It may be objected that my persuasion in Chapter I that music is the imagination of love in sound and in Chapter II that music is also the experience of life-and-death in sound are two conclusions not only extraordinary in themselves but different. It will be seen that they are not irreconcilable. My conception of the nature of music must, if true, be such as to include all music, the music of Sullivan, Puccini, Elgar and the Jazz-Kings as well as the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner; the songs of the folk, old and new, peasant and urban, as well as the songs of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. There is no difficulty in this.

We have seen that the development of music is analogous to the development of language. That this must be so is obvious when we understand that both music and language are mental structures contemporary with the human mind, reflecting its development and having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing. No arts have been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell. The reason for this gives us a clue to the character of progress in general. The senses of smell and taste are too intimate, too physically diffused, too direct or primitive in effect to be controlled by the mind. We may say that the body now short-circuits in these sensations and that the mind is cut out. But when, in the past, the sense of touch developed into the more complicated organs of the eye and the ear[1] which made touch at a distance possible, then what the mind sensed was more highly organized and less direct and amorphous. Smells and tastes may be compared with noises before the mind has organized them into musical sounds, or with sensations which have not yet passed through the imagination and become organized into emotions and ideas.

It would seem that the history of man is the history of this process of organization and that the organizations differ more from one another than do the senses from which they grew. A Chinaman, for instance, is much more like an Englishman in his body than in his language; he can have a child by an Englishwoman with whom he is unable to speak.[2]

What we think is understanding Chinese music when we hear it is merely recognition of that organization of vibration, which we call musical sounds, an organization common to the human ear in all mankind. The major part of popular music consists of stringing these sounds together for the mere pleasure of recognizing them—pleasure in their organization as contrasted with the unorganized mass of mere noise out of which they have been selected; also its use of them in simple combinations expressing simple emotions—sensations of rudimentary organization—which again are common to all mankind. It is because language is not an organization of the merely visual or auditory sensations made by the physical eye and ear with which almost everybody is born (there are colour-blind and tone-deaf people) but a post-natal acquired and complicated mental construction that it is totally unintelligible until learnt. So Chinese music does not mean the same to us as to a Chinaman, nor does European music mean the same to him as to a European, because it is not merely a construction of the ear, but is also in some although in varying degree a construction of the mind. Just as it took a multitude of lives and deaths to evolve the human eye and ear—organs with which all men are now born—so it has taken many generations of that mental development we call culture and tradition to create a language that was more than onomatopoeia, and a music that was more than recognizable and, therefore, agreeable sounds.

There is, and I maintain there can be no absolute, universal, pure art immediately intelligible to all men. It was the false idea that music was purely sensual which led Pater to think that music was such an art and that all other arts should attain its perfection. The development of every art is a development farther and farther away from the mere sensations upon which it is founded, and these developments make a web of experience which is constantly being rewoven and renewed (probably without a single strand ever being lost or destroyed) and, without this, music would dissolve into meaningless sounds. We look upon the eye and the ear as beautiful complex creations of life. We think of them as physical entities because their creation is so far back in life that it belongs to the sub-human or animal epoch, and so they have become physical things, if not material objects. But this power of becoming physical (life taking on flesh, the spirit achieving form) or material (electricity becoming molecules of hydrogen, lead, etc.) is the process which I have described as death; and as that necessary and important death, death the complement of life. But, as I have already shown, a third kind of death, other than the material and the physical, is that of intellectual structure—known variously as tradition, belief, dogma, logic, technique or, most comprehensively, as knowledge. Just as a multitude of deaths were necessary to the evolution of the eye and the ear so a multitude of deaths (an Encyclopædia is a mental cemetery) are necessary to the evolution of the mind. The past experience of music which every trained musician possesses is such knowledge. If he merely repeats it, copies out of the past stored in his mind, in the mind of his generation, in the culture he and his generation have inherited, he is a mere academic musician and not a creative artist. But there are degrees in this as in everything else. It is not the possession of the tradition which makes a musician academic and lifeless, it is the failure to use the traditions to express himself; and this is a failure in musical life. A musical mind which is a mere body of musical tradition is like a detached ear or a plucked out eye—an ear which does not hear or an eye which does not see. The life of hearing is not in the organ, not in what has been heard—of which it is the physical representation, the death-shape—it is in creation, the hearing of a new thing. And creation is that movement from life to death, from soul to substance, from the spirit to the form which is the imagining forth of love, for love alone is a creative motive.

And the forms of love vary from the flowering and seeding of plants to the music of Beethoven. It is not a progress from bad to good, it is not a retrogression from good to bad. It is rather a process which fills the Universe with death—death in myriads of lovely forms, from the form of the wood-violet to the form of the symphony. And this process is life. And life increasing the varieties of death is the general principle of progress. What is the purpose of this process? We do not know. But we can say that its purpose is delight. Ecstasy clothing Himself in a thousand Forms. The Universe delighting in itself preserves itself in death, for in death the imagination of the spirit is made immortal.