ABSTRACT

It may be that “C. A. T.’s” hypothesis about “Ancestors of Emotion,” supplemented by Dr. Head’s Schemata, have taken the Reader a little beyond his present depth in psychology, although I trust that before the end of this book I shall have gradually accustomed him to swim quite freely in such subterranean waters. But for the present, continuing our enquiry about music and emotion as well as musical emotion, we must dispose of a suspicion naturally arising in the Reader’s mind that these two are one and the same thing. And to do this we need not plunge again into the depths of Schemata, etc. (nor read the preceding “P.S. for Psychologists”) but look about us on the familiar surface of the question as mapped out in M. Ernest’s somewhat conventional statement. That statement, quite acceptable as far as it goes (and as far as it goes, consonant with “C. A. T.’s” and my own views about “Ancestors “ and Schemata) is to the effect that the movement embodied in a musical phrase—movement in pitch as well as in rhythm —may coincide with the movement of our muscles normally expressive of a state of human feeling, may coincide to the extent of setting up, by some kind of inner mimicry 1 or otherwise, that particular state of human feeling in the hearer. So far, so good. But M. Ernest has put us on the track of a further question, and, in one of his very suggestive fits of self-contradiction, has emphasised that new question in a 87violent and valuable way. After assuring us that, according to him, Beethoven put “all his joys and sorrows into his music.” M. Ernest, on another occasion and with delightful inconsequence, suddenly burst out—”Why should music awaken just the emotions which happen to be those familiar in human life and for which we therefore have names?”