through all of which we can fancy Vetter Michel passing with his coat tightly buttoned and his hat pressed over his brows, only anxious to escape as soon as possible from the enchanted spot, and return to warmth and light and good fellowship. At the same time, the Tragic Overture strikes a deeper note, and though it is not more masterly in structure, is certainly more poetic in conception. Besides, it owed no factitious interest to the particular circumstances of its first appearance, and so, having been treated from the beginning on its own merits, it is the more likely to endure.
Other events of 1881 may be dismissed in a few words. At the end of January the London Philharmonic endeavoured to secure Brahms as conductor for its coming season; but the offer, like all subsequent invitations from this country, was immediately declined. 'Je ne veux pas faire le spectacle,' is the reason which was once given as the ground of refusal; and, though we may feel a little mortified at the implication, it is difficult to deny the uncomplimentary truth that it contains. We have not yet learned to treat genius frankly, and either starve it with censure or smother it with an irrational excess of enthusiasm. And further, Brahms was much occupied during the summer, partly in preparing his two overtures for the press, partly in completing the Nänie and the new Pianoforte Concerto in B flat. During the autumn came a concert tour of unusual extent, in which the last-named work was produced at Buda-Pesth, and repeated at Meiningen, Stuttgart, Basle, Zurich, and ultimately at Vienna. By this time it had become an article of faith, that Brahms' concerti showed no claim to their specific title; and, as the jest of 'Symphony with pianoforte obbligato' had fulfilled its purpose, the critics struck out a fresh line, and described the new work as 'chamber music on a larger canvas.' However, the Viennese public was as indifferent to names as Juliet herself, and received the music with a cordiality that took no thought of problems in scientific classification.
The publications of 1882 consist of four volumes of songs, which range in character from the humour of the Vergebliches Ständchen to the poetry, as pure and contemplative as Wordsworth, of Feldeinsamkeit and Sommerabend. After the Vienna season Brahms took his usual holiday at Ischl, and there composed the String Quintett in F and the Gesang der Parzen, both of which were printed in the succeeding year. But the next real landmark was the third Symphony produced at Vienna in the winter of 1883, and repeated at once in almost every great musical centre in Germany. It is perhaps the finest, certainly the clearest, of all Brahms' instrumental compositions for orchestra—forcible and vigorous in movement, delightful in melody, and, of course, faultless in construction. 'Now at last,' said a member of the Viennese audience, 'I can understand Brahms at a first hearing': and, indeed, it must be a cloudy twilight in which so exact a hand cannot be readily deciphered. In strong contrast is the fourth Symphony in E minor, which followed after another period of song-writing. On grounds of true artistic value, it is almost equal to its predecessor; but it deals with more recondite themes, it traces more involved issues, and it has consequently been treated with some of that irrational impatience which is the common fate of prophets who speak in parables. When it was presented at Leipsic in 1886, the critics protested against it as wholly unintelligible; and when Reinecke repeated it at the beginning of the next year, the audience trooped out after the third movement and left the finale to be played to empty benches. It may be remembered that the subscribers to Fraser's Magazine once threatened to withdraw their patronage unless the editor discontinued a farrago of exasperating nonsense called by the unmeaning name of Sartor Resartus.
In 1887 Brahms was created a Knight of the German order, 'pour le mérite,' in company with Professor Treitschke, Gustav Freitag, and Verdi. He had already received the order of 'Arts and Sciences' from the King of Bavaria; and, two years later, he was admitted by the Emperor of Austria to the order of St Leopold—the first civilian, it is said, on whom that distinction has been conferred. Meantime, he brought his list of works past its hundredth opus number—that goal which Schubert was so pathetically anxious to reach—with the 'Cello Sonata in F, the Violin Sonata in A, the double Concerto and the C minor Pianoforte Trio. The first of these, which was produced by Hausmann in November 1886, at once aroused a very curious outburst of structural criticism. It was said, and the statement is still repeated, that Brahms had been guilty of a dangerous and radical innovation in choosing for his slow movement a key removed by only one semitone from that of the work as a whole. The choice was too near in pitch, it was too remote in signature, it broke the harmonic unity of the composition by a contrast of colour which was in itself glaring and extreme. But of attacks on Brahms, as of attacks on a very different master, we may generally say, 'ça porte malheur.' The so-called 'innovation,' authoritatively condemned as without parallel in musical literature, may be found in one of Haydn's pianoforte sonatas, and can hardly, therefore, be criticised at the present day as hazardous and revolutionary. Whether the contrast be here successful or not is a matter on which opinions may conceivably differ, though, after any serious study of the opening movement, they are likely to concur; but it is surely unfair to accuse Brahms of violating the classical tradition, unless, indeed, there be a sense in which any stage of evolution may be said to violate its forerunner.
In the summer of 1889 Brahms was presented with the freedom of the city of Hamburg, a gift which affected him more deeply than any splendour of royal or academic distinction. With its acceptance his public life may be said to close. He was now fifty-seven; he had spent nearly forty years of strenuous and honourable work; his dislike of notoriety grew naturally keener with advancing age; he had no longer any office or appointment to call him from his beloved seclusion. The occurrences of the next seven years may be summed up in a few rare concert-tours or holiday visits. For the rest he lived among his books; reading, editing, annotating until the creative moment came, and the world was made richer by a new masterpiece. Within this period he produced about a score of compositions: an exquisite violin sonata in D minor; a second string quintett, even sweeter and more melodious than the first; two volumes of motets, strong, stately and dignified; two concerted works for clarinet, of which one at least may rank among the chief glories of musical art, and a whole underwood of songs and pianoforte pieces, that grow and blossom in the shadow of the larger forest. But even the records of achievement become more sparse as the years decline. The evening was at hand, and the day's work drawing to its close.
It was in the summer of 1896 that he printed his last composition, the Vier ernste Gesänge. For some little time his health had been giving cause for anxiety. In the autumn his doctors sent him to Carlsbad in hope of a cure; then in the early winter appeared symptoms of some cancerous growth, and the only hope left was for the alleviation of pain. Yet a few more months he lingered, bearing his death sentence with the same unselfish fortitude that had marked his life, until on April 3, 1897, the end came and the sufferings were over. With him passed away one of the noblest figures in all musical history: a great man, generous and upright, without envy, without arrogance, free from all taint of the meaner emotions, wholly single-hearted in the service of his ideal. The happiness which eludes all conscious human pursuit came to him unasked and unsought; the rewards that he would never stretch a hand to seize offered themselves for his acceptance. His life was secure from sordid anxieties, unvexed by the contests and intrigues that have so often marred an artistic reputation, rich in the love of friends and the priceless gift of genius. It is not for him that we should mourn, now that in the fulness of years and honours he has laid his books aside and turned to sleep.
III
THE DIRECTION OF THE NEW PATHS
As Music is the most abstract of the arts, so it is also the most continuous. In each successive generation the Poet and the Painter are confronted by approximately the same facts of nature and life: the truth of representation which forms an essential part of their work is relative to an external model which is comparatively unchanging. Thus, in a certain degree, every age of representative art stands on a level with its predecessors, and however much it is influenced by traditions of style, is even more affected by its direct relation to physical realities. Music, on the other hand, is simply the gradual mastery of a particular medium by the pure action of the human mind. Its actual method contains no concrete element at all, and in it, therefore, every generation must take its point of departure, not from the same universe which appealed to previous artists, but from the actual achievement which previous artists have handed down. The Greeks were as keenly alive to the beauty of music as to that of poetry: to us their poetry is a delight and their music a bewilderment. To the Italians of the great artistic period, the charm of music was as vivid as that of painting; to us their painting is almost a finality, and their music, even in Palestrina, but the supreme expression of a transitory phase. And this is not because music is in any sense the youngest of the arts: for such a theory is refuted by the most casual survey of human history. The real reason would seem to be, that in the representative arts we have a series of comparatively independent periods, each manifesting afresh the attitude of an artistic mind to a fixed world of nature: whereas, in music, the periods are stages of a continuous evolution, and the whole environment of the artist is summed up in the inheritance that he derives from the past.
This distinction must, of course, be stated not as absolute, but as relative. For, in the first place, every work of art is the outcome of its creator's personality, and depends, therefore, on the particular attributes of his character and temperament. Poetry, like the poet, is born, not made: painting, even if it borrow its model from nature, must find its power of vision in the soul of the artist: and music, in like manner, is worth nothing unless it arises from a true and spontaneous emotion. The gift of melody, the sense of ideal beauty, the capacity for genuine and noble feeling, are qualities which cannot be learned or communicated: they constitute the life of the art, and external forces can only influence its training. Further, it is idle to speak of the 'representative' artists as unaffected by the general course of æsthetic history. Only, it is here contended, that their debt to the past is appreciably less than that of the musician, because their debt to the present is appreciably greater.
It is impossible, then, to estimate a composer without special reference to his historical conditions. For the whole of his work consists in expressing thought, which he originates through a medium which he inherits, and, to gauge his success, we must know how the art stood before it passed into his hands, and to what extent he has enriched or augmented its resources. There are, therefore, two questions, and only two, to which musical criticism can address itself: first, whether the feeling implied by the work is one that commands our sympathy: second, whether in expressing it the artist has assimilated all that is best in a previous tradition, and has himself advanced that tradition towards a fuller and more perfect development. And, as the former of these questions is the more difficult of the two, we may perhaps defer it until the latter has received some share of consideration.
Now, the primary fact in music is the simple melodic phrase: the spontaneous, almost unconscious, utterance of an emotional state that is too vivid for ordinary speech. At first, this music is entirely artless, for art only begins when the medium is recognised as possessing an intrinsic interest; then there gradually arises an attempt to make the phrases more coherent, and so more expressive, until the first landmark is reached in the establishment of a definite scale-system like that of Greece. Thus Greek music may be taken as the lowest stage of organisation in the European history of the art. It was not unscientific, for it had the modes, with their elaborate subtleties of diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic, but we may search its records in vain for any distinctive recognition of musical form. Its effect, to judge from the allusions in Plato and Aristotle, seems to have been wholly emotional, and its intellectual basis was not artistic but mathematical in character.
The Greek modes were revised by Claudius Ptolemy, and on the basis of his revisions was established the system of the mediæval church. In it the claims of the medium began to receive further attention, and the next step was the gradual elaboration of counterpoint, that is, the combination of simultaneous voice parts, each independent, but all conducing to a result of uniform and coherent texture. Starting from the crude origins of descant and faux-bourdon, the new method steadily grew and developed, through Dunstable, Dufay, Josquin, and a host of other great writers, until it reached the second universal landmark in the magnificent climax of Palestrina. If the ecclesiastical modes had been final, music would never have advanced beyond the 'Missa Papæ Marcelli,' and the 'Æterna Christi Munera.'
But the modes were not final. For certain scientific reasons, into which it is here needless to enter, they were incapable either of a common tonality or of a coherent system of modulation. Hence, while the organisation of harmony could be carried by the ecclesiastical composers to a high degree of perfection, the organisation of key lay outside their horizon altogether. And while they were busy, like the schoolmen, in 'applying a method received on authority to a matter received on authority,' the unrecognised popular musicians, who had never heard of Ptolemy, and cared nothing about counterpoint, were writing tunes in which our modern scale-system begins to make a tentative and hesitating appearance. It is not too much to say that the dances collected in Arbeau's Orchesographie come nearer to our sense of tonality than all the masses and madrigals that contemporary learning could produce. In a word, the growth of harmony belongs to the Church, the growth of key to the people.
Then came the most important dynamic change in all musical history: the Florentine revolution of 1600. Its ostensible object was frankly dramatic—the revival of Greek tragedy under such altered conditions as were implied by the change of language and civilisation: its real importance was that it destroyed the convention of the modes, and called tonality from the country fair to the theatre and the concert-room. For a while, no doubt, the dramatic ideal overpowered everything else, and even the Church left off writing masses and took to oratorios instead; but when pure music reasserted itself, it found an entirely new set of problems waiting for solution. Harmony had to be organised, not on the basis of the mode, but on the basis of the modern scale, and thus had to take into account a question of key-relationship which had never fallen within the scope of the ecclesiastical period. And hence followed a line of development beginning about the time of the younger Gabrieli, and passing through the great choral composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the third landmark of our musical history was attained in the person of John Sebastian Bach. His polyphony, as applied to the emotional expression of his time, is simply the best of which the art of music is capable. Given the phrases which he employed as subjects, the human mind cannot conceive their being treated with a more complete harmonic perfection.
Meantime, ever since the floodgates had been opened by the audacious hand of Florentine amateurs, another and more copious stream of tendency had been flowing along a separate channel. The new tonality had not only made a great difference in the harmonic aspect of music, it had virtually opened a new field by suggesting the first possibilities of form and structure. Composers began gradually to see that the equalisation of the scales afforded the material for a more perfect and coherent system of design: modulation became a reality, and with it the recognition of different tonics in successive paragraphs or cantos of the composition. They therefore took the simplest effects of contrast, as presented by the dances and Volkslieder of the people, and proceeded to develop them into a fuller diversity of organisation. At first, no doubt, they went on something of a wrong tack: the structural problem received a divided attention, for polyphony was still regarded as paramount, but yet in the chamber music of Corelli and Vivaldi, and in the harpsichord pieces of Scarlatti, Couperin and Rameau may be traced a continuous effort not only to make the form distinct, but to make it in some degree progressive. And on the death of Bach, when polyphony had reached a point from which it seemed impossible to advance, music turned almost entirely to questions of structure, and for the next two generations set itself deliberately to perfect the outline of the sonata, the quartett, and the symphony. This helps to explain the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that Bach's influence on the latter half of the eighteenth century was practically non-existent. Partly, of course, we may account for it by remembering that musical art passed, for a time, into another country, but it is a still stronger reason that composition was occupied with another set of problems. The organisation of harmony is that of simultaneous strains; the organisation of key is that of successive passages; and it is obvious that the perfection of the one will afford but little assistance to the development of the other. And so the line of structural evolution passed through Haydn and Mozart, until, in the work of Beethoven, it also attained a temporary climax and culmination. With him, then, the treatment of the musical medium may be held to have reached its fourth principal landmark.
After Beethoven came the Romantic School, the historical importance of which can roughly be epitomised under two heads. First, it widened the range of emotional expression, and so affected music from the standpoint of the idea. Secondly, it returned to Bach, and adapted his polyphonic system to the requirements of the new musical language. But as its artistic strength was its reverence for Bach, so its artistic weakness was its neglect of Beethoven. On the polyphonic side it maintained the old traditions, and even, in some respects, advanced upon them, since the more 'romantic' the idea to be expressed, the more difficult is pure polyphony in its expression. But, on the structural side, it was distinctly retrograde, and either confined itself to the smaller and more rudimentary forms, or, when it attempted those of a larger scope, treated them with something of negligence and preoccupation. Berlioz no doubt took Beethoven for his master, but it was as a poet, not as a musician. And the other great masters of the school, for all their genius and their earnestness and their love of beauty, are yet, in questions of form, but the minor Socratics of our nineteenth century music, carrying on, each from his own standpoint, some one part of the previous tradition, but neither interpreting nor advancing its full and entire content.
A special word may be said on the relation of Wagner to this general course of musical development. As a dramatist, he stands in some degree aloof: his art is a different art, his methods are different methods, his ancestry may be traced to Shakespear and Æschylus as readily as to Bach and Palestrina. The explanation of his work is always the dramatic explanation: his structure is determined not by principles of pure music, but by the exigencies of the scene. Hence, apart from such a secondary point as orchestration, it is only in his splendid, reckless, audacious polyphony that he has really enlarged the treatment of musical technique. His most enthusiastic followers claim for him that he has 'killed the symphony,' a statement which, though it is radically untrue, is enough to dissociate him from an art that recognises the symphony as its crowning achievement. The drama of the future will accept him as one of its greatest potentates: the music of the future will see in him the lord of a single province, whose government has in one respect assisted the consolidation of the others.
What, then, is required to sum up the tendencies of the present age, and to bring Music to the fifth landmark in its history. Surely a composer, who, while he maintains and develops the harmonic traditions of the Romantic School, shall even more devote himself to the restoration and evolution of musical structure: who shall take up the classical form where Beethoven left it; who shall aid to free it from the conventions which that greatest of all masters did not wholly succeed in loosening; who shall carry it to a further stage and raise it to a fuller organisation. And such a composer has appeared. So far as concerns the technical problem of composition—and it must be remembered that this is at present the only topic under discussion—the work of Brahms is the actual crown and climax of our present Musical art. He is in exact and literal truth 'der der kommen musste:' the man for whom Music has been waiting. In him converge all previous streams of tendency, not as into a pool, stagnant, passive, and motionless, but as into a noble river that receives its tributary waters and bears them onward in larger and statelier volume.
Tintoret claimed 'the drawing of Michael Angelo and the colouring of Titian': Brahms, in like manner, may claim the counterpoint of Bach and the structure of Beethoven. And not only has he entered into the inheritance of these two composers; he has put their legacies to interest, and has enriched the world with an augmentation of their wealth. He is no mere Alexandrine, no grammarian poet, content to accumulate with a patient and laborious industry the gifts that have been lavished by a previous age; the artistic heritage is not won by right of labour, and its dynasty only falls to these who are born in the purple. Erudition, in short, may copy the work of Genius; but Genius alone can develop it.
Are we to say, then, that Brahms is a more consummate master of his medium than Bach or Beethoven? By no means; but, in consequence of their work, his medium is more plastic than theirs. For certain historical reasons, with which the question of personal capacity has nothing to do, the key-system of Bach is rudimentary beside that of Beethoven, and the polyphony of Beethoven less perfect, perhaps, than that of Bach. To Brahms we may apply Dryden's famous epigram, in which the force of Nature 'to make a third has joined the other two.' By his education he learned to assimilate their separate methods; by his position, in the later days of Romance, he found a new emotional language in established use; by his own genius he has made the forms wider and more flexible, and has shown once more that they are not artificial devices, but the organic embodiment of artistic life.
It follows, then, to maintain this statement with a few words of commentary and illustration. And, first, we may take the polyphonic problem, not only because it has some chronological priority, but because the system which it implies is more limited and more readily exhaustible. Now the essential value of Bach's work in this respect is that, in addition to 'writing free and characteristic parts for the several voices in combination,' he 'made the harmonies, which were the sum of the combined counterpoints, move so as to illustrate the principles of harmonic form, and thus give to the hearer the sense of orderliness and design, as well as the sense of contrapuntal complexity,'[55] and since there are no other aims to which polyphonic writing can be directed, it would seem as though Bach's achievement were final, as though it left nothing for future generations to add. But a somewhat closer reflection will show that there are at least two points in which a possibility of progress may be admitted.
One is the immense growth of Instrumental Music, which has virtually brought with it a new material for treatment. Bach's part-writing is generally vocal in basis, the work of an organist who feels the presence of his choir and his congregation; even his concerti are not far removed from the canzonas which were specified as 'buone da cantare e suonare.' But after him came a generation of composers who recognised and brought into fuller use the peculiar character and flexibility of the strings, and thus opened out a new region, which it has been one of the privileges of Brahms to explore. Thus while, in his organ compositions, in his motetts, in the choruses of the Requiem, Brahms has closely followed the methods of Bach (though even here he solves one or two problems which were left untouched by the earlier master), in such examples as the two string Sestetts and the Symphony in E minor, he adapts those methods to a material which he had inherited from a later ancestry. And here it may be noticed that his simplest accompaniments are always characteristic. Even the arpeggio figure, which is usually the easiest and most careless of all harmonic devices acquires in him a special significance and import.
The other point is the change in emotional and melodic phraseology, due partly to the influence of Beethoven and Schubert, partly to that of the more distinctively Romantic composers. It is quite certain that the characteristic melody of the eighteenth century is, on the whole, more susceptible of polyphonic treatment than that of our own time. The finale of the Jupiter Symphony is, in any case, a stupendous effort of genius; but take five typical tunes of Liszt or Berlioz, and Mozart himself could not have dealt with them as he dealt with his own phrases. The curve of melody has altered in some degree, and thus, while it has given new effects of beauty, it has become a little less adaptable to certain of its requirements. No doubt Schumann developed a wonderful polyphonic system of his own; but even in him we may recognise certain limits: and, moreover, he stands, in this respect, almost alone as an intermediary between Bach and Brahms. We are driven, then, to conclude either that polyphony should grow obsolete, which the most unthinking audacity can hardly affirm, or that the extreme of Romantic expression has lost in art what it has gained in poetry. And herein Brahms appears as a true reformer. His thought is in full accord with the general poetic conception of our age, but he has selected from its entire range those particular forms of phrase and melody which are most conspicuously plastic and malleable. The opening of the A major Quartett is romantic enough, but it admits of that marvellous piece of contrapuntal imitation which surprises us in the coda. The Symphony in F major is one of the least formal of compositions, but the most laborious academician in music could not compile a more elaborate polyphony than Brahms has here created. Indeed, there is little necessity to search for instances: they may be found on almost every page of the concerted or choral works. And, though it be true that Bach is often curiously modern in idea, though he frequently stands nearer to us than Handel or Haydn or Mozart, the fact still remains, that Brahms is in closer and more intimate sympathy with him than even the romantic composers who made him their ostensible pattern and prototype.
So far, then, as relates to the harmonic aspect, Brahms may be regarded as a real stage in the evolution of Musical Art. There remains the more important question of his contributions to the development of structure: in other words, of his relation to Beethoven. The harmonic ideal had been maintained, in varying degree, by all composers of the first rank, and herein the traditions of Schumann and Chopin were of distinct and momentous service to their successor; but the structural ideal had, since 1830, been allowed to fall into comparative neglect, and in restoring it Brahms had virtually to do his work single-handed. No doubt, in short lyric forms, and even in their direct expansion to a larger scale, the Romantic musicians had shown a considerable mastery of outline; but in the more complex organism of symphony and concerto, they had fallen somewhat out of the line of progress, and had diverged from the methods of the 'Emperor' and the 'A major.' Hence the estimate of Brahms' position in this matter is of double interest: partly because of the intrinsic value of key-structure in musical organisation, partly because the line of development was in some degree broken and obliterated.
Now it has been already maintained that the sonata form, in its widest and most comprehensive signification, represents the highest type of structure to which the Art of Music has yet advanced. Other instrumental forms—the romance, the fantasia, the nocturne—are modelled, with more or less of exactitude, upon sonata movements; and the same is true even of vocal forms, except in so far as they are influenced by the fugue or affected by the extra-musical requirements of the words. It is therefore to works ostensibly in sonata form that we must primarily address ourselves. And here it may at once be stated that in a vast majority of the details, Beethoven seems to have reached
In the construction of the separate movements, taken as individual unities, there has been little or no progress since his time, for little or no progress was possible. We can only say, then, that in this respect the work of Brahms is as organic as that of his master; and, in saying this, we are merely propounding a matter of comparative analysis which can readily be settled by an appeal to facts. It is as true of Brahms as of Beethoven, that there is in him no redundant phrase, no digression, no parenthesis, nothing that does not bear some intimate relation either to its immediate context, or, with more subtlety, to a remoter part of the subsequent issue. Take, for instance, the rondo tune which opens the Finale of the B flat Sestett. A careless observer may regard the beginning of its second stanza as mere padding, devised to fill a gap until the principal strain recurs. Turn a few pages, and we find that it was the presage of a complete and important episode which itself is vital to the structure as a whole. Again, in the first movement of the same work, if any reader will compare the entry of the second subject with the corresponding place in Beethoven's Hammerclavier Sonata, he will see with what accuracy Brahms learned his lesson and with what consummate skill he applied it. And in all other qualities of organic structure—in choice of tonal centres, in the relative length of constituent sections, in perfect balance of exposition and development—the same line of legitimate succession may be traced. It is not a question of imitation. Brahms is no copyist, reproducing with careful fidelity the precise outline of a master's original. In this, as in his polyphony, he has assimilated the principles of a past method and has turned them to his own account.
But for the complete organisation of a symphony, or a sonata, it is not sufficient that each movement should be structurally exact; they must be so inter-related as to produce an effect of organism in the whole. And there are three chief ways in which this inter-relation can be secured. The first is by unity of emotional effect; by making the whole work tell the same story, and represent the same general type of feeling. In Beethoven's Appassionata, for instance, a scherzo would be an impertinence, in his Eighth Symphony a slow movement would be an intrusion; for the one is as wholly tragic in character as the other is light and humorous. The second is by the proper choice of key for each of the successive numbers; for the selection, that is, among all possible alternatives, of the tonic note that will give the most complete and satisfying result. And herein we may confess that we have one of the few cases in which Beethoven's work was injuriously affected by convention. Of course, the Seventh Symphony stands almost unique and unapproachable, a culminating point of structural excellence, but, as a rule, his scheme, though less homogeneous than that of Mozart, has too little diversity to be accepted as final. Thirdly, the entire composition may be held together by a transference of themes, that is, by the reminiscence in one number of phrases or melodies that have already been employed in another. Of this device there is hardly any example in Beethoven until the end of his career, and even then the only conspicuous instance is the finale of the Choral Symphony. It is, indeed, the latest-born of all the forces that tend to organisation, and along its lines the sonata form of the future will probably find the readiest opportunity of progress.
If, then, Brahms is the inheritor of Beethoven's method, we may expect to find a continuity of tradition in his treatment of these three points respectively. And assuredly the analysis of his work will not disappoint us. For, in the first place, the poetic unity of his compositions is beyond dispute. In each of the great concerted pieces, whether for the chamber or the orchestra, we find one general type of feeling worked out, it may be, to successive issues, but developed in orderly sequence from a single source. His cast of mind is usually grave and reflective, therefore he has for the most part discarded the scherzo, and replaced it by a movement of more earnest and serious character. His manner of thought is logical and coherent, therefore his finales, like those of Beethoven, are not mere light-hearted fantasias, intended to send away the audience in a good temper, but true conclusions, carefully planned and adequately presented. Even in such works as the Horn Trio, where the contrast is probably at its strongest, there is no real obscurity in the underlying relation; while in the four symphonies, to take the opposite extreme, we need only hear the sequence of movements to pronounce it inevitable.
And as we find an organic unity in the emotional aspect, so we find an organic diversity in the choice of keys. Except for the obvious principle, that first and last movements must acknowledge the same tonic, Brahms admits none of the a priori laws by which his predecessor was occasionally bound. In other words, he takes as his unit not the separate movement but the entire series, and selects his keys for Adagio and Intermezzo with the same structural care as he uses for a 'second subject,' or a 'development section.' Allusion has already been made to the Violoncello Sonata in F, one of the most marvellous pieces of successful audacity in all musical form; but hardly less remarkable is the Symphony in E minor, where the key of the slow movement is equally unusual, and equally necessary. Indeed, any of the concerted works will serve for illustration. The choice is sometimes simple, sometimes recondite, but in all cases it is justified by the event.
Transference of themes is a device attended by one imminent danger. If awkwardly employed, it may look like poverty of thought, or at best that artless naïvité of repetition which is only tolerable in a ballad literature. But if this danger be avoided, and its avoidance is only a question of skill, the reminiscence of a previous melody may round off and complete an entire work in much the same way as the 'Recapitulation' rounds off and completes a single movement. It has been already said that Beethoven makes little use of this method. Schumann indicated some of its possibilities, but Schumann died while the work was still incomplete, and left its further elaboration to other hands. And though Brahms is somewhat tentative and uncertain in the matter, though he leaves room for future advance and future progress, yet at least we may say that he has explored more of the new ground than any of his predecessors. In the Finale of the G major Violin Sonata, and in that of the Quartett in B flat, he is satisfied to carry out the suggestion of Schumann;[56] but elsewhere, as in the second Symphony and the clarinet Quintett, he develops them in a new direction, by founding two movements on thematic variants of the same idea. It is difficult to overrate the value of these hints for future guidance, though, as yet, they are only hints, not complete solutions. For, grant that an entire sonata or symphony can never be called organic in precisely the same sense as its constituent parts; grant that their analogue is the man, and its analogue the corporate community; still some further organisation of the whole is undoubtedly possible, and we may well expect it to follow the method which Brahms has here indicated.
In one word, he has completed, for present purposes, the emancipation of musical form, not by the false freedom of anarchy, but by the true freedom of a rational code. Artistic progress, like that of the political commonwealth, has always tended towards the abolition of purely conventional laws, and to the maintenance and development of those that are founded upon broad principles of human nature. By Brahms, so far as we can see, the last links of convention have been snapped, and the form has now room to grow and expand in perfect liberty. Look, for instance, at his treatment of the Concerto, which, up to his time, was the most unsatisfactory, because the most conventional, of all classical types. He has broken down the unnecessary rule of the three movements, he has finally overthrown the tyranny of the solo instrument, he has given the whole form a free constitution similar to that of the Quartett and the Symphony. And though we be disinclined to regard our present sonata-form as ultimate; though it may some day develop into a new type, as it was itself developed from the Partita, yet the very possibility of future advance depends upon conditions which it has been the work of Brahms to secure. Hence, to call him a reactionary, as some writers are fond of doing, is simply to misunderstand his whole relation to musical art. In all history, there is no composer more essentially progressive.
But, it may be objected, is not all this insistence on minutiæ somewhat pedantic and artificial? Does it really matter whether a concerto has four movements or three? whether an adagio is in A flat or A natural? Indeed, is not the whole sonata-form a piece of academic subtlety, and a fortiori, must we not regard its details as points of grammar rather than points of art? And the critic, whom we are only too probably supposing, will go on to speak of 'melody beaten out into thematic gold-leaf,' or will even tell us that there is more music in an intermezzo, where the composer's thought 'runs freely without restrictions of form,' than in all the studious ingenuity of codas and development sections. In short we are asked to believe that beauty is too spiritual for legislation, and that any attempt to render it amenable to a code is as futile as the countryman's endeavour to break Pegasus into harness.
Now, in the first place, to commend a musician for disregarding the laws of form is even more unreasonable than to commend a poet for his halting verses, or a painter for his bad drawing. If by laws are meant conventions, then the criticism is just in itself, but it does not touch the point at issue; if natural laws are meant, then the critic has done no more than express his own personal preference for chaos. The little pianoforte pieces of Brahms, for example, are charming, not because they are formless, but because their form is perfect. The only difference between them and the sonata movements, from which they are derived, is a difference of development: the underlying principles are identical. In the second place, it has already been maintained that the sonata is not an artificial construction, but an organic growth evolved, in steadily-increasing complexity, from a living origin: and, further, that its constituent parts represent between them all the general types of all existing instrumental compositions. Either, then, this conclusion must be refuted, or the 'academic' view of the sonata must be abandoned as untenable. And in the third place, if it be demurred that although some general laws of form are advisable, yet the artist should treat them with a free hand, and not expend himself on niggling details, then it is an obvious answer, that this objection rests on a confusion of thought. The little masters have sometimes to choose between a superficial facility and an elaboration that smells of the lamp: the great masters have so assimilated their principles, that exactitude with them is a second nature. In Tintoret's Miracle of S. Mark, the twisted rope strands could not have been drawn more perfectly if they had cost weeks of calculation and measurement: yet each is finished with a single sweep of the brush. And so again in Brahms this accuracy of detail is not a matter of diligence, but a matter of insight, cultivated, no doubt, by past training, but employed at the moment with a direct and unerring certainty. It may legitimately be questioned whether perfection of form is not sometimes too dearly bought by a sacrifice of vigour or originality: if the two can be set in antithesis, we may understand that a critical judgment should hesitate between them. But, given vigour and originality, and, in Brahms, no serious writer has ever denied these gifts, it hardly admits of discussion that the form of a work is, in some degree, a measure of its artistic value.
We may conclude, then, that in what has been called the treatment of the musical medium, Brahms occupies an incontestable position among the greatest composers of the world. It now follows that we should consider the character of his ideas, the nature of his melody, and, in a word, the particular qualities implied in his power of invention and his emotional standpoint. It is, perhaps, inevitable that we should do this with something of a prepossession. For, as we have already seen, in music, form and thought are obverse and reverse of the same set of relations, and the organism of the one is our best guarantee for the vitality of the other. Here, at any rate, academic methods are always imitations, copies which in no way advance upon their pre-existing model: and thus, if the artistic structure of a work be really living and progressive, we need have little fear about its artistic function. But, at the same time, music can adumbrate so many different types of emotion, that it is worth inquiring whether a given artist has seized them all, and whether, if he be limited to a part of the field, his value is affected or impaired by the limitation.
Now it is sometimes maintained that the music of Brahms is deficient in emotional sensibility: that it is too sober, too self-controlled, too intellectual to be really artistic. The composer, like the poet, should be animated by a 'divine madness and enthusiasm;' he should leave to philosophy the more cautious attributes of deliberate thought; he has the free wind of heaven in his sails, and should run before it on a full tide, neither anxious for his safety nor careful of his direction. But of two things, one: Either we are to hold that art gains by hysteria and extravagance, and that its highest climax is a delirium of unrestrained and riotous passion; or, if this be impossible, we must accept the only alternative, and admit self-control as a necessary principle. The only true question at issue, then, must be the measure in which the restraining influence is to be exercised—the point at which it sets up its barrier and says, 'Thus far and no farther.' And if we recall the Titanic strength of Brahms' first Symphony, or the romance of the Tragic Overture, and the vigour and variety of such 'Dramatic Lyrics' as Verrath, or Entführung, or Meine Liebe ist Grün, we shall hardly assert that their limit has here been suggested by any timidity or any lack of emotional force. In short, when confronted with the facts, the whole attack dwindles into a statement that Brahms' passion is sane and manly—a conclusion which we are not in any way concerned to deny.
But at least, it may be urged, the range of feeling is circumscribed: there is little humour, little gaiety, little expression of the brighter and more genial aspects of life. Granted, with a few notable exceptions, but the same may be said of Æschylus and Dante, of Milton and Wordsworth. It is merely a relic of primitive barbarism that makes us look upon music as an adjunct to conviviality, as an appanage to the 'banquet of wine,' as a pleasant emotional stimulus designed for the amusement of an idle hour. Music is an art of at least the same dignity as poetry or painting, it admits of similar distinctions, it appeals to similar faculties, and in it, also, the highest field is that occupied with the most serious issues. Not that we have any need to undervalue the charm of its more playful moments: we may enjoy Offenbach in precisely the same way as we enjoy Labiche; but it is no very extreme paradox to say that Tristan is a greater work than Orphée aux Enfers, and that La Cagnotte is on a different literary plane from Lear and Hamlet. And in like manner, if we are disposed to find fault with Brahms because the greater part of his work is grave and earnest, let us at least endeavour to realise how such a criticism would sound if it were directed against the Divina Commedia, or the Agamemnon, or Paradise Lost.
Indeed, it is incredible that anyone should listen to Brahms' melody and not be convinced. Do we want breadth? There is the Sestett in B flat, the Second Symphony, the Piano Quartett in A. Do we want tenderness? There is the Minnelied, there is 'Wie bist du meine Königin,' there is the first Violin Sonata. Is it simplicity? We may turn to Erinnerung, to Sonntag, to the later pianoforte pieces. Is it complexity? We have the Symphony in E minor, the four Concertos, the great masterpieces of vocal counterpoint. For pure, sensuous beauty, apart from all other attributes, it is impossible to surpass the Schicksalslied, or the F major Symphony, or the Clarinet Quintett. Indeed, the difficulty in Brahms is to find a poor tune or a clumsy passage. No doubt, in work of such wide scope and extent, there will always be parts that do not appeal to a given hearer, that represent a mood with which he is out of sympathy, or contain some form of expression that fails to interest him; but, at the very lowest, we may say that the mood of Brahms is never ignoble, and its expression very seldom inadequate. Even the unlucky and much-abused theme in the third movement of the Clarinet Trio has certain qualities of style which redeem it from triviality; and in any case it remains almost a solitary exception—one cankered bud in a whole garden of delight.
Here a word may be said on Brahms' indebtedness to the actual melody of previous musicians. It is indisputable that in his work we sometimes find phrases, and very rarely complete strains, which recall Beethoven, or Schubert, or Schumann. But, in the first place, there is seldom or never any case of direct quotation, the outline of an idea is borrowed and filled with a new content; and in the second place, a charge of plagiarism is only serious if it implies poverty of invention. That one man may steal a horse while another may not look over the hedge, is, if considered aright, the highest embodiment of abstract justice: the thief may be your personal friend, in whose honesty of intention you have every reason to confide, the face at the field-edge may wear a hang-dog look which fills you with not unnatural apprehension. And seriously, it is idle to suppose that Brahms adopted these passages—half-a-score, perhaps, in a list of a hundred and twenty elaborate compositions—because he felt that his own supply was running short, and that it must needs be supplemented by a raid over the border. Plagiarism means either the appropriation of an entire work, or the embellishment of a poor texture with some patch of purple that does not belong to the artist. It has nothing whatever to do with these casual and unimportant reminiscences.
There are one or two matters of detail in Brahms' melody which it may be worth while to notice. In the first place, it is conspicuously diatonic, founded for the most part on the ordinary notes of the simplest scale, and so indued with a robustness and a virility which is wanting to the progression by semitones. Besides, he is thus enabled to keep his chromatic effects in reserve, either for purposes of remote modulation, as in the Æolsharfe, or for marking an emotional crisis, as in the slow movement of the Horn Trio, or the close of the stanza in Feldeinsamkeit. Against this, no doubt, may be set his use of the flattened sixth, which is so frequent as to be almost a mannerism, but it will be observed that this appears more often in the harmonisation of the melody than in its actual statement. It is a point of colour, not a point of drawing.
Again, there are two general types of melodic curve; one which rises and falls by a progression of consecutive notes, one which follows the constituent parts of a chord in arpeggio. As a rule, the great melodies of the world contain elements of both, with a characteristic preponderance of the former; and attempts to construct tunes out of the latter alone, as, for instance, the opening theme of Weber's Second Pianoforte Sonata, have usually ended in disappointment. But to this rule Brahms is an exception. In a large number of his themes the arpeggio predominates, and always with a special interest and a special personality. Thus, in Von ewiger Liebe, in the Sapphic Ode, in the Violoncello tune, from the first movement of the B flat, Sestett we have melodies designed after this pattern which are not only clear and salient, but strikingly beautiful as well. It will be seen that in all three cases the same device is employed, a passage from dominant to mediant, which leaves the intervening tonic untouched, and in this small matter is indicated the real secret of their effectiveness. Brahms does not merely take the harmonic notes as they are presented by the simple arpeggio, he makes selection among them, omitting one and emphasising another, until he has given character to the whole progression. It is hardly extravagant to say that there is as much difference between a chord-tune of Brahms and a chord-tune of Weber as between a well-written accompaniment figure and an Alberti bass.
A third feature is the remarkable variety and ingenuity of his metrical system. The device of cross-rhythm acquires with him an entirely new significance; it does not defy the restrictions of the bar, but totally disregards them. In the first movement of the Violin Concerto, for instance, the measure of three crotchets is traversed by a phrase of five thrice repeated, the effect of which is a momentary obliteration of the time signature, and the substitution not of a similar rhythm in slower tempo, but of an interpolated phrase, which seems to stand wholly out of relation to the beat: and yet the passage does not project from the general plane of the movement, as do the famous syncopated chords in the Eroica, it is woven into the texture, and forms a homogeneous part of the substance. Again Brahms is fond of placing his melody so that the stress falls outside the principal accent of the bar, thus baffling the hearer who feels that rhythm and tempo are really the same, but is yet conscious that for the moment they do not coincide. It would be an interesting experiment for any musician, who has never seen the Quartett in G minor, to write down from dictation the first Pianoforte phrase of the intermezzo; and an instance even more striking may be found in the first movement of the Clarinet Quintett, where the string melody seems to be shifted forward a quaver in advance of the beat, until the solo instrument sets the passage back in its place, and the discrepancy is resolved. Here, then, is another reason why the music of Brahms is difficult at a first hearing. 'Was ist das überhaupt für ein Takt?' said the Viennese critics, after vainly endeavouring to count their way through a complicated passage, and the inexperienced beginner will often feel tempted to sympathise with their impatience. But, as we gradually learn how to thread the intricacies of the phrase, and how to balance the alternatives that proffer their incompatible claims, we gain a more lasting pleasure from the intellectual stimulus than can ever be afforded by glowing harmony or by opulence of tone. And if it be objected that this is little better than a musical enigma, a mere piece of child's play below the dignity of a serious art, then the answer is, that dramatic irony must fall under the same condemnation, for it aims at precisely the same effect. To confuse the noble with the trivial employment of artistic illusion, is to see no difference between a play of Sophocles and a puppet show.
Lastly, we may notice the rightness and finality which mark the most characteristic of his phrases. In Shakespear it often happens that we come across a line where there is nothing unusual in the thought, nothing recondite in the language, nothing but the simplest idea exhibited in the simplest words, and yet when we read it we feel at once that it could have been said in no other way, and that it can never be said again. And, in his own art, Brahms too has this gift of making simplicity memorable. For instance, in the opening theme of the F minor Quintett, there is nothing that can be called a device; the short loop, by which the second melodic curve picks up the first, is common enough in music; so is the use of the two alternative leading notes, so is the repetition of the same emphatic sound on the chief accent of three successive figures. But no one who has once heard the phrase can ever forget it: and no one can imagine its being altered by a single note without serious loss and detriment. In a word, it is inevitable, and therefore final: a plain statement of a primary truth which remains with us as a delight when the most elaborate epigrams have passed away into weariness or oblivion. And in two of the Violin Sonatas, in the A minor Quartett, in a hundred other works and movements, we shall find that the first sentences give an equally striking illustration of this power. Many composers become commonplace when they try to be simple: they can only seize our attention with an effort, with some special trick of colour or contrast. Brahms, who has at his command every shade in the whole gamut of colour, can make an abiding masterpiece with a few strokes in black and white.
In the foregoing analysis, nothing has been attempted except a bare description of the organism. The mystery of life, the breath of thought and inspiration, the secret language by which mind speaks to mind,—all these are beyond our reach, and in dealing with them we should only confess our ignorance of our own inadequacy. But this at least we may say, that wherever the divine principle is present, it makes itself known by the witness of visible signs—by law, by progress, by inter-relation of parts and unity of function. If, then, we can read the signs, we may guess at the thing signified: if the words be clear and consecutive, we may claim that there is a meaning in the sentence. In music it is possible, as the old Psychologists fabled, that the soul is the true realisation of the body, the power that moulds and shapes the organs into their fulness of existence and energy. And thus, though we can never put into words what we mean by the soul of music, we may yet point to perfection of body as its evidence. No man will deny that the art of Brahms is a living force—a genuine, spontaneous outcome of personal feeling and personal vitality. And, if it be so, the analysis of its external form may, to some extent, indicate its possession of the more spiritual gifts.
That he stands beside Bach and Beethoven is hardly any more a matter for controversy. All three are poets of the same order—noble, dignified, majestic—followers of the statelier muses, and of Apollo, who teaches to men the truths of prophecy. All three are consummate artists, in whose supreme mastery of utterance the highest message has found fit and adequate expression; and finally, in all three alike may be seen the culmination and fulfilment of an epoch in musical history—a climax of achievement which not only closes the chapter of its own age but renders possible the further record of the ages, to come. True, the work of Brahms is still too near us to receive its proper meed of appreciation. We are not yet so familiar with his method as with that of his two forerunners: in his speech there is still something new and strange which now and again baffles our understanding. But all true art is unfathomable: we see the play of colour upon its surface, and know from the very richness and glory of the sight, that below are depths which no plummet can measure. By our century of experience we have learned to know a little of Beethoven: we shall no more master his secret than we shall enter into the mind of Shakespear or Goethe. And in like manner, if we call Brahms obscure, we are imputing our own weakness as the fault of a man who is too great for us. It is not for nothing that we love best those of his writings which we have most carefully studied. It is not for nothing that every decade adds to the number of those who see in him the highest expression of our present ideal. When music attains to fuller knowledge and nobler practice, it will grant him a due place among its foremost leaders, and to us who honour him as a monarch, will succeed a generation which reverences him as a hero.