More Than One
Man Started To Raise His Umbrella When The Storm Burst
Forth And The Sheets Of Mimic Rain
Came driving by;
it was hardly possible to keep from putting your hand
to your hat when the fierce wind
Began to rage and shriek;
and it was NOT possible to refrain from starting when
those sudden and charmingly real thunder-crashes were
let loose.
I suppose the "Fremersberg" is a very low-grade music;
I know, indeed, that it MUST be low-grade music, because it
delighted me, warmed me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me,
enraptured me, that I was full of cry all the time,
and mad with enthusiasm. My soul had never had such a
scouring out since I was born. The solemn and majestic
chanting of the monks was not done by instruments,
but by men's voices; and it rose and fell, and rose again
in that rich confusion of warring sounds, and pulsing bells,
and the stately swing of that ever-present enchanting air,
and it seemed to me that nothing but the very lowest
of low-grade music COULD be so divinely beautiful.
The great crowd which the "Fremersberg" had called out was
another evidence that it was low-grade music; for only
the few are educated up to a point where high-grade music
gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music
to be able to enjoy it. I dislike the opera because I want
to love it and can't.
I suppose there are two kinds of music - one kind which
one feels, just as an oyster might, and another sort
which requires a higher faculty, a faculty which must
be assisted and developed by teaching. Yet if base music
gives certain of us wings, why should we want any other?
But we do. We want it because the higher and better
like it. We want it without giving it the necessary
time and trouble; so we climb into that upper tier,
that dress-circle, by a lie; we PRETEND we like it.
I know several of that sort of people - and I propose
to be one of them myself when I get home with my fine
European education.
And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull,
Turner's "Slave Ship" was to me, before I studied art.
Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that
picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure
as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year,
when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him - and me,
now - to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural
effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame,
and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him - and me,
now - to the floating of iron cable-chains and other
unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming
around on top of the mud - I mean the water. The most of
the picture is a manifest impossibility - that is to say,
a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find
truth in a lie.
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