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AN INTERPRETER OF LIFE.

BY LYMAN ABBOTT.

Poetry, music, and painting are three correlated arts, connected not
merely by an accidental classification, but by their intrinsic nature.
For they all possess the same essential function, namely, to interpret
the uninterpretable, to reveal the undiscoverable, to express the
inexpressible. They all attempt, in different forms and through
different languages, to translate the invisible and eternal into
sensuous forms, and through sensuous forms to produce in other souls
experiences akin to those in the soul of the translator, be he poet,
musician, or painter. That they are three correlated arts, attempting,
each in its own way and by its own language, to express the same
essential life, is indicated by their co-operation in the musical drama.
This is the principle which Wagner saw so clearly, and has used to such
effective purpose in his so-called operas, whose resemblance to the
Italian operas which preceded them is more superficial than real. In the
drama Wagner wishes you to consider neither the music apart from the
scenery, nor the scenery apart from the acting, nor the three apart from
the poetry. Poetry, music, and art combine with the actor to interpret
truths of life which transcend philosophic definition. Thus in the first
act of "Parsifal," innocence born of ignorance, remorse born of the
experience of temptation and sin, and reverence bred in an atmosphere
not innocent yet free from the experience of great temptation, mingle in
a drama which elevates all hearts, because in some one of these three
phases it touches every heart. And yet certain of the clergy condemned
the presentation as irreverent, because it expresses reverence in a
symbolism to which they were unaccustomed.

But while it is true that these three arts are correlative and
co-operative, they do not duplicate one another. Each not only speaks in
a language of its own, but expresses in that language a life which the
others cannot express. As color and fragrance combine to make the
flower, but the color expresses what the fragrance cannot express, and
the fragrance expresses what the color cannot express, so in the musical
drama, music, poetry, and painting combine, not by duplicating but by
supplementing each other. One may describe in language a symphony; but
no description will produce the effect which the symphony produces. One
may describe a pa