to find words for what cannot be said, and attaining a great part of its meaning by a sublime euphony. The didactic is its grave.

Before I attempt to describe the peculiar quality which distinguishes music, it will be well to state quite clearly what it cannot do. This can best be understood by a comparison between it and poetry, which of all the arts is nearest to music, because it exists in the element of time, whereas painting and sculpture exist in space. Poetry is made up of words arranged in meaning and euphony. Each of these words signifies an object, idea, or feeling; the word “chair,” for example, has come to mean an object to sit upon. Now, while notes in music are given certain alphabetical names indicating a pitch determined by sound waves, the use of these letters is arbitrary and has no connection with their original hieroglyphic and hieratic significance. The musical sound we call a, for example, means nothing as a sound, has no common or agreed-upon or archæological significance. Combine the note a with c and e in what is known as the common chord and you still have no meaning; combine a with other notes and form a melody from them, and you have perhaps beauty and coherence of form,—a pleasing sequence of sounds,—but still no meaning such as you get from the combination of letters in a word like “chair.” Combine a with a great many other notes into a symphony, and this coherence and beauty may become quite wonderful in effect, but it still remains untranslatable into other terms, and without such definite significance as is attained by combining words in poems. So we say that notes have no significance in themselves; that musical phrases have no meaning as have phrases in language; that melodies are not sentences, and symphonies not poems.

If we compare music with painting or sculpture we find much the same contrast. Just as music does not mean anything in the sense that words do, so it has no “subject” in the sense that Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire has, or Donatello’s David. It does not deal with objects. It cannot portray a ship or a star. It may seem to float, it may flash for a moment, but it does not describe or set forth. Furthermore, it cannot, strictly speaking, give expression to ideas. It may be so serious, so ordered, so equable—as in Bach—that we say its composer was a philosopher, but no item of his philosophy appears. Above all it is unmoral,[1] and without belief or dogma. Too much stress can hardly be laid on this negative quality in music, for it is in this very disability that its greatest virtue lies. I shall refer later to the frequent tendency among listeners to avoid facing this problem by attaching meanings of their own to the music they hear. I need only note in passing that these so-called “meanings” seldom agree, and that the habit is the result either of ignorance of the true office of music, or of mental lassitude toward it. “It is not enough to enjoy yourself over a work of art,” says Joubert; “you must enjoy it.”

Now the one distinguishing quality of music is this: it finds its perfection in itself without relation to other objects. It is what it is in itself alone. It is non-definitive; it does not use symbols of something else; it cannot be translated into other terms. The poet seeks always a complete union of the thing said and the method of saying it. Flaubert seeks patiently and persistently for the one word which shall not only be the exact symbol of his thought, but which shall fit his euphony. The painter so draws his objects, so distributes his colors, and so arranges his composition as to make of them plastic mediums for the expression of his thought, and the greatness of his picture depends first of all and inevitably on his power of fusing his subjects with his technique. In sculpture precisely the same process takes place. Neither of these arts actually copies nature; each “arranges” it for its own purpose.

In music this much-sought union of matter and manner is complete; the thing said and the method of saying it are one and indivisible. It is, as Pater says, “the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression.”