human depravity, but as we pass out beneath groups of long-robed saints in prayer, the thought of sin fades out before a dream of divine purity and peace. We can see what the artist loved and what he taught; that is the right test, and we may take any man's work as a whole, and apply that test fearlessly.

If we would know whether a work of art is moral or not, let us ask such questions as these:-Does the artist show that his sympathies lie with an unwholesome preponderance of horrible, degraded, or of simply pleasurable, as distinct from healthy, emotions? Is he for whipping the jaded senses to their work, or merely for rejoicing in the highest activity of their healthful exercise? Does he love what is good whilst acknowledging the existence of evil, or does he delight in what is evil, and merely introduce what is good for the vicious sake of trampling upon it? How differently may the same subject involving human sin be treated! Given, for instance, the history of a crime; one man will represent a bad action as so pleasurable and attractive as to make us forget its criminality, whilst another, without flinching from descriptive fidelity, will mix his proportions of good and evil, and distribute his sympathies in such a manner as to deprive us of all satisfaction in contemplating the wrong, and inspire us with a wholesome horror of the crime involved. I need only refer to the catastrophe in Lord Lytton's "Alice, or the Mysteries," and in George Eliot's " Adam Bede," as an illustration of the profoundly immoral and moral treatment of the same subject. The morbid taste which French and Belgian painters exhibit for scenes of bloodshed and murder is another instance of the way in which art becomes immoral by stimulating an unwholesome appetite for horrors. Tintoret's "Plague of Milan" is horrible enough, but there is this difference between that picture and such a picture as the two decapitated corpses of Counts Egmont and Horn, by Louis Gallait the Italian masterpiece reflects the profound impression made upon a people suffering from a great national calamity, while the other is simply a disgusting sop cast forth to a demoralized and bloodthirsty Parisian populace.

The best art is like Shakspere's art, and Titian's art, always true to the great glad aboriginal instincts of our nature, severely faithful to its foibles, never representing disease in the guise of health, never rejoicing in the exercise of morbid fancy, many-sided without being unbalanced, tender without weakness, and forcible without ever losing the fine sense of proportion.

Nothing can be falser than to suppose that morality is served by representing facts other than they are; no emasculated picture of life can be moral-it may be meaningless, and it is sure to be false. No; what we want is to stand upon the holy hill with hands uplifted

like those of Moses, and see the battle of Good against Evil with a deep and inexhaustible sympathy for righteousness, and a sense of triumph and victory in our hearts. The highest service that art can accomplish for man is to become at once the voice of his nobler aspirations, and the steady disciplinarian of his emotions, and it is with this mission, rather than with any technical excellence or æsthetic perfection, that we are at present concerned.

I proceed to ask how Music, which I have shown in my former article to be the special Art-medium of Emotion, is capable, in common with all the other arts, of exercising by itself moral and immoral functions.

Music and Morality.

When music becomes a mixed art-that is to say, when it is wedded to words, and associated with definite ideas-when it is made the accompaniment of scenes which in themselves are calculated to work powerfully for good or evil upon the emotions—then it is as easy to see how music is a moral or an immoral agent as it is to decide upon the tendency of a picture or a poem.

The song is patriotic, or languishing, or comic, and in each casc the music is used not as a primary agent to originate, but as a powerful secondary agent to deepen and intensify the emotion already awakened by the words of the song or the operatic situation. But how can music be in itself moral, immoral, sublime or degraded, trivial or dignified? Must it not entirely depend for such qualities as these upon the definite thoughts and images with which it happens to be associated ?

We will answer this question by reminding our readers of another. Does emotion itself always need definite thoughts and images before it can become healthful or harmful-in other words, moral or immoral? In our previous paper we endeavoured at some length to show that there was a region of abstract emotion in human nature constantly indeed traversed by definite thoughts, but not dependent upon them for its existence-that this region of emotion consisted of infinite varieties of mental temperature-that upon these temperatures or atmospheres of the soul depended the degree, and often the kind of actions of which at different moments we were capable, and that quite apart from definite ideas, the emotional region might be dull, apathetic, eager, brooding, severe, resolute, impulsive, &c., but that each one of these states might exist and pass without culminating in any kind of action, or being clothed with any appropriate set of ideas. But if thus much be granted, who will deny that the experience of such soul-atmospheres must leave a definite impress upon the character? For example, the experience of sustained languor without an effort at

acquiring a more vigorous impulse, will be deleterious; excitement passing into calmness-vague fear or discomfort giving place to deep and satisfied feelings of peace or a sense of exhaustion, followed by recreation and revival of power-such will be beneficial, productive, on the whole, of a hopeful and encouraging temper of mind; and it is just as possible to classify these various atmospheric states of mind which we call emotion as wholesome or the reverse, as it is to classify the various appropriate thoughts and images to which they may be attached. Of course, in a thousand instances, they are actually so attached, for as thought is always seeking emotion, so is emotion always seeking thought, and the atmospheres of the soul may be said to be constantly penetrated by crowds of appropriate thoughts, which take their peculiar colouring and intensity only upon entering the magic precincts of emotion.

But if, as we have maintained, music has the power of actually creating and manipulating these mental atmospheres, what vast capacities for good or evil must music possess! For what troops of pleasurable, stimulating, or enervating ideas and fancies is good dance music responsible, by providing all these with the emotional atmospheres which invite their presence, and by intensifying the situation! The strains of martial music as a military band passes by are capable of rousing something like a spirited and energetic emotion for a moment at least in the breast of the tamest auditor; and the Bible itself pays a tribute to the emotional effects and power of changing the soul's atmosphere possessed by even such a primitive instrument as David's harp-"When the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, then David took an harp, and played with his hand. So Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him." (1 Sam. xvi. 23.) Poor George III. in his fits of melancholy madness was deeply sensible of the power of music to create atmospheres of peace, and restore something like harmony to the "sweet bells" of the spirit "jangled out of tune." And I have no doubt whatever that the acknowledged influence of music over the insane might be far more extensively used-indeed, if applied judiciously to a disorganized mind, it might be as powerful an agent as galvanism in restoring healthy and pleasurable activity to the emotional regions.

Who can deny, then, if such a mysterious command as this is possessed by music over the realm of abstract emotion, that music itself must be held responsible for the manner in which it deals with that realm, and the kind of succession, proportion, and degrees of the various emotional atmospheres it has the power of generating?

I pause for a moment to meet the objection often brought against the exercise of emotion apart from action. Everything, it may be

said, music included, which excites an emotion not destined to culminate in action, has a weakening and enervating effect upon character. This is true when an emotion is roused which has for its object the performance of a duty. We may derive pleasure from a glowing appeal to help the suffering, we may listen with excitement to the details of the suffering we are called upon to alleviate,—yet, if we do no more, the emotion will indeed have enervated us. But to be affected by a drama, a novel, or poem, which points to no immediate duty of action in us, need not enervate-it may be a healthy exercise or discipline of emotion; we may be the better for it, we may be the more likely to act rightly when the opportunity occurs for having felt rightly when there was no immediate call for action. We ought not to be afraid of our emotions because they may not be instantly called upon to inspire action. Depend upon it, a man is better for his formless aspirations after good, and the more powerful and disciplined the emotions become through constant exercise, the better it will be for us. It is better to feel sometimes without action, than to act often without feeling. The unpardonable sin is to allow feeling to supersede action when the time for action as the fruit of feeling has arrived. This is the barren sin of Sentimentalism.

In considering practically the Good and Evil of music as it comes before us in its highly-developed modern form, we shall naturally have to refer to the three classes of people most concerned :

The Composers.

The Performers.

The Listeners.

The Composer.

He lives in a world apart, into which only those who have the golden key are admitted. The golden key is not the sense of hearing, but what is called an "Ear for Music." Even then half the treasures of the composer's world may be as dead letters to the vulgar or untrained, just as a village school-boy who can read fluently might roam, with an unappreciative gape, through the library of the British Museum. The composer's world is the world of emotion, full of delicate elations and depressions, which, like the hum of minute insects, hardly arrest the uncultivated ear-full of melodious thunder, and rolling waters, and the voice of the south wind-without charm for the many who pass by. Full of intensity, like the incessant blaze of Eastern lightning-full of velocity, like the trailing fire of the falling stars-full of variety, like woodlands smitten by the breath of autumn, or the waste of many colours changing and iridescent upon a sunset sea.

The emotions which such images are calculated to arouse in the

at

es

le

on

of

mes

ally

› the

se of

half

o the

read

a the

world

ke the

full of

south

ensity,

v, like

dlands

colours

in the

hearts of those who are prepared to entertain them, the composer, who has studied well the secrets of his art, can excite through the medium of sound alone; formless emotions are his friends. Intimately do the spirits of the air, called into existence by the pulsing vibrations of melody and harmony, converse with him. They are the familiars that he can send forth speeding to all hearts with messages too subtle for words,—sometimes sparkling with irresistible mirth, at others wild with terror and despair, or filled with the sweet whispers of imperishable consolation. All this, and far more than any words can utter, was to be done, and has been done for man, by music. But not suddenly, or at once and altogether, as the first rude attempts, still extant and familiar to most of us, in the shape of Gregorian chants, live to attest.

As the early violin-makers, by long lives of solitary toil and intense thought, slowly discovered the perfect lines and exquisite proportions which make the violins of Straduarius the wonder of the world as the various schools of painting in Italy brought to light, one by one, those elements of form, colour, and chiaroscuro which are found united, with incomparable richness and grace, in the master-pieces of Raphael, Tintoret, and Titian-so did the great maestros of the sixteenth century begin to arrange the rudiments of musical sound in combinations, not merely correct according to the narrow code of melody and harmony suggested by a few leading properties of vibration and the natural divisions of the scale, but in studied and sympathetic relations adapted to the ever-changing, complex, and subtle emotions of the heart.

About the time that Italian painting reached its acme of splendour, the dawn of modern music-that form of art which was destined to succeed painting, as painting had succeeded architecture had already begun. Palestrina, to whom we owe modern melody, and whose harmonies enchanted even Mozart and Mendelssohn, when they first heard them in the Pope's chapel at Rome, was born in 1529, nine years after the death of Raphael. In 250 years from that date, the delights of melody, the depths and resources of harmony had been explored. The powers of the human voice, the capacities of stringed instruments, every important variety of wind instrument, the modern organ, and the pianoforte, had been discovered. Music could no longer be called a terra incognita. When Mozart died, all its great mines, as far as we can see, had at least been opened. We are not aware that any important instrument has been invented since his day, or that any new form of musical composition has made its appearance. Innumerable improvements in the instrumental department have been introduced, and doubtless the forms of Symphony, Cantata,