"Heard melodies," said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard are sweeter." The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving their displeasure, there is some truth in it.
We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle and mercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence of everything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly of becoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best things the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music. There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly due to the sense of locomotion, the _rhythm_; so that _sound_, to become music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay, it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned _Stumpf_, that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound incline to believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements, however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove that, in a fashion, we _perform_ the melodies which we think we only _hear_; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very delicate instrument this, called the _Hearer_, and, as we all know, more liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of man. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme. Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "Your Majesty's policemen can make me _scream_, not _sing_!" and say to some queen of piano keys or emperor of _ut de poitrine_ that there is no violence or blandishment which can secure the _inner ear_, however much the outer ear may be solicited or bullied.
'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying of Keats--to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we do not know that real musicians, _real_ Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a paper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was not Beethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as a post?