Читать книгу Music and Life: A study of the relations between ourselves and music онлайн

16 страница из 28

ssss1

Music deals first of all with feeling or emotion. But since emotion may be guided by the mind and transfused by the imagination,—since emotion is not a separate and isolated part of our being,—so music may be so ordered by the mind and so transfused by the imagination as to become intellectual and imaginative. It is true that the greater part of the music produced and performed deals only with emotion, but this is equally true of literature. The popular novel is nine tenths emotion, one tenth mind, and the rest imagination. So it is with music, though such illogical invention as one constantly finds in many popular novels would be intolerable in any music. Since there seems to be an incongruity between the statement that music has no definite meaning and the statement that it is intellectual, let us take a specific illustration and see if we cannot reconcile the apparent confliction.

We must first of all distinguish between the quality itself and the expression of the quality. A person may have a mind stored with wisdom and be completely what we call “intellectual,” without ever expressing himself by a spoken or written word. His wisdom exists by itself and for itself, entirely separated from its expression. If he expresses himself, and with skill, we call that expression literature, but, in any case, it remains wisdom. And what is wisdom? It is what Mr. Eliot describes a liberal education to be—“a state of mind”; it is the fusion of knowledge with experience, with feeling, and with imagination.