XIV
It is by no means the first time that musicians have tried to “return to nature,” but the difficulty of going back to a state of primitive savagery presumably becomes greater as civilization becomes more elaborate. The enthronement of idiocy may for a moment be amusing but it soon becomes tiresome; these two favourite epithets of musical journalism are not without their appropriateness. Nevertheless it is only common sense frankly to face the fact that music is made up in the first instance of physical sounds. The metaphysical attitude towards music has given us the last quartets of Beethoven, but in the general practice of music it has done much to lower our standards of performance, especially in the matter of singing; indeed among singers who have deservedly obtained a reputation for high musicianship and intelligence those purely vocal qualities on which the emotional power of the voice in the first instance depends are in all countries only too often conspicuous by their absence. Instrumental music has been affected hardly less.
It is difficult for the musician who has been trained on the classical system to adapt himself to this new point of view. He feels inevitably that he is being asked to lower his intellectual standards. He has built them up by the application of a lifetime; they have brought him his most precious experiences and he feels that to desert them is an act of disloyalty to his most cherished ideals. It is one of the consolations of increasing years that our intellectual appreciations are deepened; at any rate we like to think so. But we have regretfully to admit that increasing years are apt to bring a blunted sense of emotional values. Our direct impressions are less vivid, our capacity for enthusiasm shrinks. Before it is altogether too late, before we lose all sensitive response to the stimulus of musical sound, it may perhaps be wise to relax our austerity of principle and allow ourselves to enjoy the primary pleasure of sound as we once did naked and unashamed. It might yet be the beginning of a genuinely new and delightful experience if we would risk the adventure.
All art, after all, is an adventure. In the art of the past the things which directly move our æsthetic emotions are the moments of adventure, the moments at which we join the artist in perceiving intuitively and directly something which we know to be artistically true and beautiful although it is not consistent with the conventional principles on which the art is based. As culture ripens and art becomes a recognized and definite part of our spiritual life, conventions are codified and systematized. In music the classical key system provides us with an obvious example. We acquire the habit of applying our intellectual and reasoning faculties to it. But our æsthetic emotions are not stirred until we are thrown into contact with the irrational. The irrational in this case does not imply utter intellectual chaos and anarchy any more than it does in mathematics or metaphysics. The mathematician perceives a new truth intuitively by an act of imagination, but it is of no use to him until he can prove it by reason; yet reason is of no use to him unless he has creative imagination as well. This imaginative plunge into the irrational is what produces a number of common and elementary physical pleasures, such as the child’s first attempt to walk and such diversions as swimming, riding a bicycle and flying, although all these processes very soon become rational and indeed automatic. We have analogous adventures in the world of art from the beginning. We may say that music is to speech as swimming is to walking. The mind very soon regularizes the new experiences, but the fascination of the arts is that they are always offering us the chance of further ones. We do not enjoy music as an art until we have learned to appreciate it rationally; but at the same time it cannot give us a real æsthetic emotion unless it confronts us forcibly with a further irrational element.
It is this irrational reaction which causes us still to be stirred by the music of the past. We listen to a quartet of Mozart; we recognize a familiar convention, we are easily set back into a past cultural period in which Mozart’s language was the language of the day. We understand every phrase, and we may even run the risk of being bored. Suddenly Mozart does something which the average music-maker of his day would not have done; we are thrown off our rational balance, we have to apprehend directly and intuitively. Our minds have to make some unfamiliar movement just as our bodies may in certain circumstances have to make some movement incompatible with normal equilibrium. In the case of bodily movements practical experience and a knowledge of mathematics may subsequently show that this unfamiliar movement is really just as reasonable as walking. Something of the same kind happens in our artistic experience too. Even Mozart may cease to interest us. The once unfamiliar experience becomes automatic, the new harmony becomes a cliché.
There need not really be anything so very terrifying about the abandonment of the classical system. After all, we can always go back to it when we feel inclined, just as we may take up Dante and return to mediaeval astronomy. The lurking fear which besets us is perhaps that if we abandoned ourselves to the artistic adventure of modern music we might find, not merely that we did not particularly enjoy it, but that somehow it had made it impossible for us to go back wholeheartedly to the music of our youth. It is impossible. Everybody has to ask himself the question and answer it for himself honestly—am I ready and keen to face fresh intellectual adventures? As age increases, increasing vanity has to be taken into account. We elderly people are easily prone to deceive ourselves and to think that we can convince others of the doctrine that connoisseurship is an adequate substitute for direct enjoyment.