Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/256

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THIRD BOOK. CHAPTER XXXIX.

dominant, and one sinking, quieting, returning to the fundamental note. Two or several periods constitute a part, which in general is also symmetrically doubled by the sign of repetition; two parts make a small piece of music, or only a movement of a larger piece; and thus a concerto or sonata usually consists of three movements, a symphony of four, and a mass of five. Thus we see the musical composition bound together and rounded off as a whole, by symmetrical distribution and repeated division, down to the beats and their fractions, with thorough subordination, superordination, and co-ordination of its members, just as a building is connected and rounded off by its symmetry. Only in the latter that is exclusively in space which in the former is exclusively in time. The mere feeling of this analogy has in the last thirty years called forth the oft-repeated, daring witticism, that architecture is frozen music. The origin of this can be traced to Goethe; for, according to Eckermann's "Conversations," vol. ii. p. 88, he said: "I have found among my papers a page on which I call architecture a rigidified music; and really there is something in it; the mood which is produced by architecture approaches the effect of music." Probably he let fall this witticism much earlier in conversation, and in that case it is well known that there were never wanting persons to pick up what he so let fall that they might afterwards go about decked with it. For the rest, whatever Goethe may have said, the analogy of music and architecture, which is here referred by me to its sole ground, the analogy of rhythm with symmetry, extends accordingly only to the outward form, and by no means to the inner nature of the two arts, which is entirely different. Indeed it would be absurd to wish to put on the same level in essential respects the most limited and the weakest of all the arts, and the most far-reaching and powerful. As an amplification of the analogy pointed out, we might add further, that when music, as it were in a fit of desire for independence, seizes the opportunity of