The development of all kinds of historical studies during the past half-century has caused a wide and by no means learned public to take a keen interest in the life of the past and in its artistic expression. We can no longer quietly accept the doctrine that music began with Bach, or even—as Victor Hugo suggested—with Palestrina. The architecture, sculpture and painting of the remote centuries, as well as their poetry, bring the ancient and mediaeval world vividly before our eyes and minds. We cannot help seeing that music must have been no less important in the lives of our ancestors than it is in our own; indeed, it often seems that in those far-away times the art of music exercised an even more cogent influence than it does now. How can it be, we ask, that people so strangely susceptible to the power of sound and at the same time so consummately accomplished in the other arts should have left behind them an art of music which we can only regard as crude and primitive?
If we attempt to consider this question seriously we shall soon find that we are confronted with fundamental problems of æsthetics. First of all we must rid ourselves of the habit of regarding music as something printed on paper which can be played on the pianoforte. Modern civilization easily leads us to take it for granted that whatever has been written down or printed is clearly fixed and recorded for all time. But the real music is not that which is written down: it is the sounds which are made by those who perform it. A physician cannot cure his patient merely by giving him prescriptions to read. The written notes, even those of our own day, require imaginative interpretation; they require, too, an interpretation based on tradition and experience. Complicated as it is, our contemporary notation is very inadequate, although we of to-day are thoroughly accustomed to the practice of conveying information by written signs. It is only natural that in centuries when very few people were able to read or write words at all the notation of music should have presented still greater difficulty. We can see from early documents such as the ecclesiastical manuscripts of the tenth century that if music was written down it was not in order that complete strangers should be able to read it clearly and accurately at sight, but merely to serve as a reminder to the singer of what he had already committed to memory by ear.
The records of the other arts are solid material facts, things of wood, metal or stone which are always before our eyes. The music that was contemporary with them has disappeared into silence, but that does not necessarily prove that it was not worth preserving. Yet we may well ask ourselves another question: is any art worth preserving? From the historian’s point of view everything is worth preserving as a historical document; but if we judge works of art from a purely æsthetic standpoint can we honestly say that the art of the past has any value for us?
Directors of museums and galleries may perhaps be shocked at so heretical a question. But if, as so many art-critics have suggested, music is the ideal type of art we may legitimately approach the subject from a musical point of view in preference to a pictorial one. The records of the other arts are solid material facts: temples and cathedrals, statues, panels, canvases. Compared with a symphony that may last an hour in performance, they are almost to be considered indestructible and eternal. If on hearing the symphony we find that it gives us no pleasure, it is soon over, and we need never hear it again. Once the cathedral has been put up, it is more trouble than it is worth to take it away again. A second generation may think it hideous, a third takes no notice of it, a fourth venerates its antiquity, yet another decides to find it beautiful. The statue or the picture meets with a similar fate, but as it is less bulky, it can at least be sold, bought and sold again. It may acquire value as a rarity, for every material work of art is unique, whereas a piece of music can be reproduced as many times and in as many different places as we choose. The owner of a picture by Titian possesses property which is his and his alone. He might say the same of an autograph manuscript by Beethoven; but he cannot possess the symphony itself—that belongs to the world at large. The autograph may fetch a thousand pounds at auction, but it is no more than a piece of dirty paper. You can hear the symphony played for a shilling.
The fundamental question at issue is this—is a work of art a complete and finite thing, beautiful when it left its maker’s hand, beautiful now and for ever, or is it frankly transitory, a momentary expression of a momentary experience, speaking as a rule only to those who belong to the same generation? The art dealer and the museum director naturally take the first view. If you have paid some huge sum for a picture, you may hesitate to burn it as soon as you are tired of it. You must at least go on pretending to admire it. And since material works of art are always before us, it is natural that philosophers should have started to construct their artistic theories from an architectural or pictorial point of view. It is perhaps inevitable that the criticism of music should borrow phrases from that of the plastic arts, because music is an art so entirely complete in itself that it has never yet evolved an adequate vocabulary of technical terms, let alone a vocabulary in which its nature can be described to the non-technical reader. But although there may be something to be said for Goethe’s famous comparison of architecture to “frozen music,” it is with poetry rather than with the plastic arts that music more legitimately may seek affinity. Literary critics have never yet succeeded in defining what poetry is; but we can at any rate say that what distinguishes poetry from a statement of the same idea in prose is chiefly the presence of qualities which are common both to poetry and to music. It has been clearly shown, for instance, that the lyric poetry of classical Greece employed devices of construction which are curiously similar to those of Beethoven. Habit induces us to imagine that the value of Beethoven’s music depends on our conventional scale and the harmonies derived from it; but though we are bound to admit that every artist is limited by the peculiar qualities of his materials, whether they be words, marble or musical sounds, we know that they cannot be turned to artistic account unless he has chosen them, imperfect as they are, to serve him in the expression of something conceived in his imagination—something of which he himself is definitely aware although he cannot communicate it to others without this material presentation.
That which is common to poetry and music is not a metaphysical figment. It may often elude analysis; but at present it has hardly been investigated scientifically. It ought to be possible to find out a great deal more about it, and to find out a great deal more about what constitutes the “poetical” quality—to use the epithet in a familiar if not very accurate sense—of musical interpretation, for these things are problems of actual physical sound.
The close connection between music and poetry would indeed be more immediately apparent if people of to-day had not acquired a distorted view of poetry by reading it in silence instead of reciting it aloud. Cheap printing and popular education have given readers—poets too, perhaps—an entirely false set of values. People talk of the beauties of Greek poetry; how can they have any idea of them when the most learned scholars admit that nobody knows how classical Greek ought to be pronounced? They are in the same position as a musician of the future might be if he studied the scores of Beethoven without any idea of what a tone or a semitone was. They know what the words mean, but they are in much the same case as the man who sees nothing in a picture beyond the story which it tells. This preoccupation with the “story”, natural and inevitable as it is, has dominated the whole conception of art; it has even contaminated the conception of music. It is necessary to draw attention to it here, because it constantly distracts the attention from the fact that all the arts are in a perpetual state of change. We see the human form represented in the plastic arts and are inevitably tempted to judge them according to their skill in representing it faithfully. We read about the common experiences of human life in poetry, we accept translations from other languages without demur, and take pleasure in the sense of human continuity. The stability of material works of art gives us a false idea of æsthetic permanence; we are easily induced to take an analogous view of poetry. But in actual fact language, which is the material of poetry, is in constant flux; we are so well aware of that fact that we have almost ceased to notice it. Language changes because it is, if not the most immediate, at least the most useful, of our means of expression. The most immediate means of artistic expression is music, and consequently music is of all the arts the most subject to change, perhaps the most subtle, certainly the most transitory.