Art. X.-THE RIDDLE OF MUSIC.

1. The Power of Sound. By Edmund Gurney. London: Smith and Elder, 1880.

2. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. By Eduard Hanslick. Ninth edition. Leipzig: Barth, 1896.

3. Essai sur l'Esprit Musical. By Lionel Dauriac. Paris: Alcan, 1904.

4. Les Rapports de la Musique et de la Poésie. By Jules Combarieu. Paris: Alcan, 1894.

5. Die Musik als Ausdruck. By Friedrich von Hausegger. Munich, 1887.

6. La Logique des Sentiments. By Th. Ribot. Paris: Alcan, 1905.

7. Grundlegung der Esthetik. By Theodor Lipps. Hamburg: Voss, 1903.

SOON after the publication of the late Edmund Gurney's 'Power of Sound,' a writer in the Contemporary Review' sought not merely to point out the originality and importance of the author's views, but also to stimulate him to seek additional facts and hypotheses in historical or, as we should now pedantically say, genealogical and morphological studies, analogous to those applied to sculpture since the days of Winckelmann, and to painting, quite recently, by Morelli and his disciples. Who knows but that such methods, employed by one so specially gifted, might not have solved the riddle of music, and thereby explained the how and why of beauty, suggestion, and impressiveness in every other art? That was in 1882. Edmund Gurney died some six years later, having abandoned the riddle of music for other riddles, which are solved, most likely, only by those travellers who never return to teach us. The Power of Sound,' that book of such fine accomplishment and splendid promise, has meantime been forgotten; its very title is known to very few among the aestheticians who still set out to discuss anew questions to which it had given a satisfactory reply. And now, after twenty-four years, the writer of the paper referred to above, having re-read Gurney's book, is anxious to estimate what additional light has been shed, or what additional confusion made, about this, which must still be called the riddle of music.

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In order to make these difficult matters a little easier by mixing narrative with mere analysis, I must refer to my own studies after the writing of that article in 1882. Finding that Mr Gurney would not resume his musical investigations on the lines I had, perhaps presumptuously, suggested, and aware that my own musical training and opportunities were insufficient for such work, I turned all my attention to the visual arts, and to those branches of psychology which promised to shed light upon them; and, gradually forgetting my claim that music (if studied by Gurney or another like him) might become the typical art with which all general aesthetics would begin, I slid into a lazy belief that music was surrounded by some mystery of its own requiring the application of some method of study not as yet to be guessed at. This was my state of mind when, reading M. Lionel Dauriac's new book, L'Esprit Musical,' I discovered, not merely that this writer had brought the riddle of music a step nearer its solution than had been done by Gurney, but, what was far more unexpected, that my own seemingly irrelevant study of the psychology of visual art enabled me to see deeper into the mystery. Once more music appeared to me as the typical art; but, far from its having helped to solve the more intricate problems of the visual arts, it was the attempted solution of some of these, due to the converging work of many psychologists and many art-critics, which seemed to put some meaning into the aesthetics of music. The following pages will embody as much as remains valid of the analyses of Edmund Gurney and his twin critic Hanslick, and as much as seems fruitful of the recent hypotheses of M. Lionel Dauriac, all of which I shall attempt to connect and correct in the light of my own and other contributions to artistic psychology; above all, I shall try to bring these studies of the modus operandi of music into line with the most plausible modern system of æsthetics, as explained to the readers of the Quarterly Review' in an article on Lipps and other German æstheticians, which appeared in April 1904. We can now pass to the definition and examination of the riddle of music, which is also, with differences of detail and degree, the riddle of all the fine arts.

Music presents two sets of psychological phenomena. It can suggest and stimulate feelings akin to those pro

duced by the vicissitudes of real life; and it can interest, fascinate, delight, or weary and displease, by what we can only call the purely musical quality of its soundpatterns. Music thus awakens two different kinds of emotion—a dramatic one referred to its expressiveness; and an æsthetic one connected with the presence or absence of what is known as beauty. The close interplay of these two sets of phenomena, and the poverty and vagueness of the nomenclature of æsthetic form, as compared with the richness and definiteness of the vocabulary of human feeling, have resulted, ever since music became matter of reflection, in an extraordinary confusion on the subject.

However much musicians may have felt that there was in their art something more characteristic and more important than its suggestion of human emotion, there grew up, and still exists universally, a habit of speaking and even of thinking of such human emotion as the subject-matter, the significant and noble portion of music; and of the patterns of notes, as merely a more or less agreeable, sensuous, that is to say, soulless vehicle thereof, standing thereunto much as the sound of a word to its meaning. However much this manner of thinking-and, even more, of talking-still furnishes forth the current literature of music, it was cleared away from all serious æsthetical study by Hanslick's splendid essay On Musical Beauty,' in which he demonstrated that, whatever its coincident powers of suggesting human emotion, the genius of a composer is manifested in the audible shapes, the musical monuments which he builds up in the soul of the listener. This essay was first published in 1852; and, although there is no appearance of Edmund Gurney having read it, it is more than likely that its essential ideas had been carried beyond Germany by the then raging Wagner controversy, and been assimilated by the English psychologist, in his conversations with other musicians, without his ever knowing who had given the start to his own theories. Be this as it may, one half of the Power of Sound' is but a more elaborate restatement of the main propositions of the essay on 'Musical Beauty.' But, while Hanslick was satisfied with a mere controversial argument that the beauty of a composition is not the same thing as its emotional suggestiveness; Gurney added a masterly analysis of the element both of Vol. 204.-No. 406,

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emotional suggestion and of beauty; and, what was in a manner more valuable still, a rejection of forthcoming scientific explanations as still inadequate to solve the chief riddle of music.

Having thus distinguished the two main powers of music, let us take them in succession and examine the hypothesis concerning each which could be offered twenty years ago and those which may be added to-day. The Hanslick-Gurney attitude had originated, as we have seen, in a reaction against the current assumption that human emotion is the subject-matter of music, and the expression thereof music's essential mission and glory. The first task of the new musical æsthetics was therefore to determine the nature and amount of such emotional expression. A first analysis showed that what passes for such is in part mere impressiveness, music acting on the nerves inasmuch as made up of sound. Why this should be the case is still in part a mystery, though one which physiology may solve to-day or to-morrow. Hanslick to some degree accepted, while Gurney rejected, an hypothesis put forward by Darwin connecting the elemental power of musical sound with the courtship of animals and of primitive man. And Gurney victoriously demolished (though its remains keep cropping up even now) Mr Herbert Spencer's theory that music owed its emotional power to its direct derivation from cries, gesture, and speech. For Gurney pointed out that musical sound is exactly that which differs most from such primitive modes of expression; and that, as the musical intervals and even musical tones are highly artificial and modern, their associational impressiveness cannot be referred to remote periods before they existed; while, with regard to the Spencerian view, which has quite recently been revived by M. Combarieu, even if musical form could be traced back to speech, it would not therefore possess an emotional power greater than that of speech itself. A similar neo-Spencerian hypothesis was formulated by Herr von Hausegger, that music is emotionally impressive because it has inherited, through dancing and declamation, the wholesale expressiveness which primitive man lost when he ceased to display his entire body naked. We must dismiss all such explanations as inconclusive, because they postulate

hereditary transmission where there is no evidence of its possibility; and because the tendency or habit thus accepted as transmissible is not even proved ever to have existed. We have no reason for thinking that our remotest ancestors possessed emotional suggestibility at all sufficient to explain our own. These evolutional or anthropological explanations, moreover, start from a defective conception of the whole phenomenon of musical expression. This, therefore, we now return to analyse.

One of the merits of Hanslick, and even more of Gurney, was the distinction they made between two of the main factors of musical expression-the factor of mere sound, and the factor of sound measurement in time, that is to say, pace and rhythm. Sound as such, and its different varieties of intensity, pitch, and clang (timbre), represent an intermittent, and therefore powerful stimulation of comparatively little-used nerves. We are, when awake, always seeing, but by no means always hearing. Moreover, musical sound being rarer and more complex, having, indeed, been selected and perfected in view to such impressiveness, has an additional appeal of intensity and infrequency. It is possible, also, that further physiological and psycho-physical research may confirm the opinion of M. Lechalas (falling in, as it does, with certain suggestions of Professor Sergi*) that there is an actual intermeshing of the nerves of hearing with those which control the movement of the larger viscera; and sound-impressions may for this reason provoke massive and unlocalisable conditions (in technical language kinæsthetic sensations) such as invariably accompany what we call emotion. Be this as it may, we are bound to accept from everyday experience the fact of the great emotional power of the element of mere sound as such. The highest point to which this emotional power can reach through the selection and combination of various clangs and intensities, which not only stimulate doubly by their combination, but solicit the attention by their unexpectedness, has doubtless been reached by Wagner; and we latter-day audiences have every reason to know the power of mere sound upon the soul, perhaps we ought rather to say upon the body.

* Giuseppe Sergi, 'Dolore e Piacere,'