Thinking we Know what we Know we Think

How many people are there for whom music is, simply, nothing? As I poke and pry at the subject on the Worldwide Internet, I keep running upon a conservative 5% - 10% guesstimate--surprisingly, about twice as many girls as boys. Adorno, with his Freudian tilt, thinks that the few, totally "amusische" have been brutalized into it by their cruel fathers; which might account for Gertrude Stein's incurious indifference to music--and then again it might not. I, for one, am willing to call it a recessive gene, and let it go at that. But the fact is, there are such people, whose souls are dead to the Angelic Art, who are for the most part sublimely unaware that they're missing anything. One has to be on one's guard, particularly when one is reading about such peculiarly human concerns as culture, civilization, and the human condition--that these people, as authors, don't unconsciously intrude their psychic deficiency upon their subject matter; as color-blind persons, for example, are always hopelessly, unconsciously, misjudging the aims and effects of painting, porcelain, and jewelry. Miltonic criticism is especially rife with this sort of unconscious misapprehension, because Milton may well have been the most musical poet that ever lived: his poetry is saturated with music, in sound and sense. Even those of his critics who are capable of assessing the significance of the extraordinary collection of printed music that Milton brought back from Italy with him, are apt not fully to appreciate the importance of the music--and in especial, the singing--that we know him to have heard in Italy.

And so, reading John Addington Symond's introduction to the Havelock Ellis edition of Five Plays of Christopher Marlowe:

"...This drama, in its own original creation, stood to the English nation in the place of all the other arts. It became for us the embodiment of that Renaissance which had given sculpture, painting, architecture and a gorgeous undergrowth of highly-coloured poetry to the Italians."

My bold italic.