XII
Those who live on the outskirts of the world of music may say that they cannot get as much of it as they desire; those who are in the midst of it are painfully aware that they cannot escape the overwhelming flood. The commercialization of music has led to overproduction. This is apparent enough in England, where commercialization has fostered the spawning of a thoroughly degraded type; in Germany the over-production has been a greater danger because the vast complexity of the musical industry has encouraged respectable mediocrity. It is not to be wondered that plenty of musicians would be glad to make a clean sweep of all the music of the past and start fresh from the beginning. We cannot; it is a hopeless delusion. Even if we could make the clean sweep, we are still men of the twentieth century; we cannot return, for just one aspect of our lives and that perhaps the most direct and immediate, to primitive savagery. Civilization has forced us to remember what we ought in the nature of things to have forgotten. Commercialism has always been only too glad to throw dust in our eyes with the pretence of culture. We tell people that they ought to know and love their musical classics. Being out of copyright, they can be reprinted cheaply. Teachers find it least troublesome to teach what they have always taught; concert-givers play what they have always played—it is the safest thing and requires the least rehearsal and study. The casual listener loves the “dear familiar strain.” It is not as if people knew their classics intimately in a scholarly way. And the scholar is easily tempted into false judgments under the itch for research. Old music has its interest for the musical anatomist, but from an artistic point of view most of it is much better forgotten.
There are some who sadly deplore the popularization of the classics on the ground that they risk being desecrated. Why not? If some unlettered person goes into a cinema, hears a fragment of the Unfinished Symphony for the first time and receives a new thrill, surely it is all to the good, at any rate for him. If others feel that the vulgar associations of the cinema have destroyed the music’s beauty for them, let them have done with it, throw it away as a worn-out thing and turn to something else. We may reasonably say that people who are the prey of their unwilling associations, unable to view a work of art with detachment, do not deserve to experience artistic enjoyment; but at the same time we should do well to admit frankly that music which cannot survive momentary degradation (and all things connected with music are and must be merely momentary) is not worth preserving and reproducing. When we consider the innermost nature of music it is surprising that any of it should survive for more than a generation. Some has survived for less, some for far more; but that is no reason why it should survive for ever. Occasionally some work of a remoter age is exhumed and seems to have a new significance for us after having been forgotten for centuries. But its significance is what our own age puts into it. That is one of the advantages of dealing in the art of the past; we can do what we like with it. The art of the present, if it has any vitality, compels us to submit our minds to itself.
The present age revolts from the music of the past century because of its insincerity and pretentiousness. Musicians of the older generation will repudiate this charge with indignation. The criticism is indeed a very summary one, and the man of to-day, if pressed with cross-questioning, may probably be induced to admit a good many single exceptions to his universal condemnation. But technical analysis will show that there is a sounder basis for modern criticism than mere caprice of youthful iconoclasm. The wealth of harmonic resource which the nineteenth century built up was derived, as has been shown, to a large extent from associations, some extra-musical, some intra-musical, some derived from literary or pictorial ideas, some depending on recollections of previous music. These two categories interact on each other again and again, so that it is not easy to separate them out clearly. Like a system of monetary wealth, the wealth of western music has become largely a paper currency and with the realization of this fact values have in many cases become suddenly depreciated. It may be urged that music as an art has derived enormous benefit from the tendency to widen the scope of its significance, from its closer alliance with other intellectual activities and from the deepening conviction of its ethical influence. Is it not childish, it may be asked, for us deliberately to throw away all that we have gained and revert to a condition of music in which it shall be at best a mere entertainment or possibly no more than a physiological stimulus of dangerous passions?
The lofty idealism of Beethoven and certain of those who came after him, both composers and interpreters, is a thing which we cannot possibly deny or ignore; but we may justly question whether the artistic expression of it is still convincing to modern ears. That noble and visionary idealism, in its ardent insistence on the spiritual, tended more and more to suggest that the reality of music lay not so much in the actual sounds perceived by the physical ear as in the relations between them, in sounds—or rather in relations between sounds—never actually heard at all, but induced in the perceptive faculty by association. The works of Beethoven’s third period often seem to lead us into a metaphysical labyrinth. But philosophical language is apt to degenerate into a jargon, and philosophical music, when it is the product of lesser minds than Beethoven’s, into platitudinous rigmarole.
Swinburne’s parody has its musical application too. The classical key-system of Rameau and Bach established a tradition that was academic in the most honourable sense of the word. It won too much respect. It had the symmetrical logic of the heroic couplet in poetry. We can see how in literature the austere reverence for the great academic tradition inevitably petrifies poetry into what discreet reviewers call “scholarly verse.” Music followed an analogous course. By the irony of fate the music of the last century, when it was designed to edify, has become vapid and tedious; what has survived, quaintly artificial though its freshness may be, is the music that was made only for ephemeral entertainment. La Belle Hélène has outlived Les Béatitudes.