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.”