poetry as fine arts, as gauged by the loftiness of those attributes of our nature with which each art at its best connects itself. No great poetry stirs that part of our nature that we have been discussing: anything in literature that does so is at once, and on all hands where authority exists, condemned as low, whatever be the power brought to the creation of the work, or the technical beauties of the work itself.

These facts bear out and illustrate the æsthetic scale we referred to at the opening of the present article,—the scale of decreasing generality and increasing technicality,-that holds relation with our higher attributes in proportion to its generality and untechnicality. Poetry, at one end of the scale, is more intimately related with religion, science, and philosophy than any other art; architecture, at the other end of the scale, excels correspondingly in the intimacy of its relations with industry. Art, standing midway between philosophy and practical life, "never becomes disconnected from human interests;" but in its descent from that most general method of expression wherein it makes common cause with religion, science, and philosophy-in its ascent towards the extreme technicality wherein it makes common cause with industry-it claims relationship with attributes of our nature that are less and less high; and in the same progression it gets more and more dependent upon inorganic nature.

To give high enjoyment, to beautify, to humanise, and to soften-to thrill men with a sense of the glorious and imperishable freedom of their manhood, and to call into vivid and intensified action all the higher emotions and aspirations, are lofty parts for an art to play; but they are parts not confined to music poetry also does all this, and adds to its role the bearing about of articulate evangels, the setting of the best thoughts in the best words: and while it has power

"Not only to keep down the base in man,

But teach high thought, and amiable words
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,

And love of truth, and all that makes a man”

it owns the supreme faculty of setting up immortal types of perfect manhood and perfect womanhood to be made the living companions of our life: in a word, it is more nobly and articulately creative than music is.

We do not ignore the fact that the truly modern music gave up in the hands of Beethoven, once and for all, the old tradi

"Music of the Future" based on Poetry.

35

tion of sound for sound's sake, and took on that great accession of true creativeness that is implied in the existence of organic ideas underlying all his great works; but this development, however highly it be followed out with music isolated from poetry, can only be lyric and didactic (so to speak), and cannot come to be dramatic in the high creative kind in which poetry is dramatic. Moreover, the very fact of this development of music gives an additional proof of the supremacy of poetry; for it is poetry which supplies the ideal basis whereon this higher music is founded.

We do not intend to enter upon any discussion concerning what is known as "the music of the future;" but we may note that Richard Wagner, the prophet and practitioner of that music, abandons definitely the position of absolute independence that was practically and theoretically claimed for music until far into its modern period. The departure of music from its position of bondage to poetry was followed, in course of time, by a strange anomaly; and instead of music being used simply to heighten the effect of the drama,—as it did with the Greeks, who used their meagre music in connection with their divine choruses, we find a later civilisation subordinating poetry altogether before the arrogant pretensions of composers who, it is true, practised an art which had already a grand development whereon to found pretensions. The Italian opera at the commencement of modern music was based upon poems (libretti) of the most dull and feeble order, and this because they were written for the mere sake of adaptability to the display of sounds: this state of things had its origin in that degraded society that we referred to further back,-a society for whom the musician had but to display such an amount of technical skill as would satisfy the virtuosi, and create such a class of sounds as would satisfy and inflame a vapid sentimentality. That such a society was unfit for a musical drama with a real poetic basis, is evident from the one notorious fact that it had fallen to that degraded state of æsthetic cruelty which permitted of the maintenance of a class of soprano voices obtained solely by the culture of emasculated male singers ;-a monstrous subordination of morals to technical art, such as must ever be the index of a rotten society, incapable of any approach to the highest æsthetic creation. As a matter of fact, the "poet" wrote for the musician, the musician often enough for the castrato; and the result, from a high æsthetic point of view, was as unsatisfactory as in reason it should have been; but in the development of the opera, successive masters strove more and

more against this anomaly: Glück declared uncompromisingly, that the function of the musician was to give full expression to the words of his opera; and in the present day Wagner endeavours to reconcile, more fully than any other artist has done, the two arts of poetry and music, by producing operas that are strictly dramatic in action, and founded upon a real and distinct poetic basis. We need hardly say that here the music is guided and regulated by the poetry; and, supposing an ideally perfect opera to be the highest form of music, the movement of which Wagner's is at present the fullest development is an emphatic and final restoration of the supreme position of poetry in any joint product of the two arts. If the noblest form of music is the musical drama, it is simply because of the poetic element in what is not absolute music at all. We have not space to discuss here the question between the musical drama and the symphony; but the fact that the highest representatives of modern music have seen the utter untenableness of the position assumed in the Italian opera (the principal means by which music and poetry were brought into actual collision), is another argument in favour of the parent art maintaining the first position. Although poetry produces a less intense impression than music does, the same may be said of it as compared with the other three arts; and indeed the three arts of form, appealing to the sense of sight, produce a still more intense impression than music does, "because things seen are mightier than things heard." And, on the other hand, the impressions produced by poetry are more varied, have a grander range, than those that result from any other art; for poetry embraces every side of our existence, individual, domestic, and social; and while it, like the other arts, is more nearly related with actions and impulses than it is with thoughts, it is not excluded from treating the most abstract conceptions, to the inner beauty of which it may readily add, while improving the language wherein they are expressed. More popular, more comprehensive, more spontaneous than the other arts, it also excels in the principal distinctive characteristic of art -ideality; and idealisation must always be regarded as a higher function of art than mere expression, in the intensity of which the other arts, as we said, exceed poetry.

The superiority of music over the arts of form is a natural consequence from the supremacy of poetry; for it has a nearer kinship with the parent art than any of the others have, and approaches poetry more nearly in popularity, in comprehensiveness, in spontaneity. Science furnishes an

Shakespeare on Imperviousness to Art.

87

additional argument for its superiority, in the classification of the senses which biologists adopt: the senses arrange themselves on the principle of relative sociability; and, of the only two senses that are æsthetic, hearing, to which music appeals, thus stands higher than sight, to which painting, sculpture, and architecture appeal. More general and less technical than the arts of form, music is more intimately related with our higher attributes than they are; it depicts a less material kind of beauty than they depict, and exercises a higher influence on our moral nature.

The amount of discredit attaching to indifference to the arts, among educated people, also confirms the view we have taken of their relative importance. Shakespeare's immortal utterance on indifference to music may be applied in varying degrees to indifference concerning the other arts :

"The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus :

Let no such man be trusted."

This is one of the most precious of the household words of the great bard, one of the words which, dramatically and vicariously spoken, as all his words are, we can yet associate, with an extreme degree of probability, with the large personality of Shakespeare; and,

"If music and sweet poetry agree,

As they needs must, the sister and the brother,"

how much more true is this relentless brand when applied to the man that hath no poetry in himself! Literally speaking, such a man cannot exist, because every child born inherits some of the elements of poetry; and no man who is not a villainous travesty of humanity can be unmoved by the external influence of poetry in some form or another, whether epic, lyric, dramatic, or in the kindred form of oratory (for it is poetry that moves us in an oration: the effect is strictly æsthetic). Shakespeare has made it an articulate reproach to a man to be obtuse in regard to music: few cultivated people care to be thought indifferent to painting; and taste, real or reputed, for sculpture and architecture are pretty widely coveted. And here we find, as a matter of course, that the discredit attaching to imperviousness to the influences of the various arts is in proportion to their generality

and untechnicality. A man has no possible excuse for disregarding the appeals of poetry, which come before him at all points of his existence, in some shape or another disregard for music is nearly as inexcusable, because all of us are more or less within the range of its influence involuntarily. We may shut our eyes to the arts of form, but we cannot close our ears to the art of sound; and the difficulties in appreciating the arts of form increase with the amount of technical knowledge to be mastered, the trouble of bringing oneself under the influence of the work increasing at the same time. To hear a musical composition, you must listen, and may have to go from one place to another; but that is all. a painting, you have, when brought before it, to bring the will to bear on all the muscles connected with seeing, and also to shift your position in front of it: for a statue, you have to do all this, and more, for you must go round about it: and for architecture, the same process in a much extended degree is needed.

To see

It is true that the enjoyment of music may be much enhanced by a technical acquaintance with the processes of the art, such as gives the intellect a relish in the matter; but the major part of the enjoyment must always be independent of the higher intellectual functions; and the moral effectthe effect on the emotions-will not be at all heightened by special technical intelligence, though it will by general culture and vivacity of appreciation. In poetry, the intellectual enjoyment of technique is still less; and the chief part of the technique, prosody, is so simple that the intellect can master it, and put it in practice in a few days. This technical simplicity is the main reason why the individual can carry about so much more of a poem than he can of any other work of art in fact, he can reproduce it all without extraneous aid, if he once knows it; and this he cannot do with any other work of art except a song, which he may sing if he have the skill.

Looking at the importance of the functions performed by music, as indicated in the foregoing pages, we ought to note that notwithstanding the immense increase, of late years, in the attention given by the public to musical entertainments, the influence of the art is particularly ill-organised. People enjoy music more and more every year, no doubt; and yet it does not receive its due of critical, official, or general attention. While we have a chartered Royal Academy for painting, &c., the Royal Academy of Music is without a charter, and proportionably without organisation and influence. While