1915] on Music and Poetry 521 



IV. — DiVEEaENCES AXD DiFFEREXCES. 



As one listens to examples such as these, though it may grow 

 increasingly clear to the hearer that relationships at once so' funda- 

 mental and audible should secure the consistent partnership of the 

 two arts for always, yet it becomes more apparent that while they grow 

 in their own ways, real discrepancies do arise which are not all due to 

 simple miscalculation of composers. Their divergences of aptitude 

 may now carefully be noted. 



They can be most easily traced at their source, that is, in the first 

 prattle of infants. Of course the very early noises of babies have 

 very little in them that can truly be called speech or song. But a 

 crude language soon emerges. A mouth wide open emits an open 

 vowel, so that the animation of pleasure in a laugh or pain in a cry 

 both naturally resolve themselves into the baby-music of ah, with all 

 its subtle variations of colour and rhythmic recurrence which connote 

 life to the baby and a definite language to the mother. Between 

 the vocal energies of pleasure and pain there lies a consonantal 

 region of calm when the muscles are at rest. J/ (lips closed) seems 

 the natural sound of contentment, and is associated with the name 

 of mother in almost all languages. X comes next in such coined 

 words as na-na, generally used to indicate a second-best companion. 

 Indeed, an infant's complete vocabulary for a while seems to be 

 summed up in such sounds as ma-ma, na-na, da-da, with a few 

 supplementary efforts {ga, ka, and the like), which, taken together 

 with the vigour of rhythm and vividness of vocal colour with which 

 they are uttered, convey aversion or attraction very effectively, 

 while they are not more complex than the sounds of small birds or 

 lambs. In this extremely limited language the baby is true both to 

 verbal and musical principles. The words it invents come each to 

 mean exactly one kind of odject in the world, while they at the same 

 time express the state of feeling associated tvitli that object. 



If the development of tonal and verbal utterance be traced as it 

 proceeds it will be seen that music, on the one hand, tends to express 

 every shade of vitality in infinite variety, coining new words (so to 

 speak) as it goes along, and in this way it becomes more directly 

 vital and more expansive than words. Language, on the other hand, 

 specializes in associated significances ; in it we decide, whatever the 

 changes of vital significance may be, always to utter the same sound 

 in connexion with one object or circumstance in our experience. By 

 this means words acquire by degrees a surprising power of precision 

 and a definiteness of suggestion to which music does not aspire. For 

 example, by the arbitrary expression eqiu'lateral triangle it is possible 

 instantly to call up one and the same image in a thousand minds of 

 utterly different calibre in entirely different environment. This 

 exact image or impression was called up five hundred years ago, 

 and will be, presumably, five hundred years hence. Music can 



