118 Professors Perry and Ayrton on the Music 



receive much cultivation. Even with the experience of sound 

 the ear has gained during the last four hundred years, how 

 very few people are there sufficiently educated to have their 

 feelings excited through music in answer to the emotions of 

 a composer ? and how pleasing to all is the repetition of a strain 

 in a melody or the movement in a dance, perhaps from the 

 instantaneous education the ear or the eye receives which en- 

 ables it to better understand the movement when repeated. 

 Consequently, if we consider the cumbrous and expensive 

 nature of the apparatus necessary for producing regular 

 changes of colour, or of motion, or of the size of the moving 

 bodies, we may expect that it will probably take a long time 

 before the world is able to employ our more complicated 

 agencies. 



It may appear at first sight that in placing motion on a 

 footing of equality with what we consider its sister graces — 

 sculpture, painting, and music, — we offered an indignity to 

 these latter ; and it may appear inconceivable to many how any 

 amount of study of moving bodies can ever create an art as 

 powerful and as enchanting as music. But it must be borne 

 in mind that our present form of the fine arts probably only 

 owes its existence to the accident that western nations have 

 more assiduously educated the emotional side of their minds 

 in certain particular directions *. 



And in our own country we have a close connexion between 

 the varied emotions created by colour or movement and those 

 excited by sound. It is well known that when certain per- 

 sons hear an Oratorio, an Opera, or even a well-played violin 

 solo, they see, without any voluntary effort on their part, 

 beautiful changing mosaics, the patterns of which have defi- 

 nite connexions with the musical chords, and that such people 

 always see a flash of light when they hear a sudden shriek of 

 a railway- whistle. 



The emotions excited by large bodies having a great velo- 

 city do not seem to be producible by any thing else in nature. 

 These are felt when we stand on a bridge over a railway when 

 a train approaches and passes underneath at great speed, or 

 when we stand at the side of a railway when the train passes, 

 even if we hear no sound, or if there is no appreciable trem- 

 bling of the earth. In our first experience of such visible 

 motion, terror, due perhaps to its utter strangeness, predomi- 



* Here followed a number of examples taken from the Japanese stage and 

 musical performances, proving that great conventionality existed among 

 different nations in the expression of the emotions, and lending- weight 

 to the doctrine that music, unlike painting, received no suggestion from 

 nature, and was therefore a creation of each individual people. 



