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

22 страница из 28

Each of the other arts has one or two of these qualities; none has all of them. The novelist, for example, can use the first and last but not the second. Meredith’s “Vittoria” is an ideal presentment of the struggle for Italian unity, but the heroism which constitutes the essence of the book has to find expression through actual persons. So the greatest virtue of music lies not alone in its peculiar unification of matter and manner, its artistic perfection, but in the power which that gives it to create a world not based on the outward and the visible, but on that invisible realm of thought, feeling, and aspiration which is our real world. For if there is any one certain historical fact, it is that from the earliest times until now man has continually sought some escape from reality, some building up of a perfect world of ideal beauty which should still his eternal dissatisfaction with the imperfections and inconsistencies of his own life. It is in the very nature of his situation that he should seek some perfection somewhere. So he has tried to paint this perfection on canvas, idealizing life and nature into a satisfying form of beauty; or he has carved a physical perfection in marble to deify himself and give himself a place in nature; or he has built up for himself a world of magical words in which all his noblest dreams strive for expression. Everywhere and always he has had this dream, which has saved him when all else failed. And the noblest of his dreamers have been those whose imaginations have transcended the limitations of the actual and brought it into relation with the unknown.