Now my task in this last chapter is a more delightful one than if I
were the usual solicitor of fiction, come to inform the
poor-but-honest newsboy that he is a royal duke. It is my privilege to
comfort many of the comfortless by revealing to them how and why they
are--or may be--masters of an art as indispensable as the arts which
they now regard so wistfully. I mean the art of master-making--the art
of being a master by proxy.
To be specific, let us single out one of the arts and see what it
means to master it by proxy. Suppose we consider the simple case of
executive music. In a book called "The Musical Amateur" I have tried
to prove (more fully than is here possible) that the reproduction of
music is a social act. It needs two: one to perform, one to
appreciate. Both are almost equally essential to a good performance.
The man who appreciates a musical phrase unconsciously imitates it
with almost imperceptible contractions of throat or lips. These
contractions represent an incipient singing or whistling. Motions
similar to these, and probably more fully developed, are made at the
same time by his mind and his spirit. The whole man actually feels his
way, physically and psychically, into the heart of the music. He is
turned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contribution
of emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy to
the performer. When a violinist and a listener of the right sort meet
for musical purposes, this is what happens. The violinist happens to
be in the mood for playing. This means that he has feelings which
demand expression. These his bow releases. The music strikes the
listener, sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board, and
rouses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist. Enriched by
this new contribution, the emotional complex resounds back to the
violinist, intensifying his original "feeling-state." In its
heightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator, "and so on,
back and forth, growing in stimulating power at each recoil. The whole
process is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis, with the opponents
closing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster
with every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure.
'Social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing." This,
briefly told, is what passes between the player of music and his
creative listener.
In application this principle does not by any means stop with
performing or composing music or with the fine arts. It goes on to
embrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the
fiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not too
much to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself
adequately expressed without the cooeperation of this social resonance,
without the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognized
partners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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