M. Beauquier gives the following explanation of the difference between noise and musical sound.

A true note, or musical sound, contains in itself a third, a fifth, and an octave. In addition to the fundamental note, a cultivated ear will be able, under certain experimental conditions, to recognise these other three, like faint musical emanations. These three are called the fundamental harmonics of a note, and every sound is thus complex, just as white light is complex, containing within itself what may he called the three harmonical colours,. blue, red, and yellow. Now, when the ear receives one distinct sound, and the accessory harmonics are at the same time of very faint intensity and very high in pitch, then we have a pure or clear musical sound called a note; but when the accessory or harmonical sounds are so loud, confused, and so near to the fundamental note that we have difficulty in separating between them and the note itself, then we have the negation of musical sound--that is to say, noise. The Chinese gong is an admirable example of unmusical sound, or noise, and a well-tuned kettledrum is almost as good an example of a true musical note.

But when we have thus manufactured our materials we have not arranged them. We have got the threads, but we have not woven them into any fabric-we have not invented any pattern-we have not given them any form-we have not created any work of art. We might as well give a man a bundle of coloured threads, and expect him without machine or instruction to produce an Indian shawl, as give him musical notes without teaching him the secret of the scale, or of symmetrical arrangement, and expect him to produce melody and harmony. We are still a long way off from what we call music.

Now before we enter upon any further account of the rise and progress of the musical art, the question naturally arises, What claims has it upon our attention? What wants does it meet? Why is it worth studying?

We might point to the fact that people nowadays spend much time and money upon music. But why do they do so? Because it gives them very keen enjoyment. Why does it give them enjoyment? what is the enjoyment worth? Is it pleasure and nothing more, or is it pleasure and something besides? What right have we to speak of Beethoven in the same breath with Goethe? In what sense is the musical composer a teacher or an intellectual and moral benefactor? All such questions,

and many more like them, which are asked more frequently than they are answered, may be summed up in a single sentence,What is the dignity of the musical art? To this question we hope to give some definite reply.

Speaking

Speaking generally, all the arts may be said to have arisen out of a certain instinct, which impels us to make an appeal to the senses, by expressing our thoughts and emotions in some external form. When a man is haunted by the beauty of the outer world, when he has been for a time purely receptive, watching the light upon summer fields or through netted branches, or at evening the floods of liquid fire that come rolling towards him upon the bosom of the sea, at last before his closed eyes in the dreams of the night there arises within him the vision of an earth, and sky, and sea even more fair than these; and seizing his palette and canvas in the morning, he endeavours to fix the impalpable images which have almost pained his heart with their oppressive loveliness. Who can look at some of Turner's pictures, and see there 'the sunshine of sunshine and the gloom of gloom,' without feeling that the picture stands for the deliverance of a soul's burden? It is its own justification. No one asks first why it gives us joy, or why it is so good; that questioning may come afterwards and may have to be answered, but our uppermost thoughts are such as these:-'I, too, have had such visions, but never till now have they lived and moved before me: henceforth their life is doubled because revealed; their beauty is painless because possessed: now that I have prisoned this fleeting memory, it is mine for ever-Kтîμа ès àεí. In freeing his own soul the painter, the orator, the poet has freed mine; I shall not suffer in this direction from the void and the agony of the unattained, for it is there worked out for me and for all men to rejoice in and to love.' Therefore the great justification of all art is simply this-that all life tends to outward expression, and becomes rich in proportion to the degree and perfection with which it is mastered inwardly and realised outwardly.

It is evident that the artistic instinct is involved in the constitution of our nature, and only waits for the peculiar times and seasons favourable to each of its several developments. Hence in all sorts of ages and countries we find traces of the arts, but only in certain countries and at certain epochs the full development of any. The seed of a political system, of a religious creed, or of a new art, may lie long in the fallow ground of history, waiting for the mysterious and happy combination of circumstances necessary to its special development. By and by this nation will be ready for such a government; and that form of government, which may have tried in vain to spring up before, will then rise. Such has been the history of representative government in England. By and by a nation will feel the need of a new intellectual form for its religion; and then,

then, and not before, will the new system prevail. Such has been the history of the Protestant Reformation. By and by the æsthetic and imaginative impulses of a people will demand a certain appropriate channel of expression; and then the art which can best express the imperative mood of the popular life is certain to spring up. That is the history of all Literatures, and also of the directly sensuous arts of Sculpture in Greece, of Gothic Architecture in modern Europe, of Painting in Italy, and, finally, of Modern Music in Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, and England. Each art has been strikingly appropriate to its own age, and each art has more or less exhausted the impulses which it was destined to express. We will now endeavour to show the real position and speciality of music amongst the arts, by a general glance at some of the art developments of the past.

No doubt the art of sculpture existed in a rude form amongst those Eastern nations from which Greece derived the germs of all that she ever possessed. Yet we do not admit any high development of sculpture to have taken place before the period of Grecian art, or about B.C. 500; nor do we venture to say that the works of Phidias and Praxiteles have ever been surpassed. The fact is, that sculpture was the art which rendered concrete, or gave outward expression to, the Greek's highest idea of what was desirable and excellent in life. He was passionately enamoured of the external world. Beauty had no hidden meaning for him; the incompleteness or insufficiency of life never occurred to him; there seemed no moral, no aspiration written upon the face of man or nature: hence he loved outline better than colour, and cared more for form than for expression. His life was exceedingly simple; his intellect remarkably clear and active and subtle; he lived much out in the open air, gossiping incessantly, learned a little Homer and a few lyrics, sometimes peeped into a work of Anaxagoras or Zeno, at other times amused himself with the disputations of the Sophists, or listened to the orators in the Agora. But whatever else he did, his body was his first care. The staple of his education consisted in gymnastic exercises and the cultivation of rhythm as applied to motion. His greatest admiration was lavished upon a beautiful human body, and in Greece there was never the slightest difficulty in studying the human form divine. What every one was proud of, every one was prone to exhibit; and what was universally exhibited and admired naturally became the object of the most elaborate and successful cultivation. Hence Greece, in her eager simplicity, her exquisite perception, her naïve enjoyment of life, and her material

prosperity,

prosperity, found an appropriate expression for her ideal in the Art of Sculpture.

If we glance at Rome in her best days, we shall hardly be surprised to find that she had no original leanings in the direction. of the sensuous arts. The art expression, if such it can be called, of her ideal is to be found in the Justinian code. Her notion of life was not beauty, but law, in its most prosaic aspects: stern patriotism, regulated by military despotism; stern justice, regulated by civil law. She had no time to design her own public buildings; she borrowed the designs from Greece. Her statues and her ornaments, when not actually made by degenerate Athenians, were but the cold parodies of Grecian art. It was not until centuries later, when the old Empire had been split upinto a thousand fragments, that a new and genuine art began to arise in Italy, but an art responsive to a new age, and to an utterly changed state of political life and religious feeling. We allude, of course, to the Art of Painting, which culminated in the sixteenth century in the schools of Padua, Venice, Umbria, Verona, Bologna, Sienna, Florence, and Rome.

But there is one growing characteristic of the art of the new world after Christ as contrasted with the art of the old world before Christ, which it is highly important for our present purpose to notice. That characteristic is its ever-increasing tendency to express complex emotion. The Greek schools which succeeded Phidias indeed supply numerous expressions of suffering, such as the Laocoon; action, such as the Discobolos; and occasionally some simple and strong emotion, such as the Niobe.

But even in the post-Phidian period, when emotion is expressed at all, it is usually of a simple and direct kind; the fever of the new world had not yet set in. Upon the religions of the past the accumulated moral influences and religious feelings which we are in the habit of expressing by the one word Christianity, broke like a second flood, submerging the old philosophies and the old faiths. The rise of that tide was irresistible, and it brought with it the elements of a new ideal life, in violent antagonism to the traditions of many an earlier civilization. Thanks to this antagonism, which drew hard and fast the line between the Church and the world, the emotional life of the early Christians was also simple and strong. Missionary work afforded an ample and sufficient outlet for feeling; there was little time for anything else. The New Church shrank from Heathen art, as the Jews had shrunk from Egyptian images; and although a reformed Orpheus cropped up later in the character of the Good Shepherd, preference was given to mere symbols,

and

and only a few coarse representations of Christ, His apostles or His miracles, were allowed to grace a religion which was intended to appeal to the spirit more than to the senses. Then, when the Christian seed had been sown throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, the beginning of the end drew nigh; and we have heard to satiety how the Gothic hordes came down from the Northern Alps upon the plains of Italy, and how the worn-out organization of the Empire fell like an avalanche before the breath of spring. But the imperial sceptre had only passed from the Emperor to the Bishop of Rome, and it was under the timidly admitted presidency of the Pope that the Christian Church first stepped forward as the inspired guide, ready to reduce to order the confused life and weld together in new combinations the heterogeneous elements of the old and the new worlds.

The rise of the Roman Church and the rise of the nations of modern Europe after the death of Charlemagne (814) gave birth to what we call the modern spirit, which is emphatically the spirit of a complex emotional life. In Italy, after the close of the ninth century, the stiff forms of Byzantine art had entirely ceased to have any charm for a nation distracted with wars, and in the eleventh century Italian art had reached its lowest condition.

But another art had already begun to assert itself in France, in Germany, and in England-an art which, taking its rise amongst the masonic guilds, found its perfection in the cloister, yet mingled freely with the world, and became in a remarkable degree the monumental expression of its lights and shadows, all the wealth and all the woe.' Gothic architecture received some of its finest developments at the hands of priests, but the Gothic temples were the darlings of the people and became the models. of popular architecture for the nation. Into them, as we can see to this day, were woven the miseries and the joys, the wild fancies, the morbid tendencies, and the confused aspirations of a spiritual faith, struggling with new and untried aspects of social and political life. It is unnecessary to describe all that the Gothic architecture of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries strove to express. How highly emotional it became they know who have marked the faces that peep out between the network of leaves or clustering fruit in florid architrave and capital. When the art began to lose all temperance, and assumed wild and flamboyant forms, it was simply because the artist was in despair at not being able to transcend the plastic limits of his material-to express the varied emotions which were daily becoming more numerous and more oppressive, and