“O! what is this that knows the road I came?”
It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sexual traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted.
There are perhaps two instincts, a motor and a sensory, lying at the bottom of art and the delight in art. All the constructive instincts of living things, from bees and ants and worms and birds upwards, have gone to mould our delight in the fashioning of a whole, and in the contemplation of its fashion. The same process was carried on into human life. The primitive potter who took clay and wrought with her hands, and dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar, wrought it through long ages ever more lovely and perfect, embodying therein all that she knew of the earth’s uses and saw of its beauty, and by a true instinct she called her work a living creature. The baskets that early men wove, and the weapons that they carved for themselves, and their rhythmical cries in war-dance or worship, are part of a chain that presents itself again in Gothic cathedrals or Greek and Elizabethan dramas.
Even stronger than this motor instinct of art is the sensory delight in beauty which has its root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the only root; all the things in the world that give light and heat and food and shelter and help gather around themselves some garment of loveliness, and so become the stuff of art; the sun and the reindeer are among the very first things to which men tried to give artistic expression. But the sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering, more ancient than any as a source of beauty. Colour and song and strength and skill--such are the impressions that male and female have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty--whether in the form of the Venus of Milo, the Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin’s music, Shelley’s lyrics--can always appeal, certain of response? One might name finally as the highest, most complex summit of art reached in our own time--a summit on which art is revealed in its supreme religious form--Wagner’s “Parsifal.” These things sprang from love, as surely as the world would have been wellnigh barren of beauty had the sexual method of reproduction never replaced all others. Beauty is the child of love; the world, at least all in it worth living for, was the creation of love.