Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

First Book.

PHILOSOPHICAL.

MUSIC, EMOTION, AND MORALS.

B

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]

HE sun smiting through crystal drops shakes its white light into blue, and red, and yellow fire; and, as the beads of fresh-fallen rain tremble in the wind, we may watch the primary colours of the rainbow combined and recombined with wondrous alchemy into more subtle flame of emerald, purple, and orange. A cloud passes over the sky, and in a moment every tiny globe hangs before us, scintillant still, but pale and colourless, with its one quivering speck of crystalline light. Then we can see with quiet eyes the metallic lustre upon the wide blue wings of the Brazilian butterfly-the green dissolving into glitter of rubies upon the breast of the humming-bird-the long reaches of golden king-cups in June meadows, or opal tints upon wet shells and blown foam.

Have we

not looked into the great laboratories of light itself? Have we not seen the essential colours in the very moment of their evolution falling like shattered flameflakes from the sun? Is it so strange to find them mingled bountifully with all created things, and made fast in every conceivable tint upon plume of bird and petal of flower ?

The painter goes forth each day into a new Eden, and finds his palette already laid for him. He cannot choose but take the materials and follow the suggestions which Nature so freely gives him. He, too, can combine and recombine; can distribute his hues in concord and discord of colour; can associate them with definite images, or, making them the vehicles of poetic emotion, paint "the sunshine of sunshine, and the gloom of gloom."

The wailing of the wind at night, the hum of insect life, the nightingale's note, the scream of the eagle, the cries of animals, and, above all, the natural inflections of the human voice-such are the rough elements of music, multitudinous, incoherent, and formless. Earth, and sea, and air are full of these inarticulate voices; sound floats upward from populous cities to the Cloudland, and thunder rolls down its monotonous reply. Alone by the sea we may listen and hear a distinct and different tone each time the swelling wavelet breaks crisply at our feet; and when the wind with fitful and angry howl drives inland the foam of the breakers, the shriek of the retiring surge upon the

shingles will often run through several descending semitones.

It would seem, then, that we have only to take the Colour and the Sound provided for us by Nature and transform them at once through the arts of Painting and Music into the interpreters of human thought and emotion. But, in reality, between music and painting there is fixed a great gulf of difference. Nature gives man the art of Painting, as it were, ready made. For him the sun sets and rises, and the summer glows, and the woods change so softly and slowly beneath his gaze, that he has time to chronicle every tint before it has passed away. All forms of beauty, from the supreme outline of the human body to the filmy speck of the minutest insect, are constantly limning themselves upon the retina of his eye until his sensitive brain is supplied with objects of enchanting loveliness, which he is at liberty to reproduce and recombine at will. Nature not only provides the painter with fair forms and rich colours, but she also teaches him the magical art of selection and arrangement. But what has she done for the musician? She has given him sound, not music. Nowhere does there fall upon his ear, as he walks through the wide world, such an arrangement of consecutive sounds as can be called a musical subject, or theme, or melody. Far less does he find anything which can be described as musical harmony. The thunder is not affecting because it is melodic, but because it is loud and elemental. The much-extolled

« ПредишнаНапред »