The principles we now have before us, interesting as they are in themselves, must finally vindicate their worth by helping us to form sound opinions of musical tendencies and of individual composers; they must provide a corrective for the whims and freaks of prejudice, and a basis for that intelligent and systematic criticism which takes account both of a man's qualities and of his defects before assigning him his place in the general artistic movement. With them in mind, we should be able to avoid the current one-sided and partial views, and also to attain that positive insight into the nature of music which alone can give our opinions sanity, liberality and perspective.
In the first place, then, it will be well to turn their light on certain dangerous half-truths, which, constantly cropping up in musical opinions, are hardly less misleading than complete fallacies. The two most persistent and mischievous of such half-truths are those which neglect one aspect of the dual nature of music, which ignore expression or repudiate form. Of the first, the half-truth so frequently formulated in the phrase, «Music is a kind of audible mathematics,» it is not necessary to say much. Those dryly ingenious persons who rejoice in a fugue of Bach much as they enjoy an intricate problem in calculus, failing to perceive the warm human heart that animates the skeleton, form a minority which gets little attention from the mass of music-lovers. The half-truth which neglects expression will not, in the nature of things, ever gain a large following. Far more dangerous is the opposite fallacy, which, repudiating form, asserts that expression is all, that «music is the language of the emotions.» This phrase, without any qualifications, is the creed of the sentimentalists. Their ranks assemble all varieties of rhapsodical, ill-balanced temperaments, from the young girl who «dotes on Wagner» to the old lady with curls who thinks that «music leads us up to the higher life.» The sentimentalists sin, perhaps, not so much by commission as by omission. So far as they are able they appreciate music, for they feel it emotionally, and, as we have seen, half its reason for being is its appeal to the emotions. But they fail to realize that it must be beautiful as well as moving, that all its lineaments of expression must be held in orderly relation with a larger integral beauty of form. They fancy that form, which in reality enhances expression, is somehow at odds with it, that the mind and the feelings are natural enemies. Satisfied with thrills and tremors, they do not ask, in their music, for meaning and order. They fancy that to listen heedfully, attentively, analytically, is somehow to pull out the petals of art and strew them in the dust. Analysis is a desecrating process. You should not focus your ears, make the image clear; you should swoon in a delicious haze of sensation and suggestion. But one can analyze without dissecting; one can recognize that a flower has petals without pulling them out; and indeed it is hard to imagine any one appreciating the true loveliness of a flower, its formed, articulated beauty, without such recognition. So in music, the true lover of melody will be in no danger of confusing Beethoven's Hymn of Joy with Schumann's _Warum_ because of the trance of nebulous feeling into which they throw him. He will pay them the tribute of listening to them attentively, of noting the various charms of their phraseology and expression as he would note the difference of meter and effect between a sonnet of Shakespeare and a song of Burns. Music is not poorer, but richer, for its marvelous intricacies of structure, and the sentimentality which hates clear definition is not high sentiment, but misconception or insensibility.