Such has been the development of the elements of symphonic music. The processes I have described are the natural processes of an art which is continually striving for wider and deeper expression. And, speaking humanly, it is not too much to say that within ourselves there should take place a complete analogue to that development and to those processes. The connection between ourselves and the sounds may graduate all the way from complete unconsciousness of their significance (even though we hear all the sounds clearly) to that state wherein they strike fire in our souls, and there passes between the imagination of the composer and our own that spark of undying fire which illumines our whole being. For in the last analysis it is not so much the music that communicates itself as it is the soul of the composer reaching us over whatever stretch of time. He who creates beauty is immortal.
Is not this what we seek? Is not this the object of all beauty everywhere? Is it not always trying us to see if we are in tune?—as, indeed, everything else is: labor, love, objects, knowledge, religion—all these await our answer.
But I should not leave this part of my subject without setting forth the relation between these elements of symphonic music and the orchestral instruments by means of which they find expression. I do not wish to attempt here any account of orchestration, as such, but rather to point out that in symphonic music it is by the quality of tone that the essence of an idea is conveyed. The tone of the instrument is like the inflection of the voice in speaking, wherein the truth is conveyed although you speak an untruth. An oath might be a prayer but for the inflection.
The pianoforte or the violin, or any other single instrument, has but little variety of tone; the orchestra, on the other hand, has not only four distinct groups of instruments, each group having its own tone quality, but within two of these groups[11] there are considerable differences in what is called “tone color.” It is of no great importance to know that the solo near the beginning of the slow movement of the César Franck symphony is played on an English horn, but it is important to feel the quality of the tone, and to realize how largely the effect of the theme depends on it. For some obscure reason many people remain insensitive to qualities of tone color. (Perhaps they have received their musical education at the pianoforte which, under unskillful hands, differs only in loud and soft.) One so seldom observes a listener even amused by the antics of Beethoven’s double-basses, and yet, in at least four of his symphonies, their behavior is at times extremely ludicrous. He whose humor ranges all the way from the most delicate, ironic smile to a terrible, tragic laughter, wherein joy and sorrow meet,—as meet they must when either presses far,—he achieves these remarkable effects largely by means of the tone quality of the instruments. In his Fifth Symphony he creates the most thrilling effect by means of some score or more of reiterated notes in the soft, muffled tones of the kettle-drum. In the finale to the First Symphony of Brahms it is the tone of the French horn, and again of the flute, that creates for us such profound illusions of beauty as pierce to our very soul. From the depths of the orchestra the horn chants its ennobled song; then follows the dulcet blow-pipe of the flute singing the same magic theme. These varied tones succeeding one another, or melting one into the other—these are the colors that animate and beautify the forms into which the thoughts fall. What delicate nonsense filigree the violins draw in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; how sepulchral the bassoon with its mock sadness; what a vibrant quality do the violoncellos and the contra-basses give to the great melody in the finale to the Ninth; with what poignancy does the clarinet give voice to the sentiment of the second theme in the slow movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony. How luxurious and vivid is the application of all these varied hues to the design.
A fine singing voice has, perhaps, the most beautiful of all tone colors, but the sensibility of many people seems to be limited to that alone. In fact the love of singing is, in many cases, merely a sentimental thrill unconnected with any intellectual process and entirely devoid of imagination. In the orchestra the tone of the instrument is to the theme itself what the color is to the rose. It is much more than that, of course, because it is at any time both retrospective and prospective; this tone color is a darker or lighter shade of that, or, perchance, another hue entirely. The colors shift from moment to moment always as a part of the design rather than as mere color.
Taking it all together—rhythm, meter, melody, harmony, and tone color—this substance of a symphony is a wonderful thing. Nothing quite so delicately organized has ever been created by the mind and the imagination of man. With an interplay of parts almost equal to that of a finely adjusted machine, it seems to go where it wills to go regardless of anything but a whim. How marvelously does it express both the actions and the dreams of human beings; how true is it to their deeper consciousness—a consciousness that dimly fathoms both life and death; that knows itself to have come from across the ages, and feels itself to be a part of the ages to come. It is just as likely that life is a brief, shadowed moment in an endless light, as that it is “a rapid, blinking stumble across a flick of sunshine.”
[9] I stated in the first chapter what justification there is for using the word “intellectual” in regard to music, and I speak here of thought in that sense.
[10] As examples of melodies with finely adjusted rhythms I may cite the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, opus 13, and that of the slow movement of Brahms’s pianoforte quartette, opus 60.
[11] In the “wood-wind” group, so called, there are flutes, oboe, clarinets, bassoons, English horn, etc.; in the brass, there are trumpets, French horns, trombones, tubas, etc.
For the ordinary listener to a symphony the one great difficulty lies in “making sense” out of it as a whole. He enjoys certain themes and is, perhaps, able to follow their devious wanderings, but he retains no comprehensive impression of the symphony as a complete thing, and he may even never conceive it as anything more than a series of interesting or uninteresting passages of music. Now, it is obvious that an art of pure sound, if it is to have any significance at all, must have complete coherence within itself, and that the longer the sounds go on the more necessary does this coherence become. This is, of course, the problem of all music. Even opera must have a certain musical coherence, for it cannot depend entirely on being held together by the text and action; even the song must make musical sense in addition to what sense (by chance) there is in the words. Give what glowing, what romantic, even what definite title you will to a piece of programme music,—call it “The Hebrides,” or “Death and Transfiguration,” or descend to such a title as “A Simple Confession,”—you must still give your music coherence in itself. As a matter of fact, the titles of pieces of programme music do not lessen the composer’s responsibilities in the least, and there is no fine piece of such music in existence that does not obey the general laws of form as applied to music. The title is, after all, merely a suggestion, an indication, an atmosphere. Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer” is merely jolly; it is not even bucolic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain; “Träumerei” is made rhythmically vague in order to create the illusion of reverie, but has, nevertheless, complete musical coherence; “Tod und Verklärung” of Strauss contains no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-called “subject,” and the Wagnerian leit-motif is suggestive and not didactic.
The development of form in the symphony is too large a subject to be covered here, but there are certain fundamental aspects of it upon which I may dwell with safety, since they obey laws which apply everywhere. To make clear what I mean let me say that an art whose fundamental quality is movement must have for its problem the disposition within a certain length of time of a certain group of themes or melodies. The distinction between this art and that of painting is that in music the question is “When?” in painting “Where?” In this sense literature is nearer music than is painting, and I shall shortly point out some analogies between literary and musical forms. I stated in the first chapter the fundamental synthetic principle of music, which is that no one series of sounds formed into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series, unless there be given some restatement, or, at least, some reminder of the first. There is no musical form that does not pay tribute directly or indirectly to this principle. And this, much modified by the medium of language, applies also to literature. Most novels contain near the end a “looking backward over traveled roads”; a too great digression from any thesis requires a certain restatement of it. The first appearance of Sandra Belloni is heralded by her singing in the wood near the Poles’ country house. The epilogue to “Vittoria” closes with the scene in the cathedral: “Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old blind Agostino’s hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for once, her voice was heard in Milan.” The unessential characters and motives of Sandra Belloni disappear in “Vittoria”—Mrs. Chump, an unsuccessful essay in Dickens, finds a deserved oblivion; so do the “Nice Feelings” and the “Fine Shades”; but the presence of Merthyr in the cathedral is as necessary to that situation as is the absence of Wilfred. “War and Peace” would be an inchoate mass of persons, scenes, and events, were it not for certain retrospects here and there which hold the whole mass together. “The Idiot” is a striking illustration, for the early part of Mishkin’s career only appears in the sixth chapter, as if to tide over more successfully the vastness of the scheme; and the final chapter brings back most vividly the experiences of his boyhood. The sonnet is the most concise example of this process, and I do not need to dwell on the precision with which it illustrates it.
One great difference exists, however, between music and literature, and that is in the number of its subjects or characters. “War and Peace,” to take an extreme example, contains scores of characters, while a whole symphony would usually contain not more than twelve or fourteen themes. The prime reason for this is that themes have no established law of association, and so do not represent something else with which we are already familiar as do names of persons in books. We remember the names of such characters as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Portsoaken, for, although they lived a long time ago, we have enough word association to contain their names and we can understand them and can follow the devious courses of their adventures and the philosophy of life they represent. (The absence of this association makes it difficult for us to remember the characters in Russian novels.) When we hear a musical theme, however, we have to remember it as such.
I have frequently stated the somewhat obvious fact that music obeys general æsthetic laws, and the foregoing is intended to show how these laws are modified by the peculiar properties of sound. A symphony in this sense, then, is a coherent arrangement of themes. This brings me to the important question of the detachment or the unification of the several movements of a symphony. Is a symphony one thing or four? Should we listen to it as a unit, or as separate contrasting pieces strung together for convenience? The conventional answer to these questions—the answer given by the textbooks—is that a few symphonies transfer themes from one movement to another, but that, speaking generally, a symphony is a collection of four separate pieces contrasted in speed and in sentiment, etc. Now I wish to combat this theory as vigorously as possible, and I should like to rely solely on general æsthetic laws, and say that no great work of art could, by any possibility, be based on such a heterogeneous plan as that. Or I might base my opinion on psychology and say that, since there are four different movements, different in general and in particular characteristics,—one containing themes which evolve as they proceed, producing the effect of struggle toward a goal, another suited to states of sentiment, another for concise and vivid action, and so forth,—and since the mind of a great man is a microcosm of the world and contains everything, it follows, as a matter of course, that he tries to fuse his symphony into one by filling its several parts with the various elements of himself, a process that has been going on ever since there has been any music at all. The composer is not four men, nor is his mind separated into compartments. One symphony will differ from another because it will represent a different stage in his development, but any one symphony—unless arbitrarily disjointed—will express the various phases of its composer’s nature at the time, and will have a corresponding internal organism. This is sufficient evidence of the soundness of this view in the great symphonies themselves. I cannot specify at length here, but any reader having access to Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Brahms’s symphonies or that of César Franck may investigate for himself. Let me merely point out a few instances which I choose from celebrated and familiar symphonies. In the last movement of the C major of Mozart (commonly called the “Jupiter”) there is a rapid figure in the basses at measures nine and ten which is derived from the beginning of the first movement. The theme of the last movement is drawn from—is another version of—the passage in measures three and four of the first movement. In Beethoven’s “Eroica” the first theme of the last movement is drawn directly from the first theme of the first movement. The theme of the C major section of the “Marche Funèbre” is the theme of the first section in apotheosis, and each owes a debt to the first theme of the first movement. Illustrations of this principle could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and it is not too much to say that there is in all great music this inward coherence. In other words, form in music is not merely a sort of framework, or, if you please, a law or precedent, but the expression of an inward force.
Themes having no organic relation are, of course, introduced in symphonic movements for the play of action against each other which results from their antagonism. The novel depends largely on the same element. If it were not for Blifil there could hardly have been a Tom Jones. Sandra Belloni must have Mr. Pericles as a foil to that finer character of hers which rises above the prima donna, and she needs Wilfred and Merthyr in order to achieve Carlo. In short, the symphonic movement is not unlike the novel which is based on the juxtaposition of contrasted or antagonistic characters or elements, the struggle between the two, and, finally, their reconciliation; and sufficient analogy could be drawn between this and life itself to illustrate the principle as a cardinal one. But I believe the symphony to be still in flux. I see no reason why it should not continue to develop from within and finally to achieve an even greater inward coherence than that already attained. This will almost certainly not be brought about by an extension of its outward form or by an enlargement of its resources—as is the case with many modern symphonies.[12] In brief, the composer is an artist like any other; he is dealing with human emotions and aspirations as other artists are; he is subject to the same laws; he, too, draws a true picture of human life in true perspective, with all the adjustments of scene, of persons, of motives, carefully worked out—even though he deals only with sound. It is almost incredible that any one should suppose otherwise; the real difficulty is in getting the ordinary person to suppose anything! So I say that the symphony is a mirror of life, and that all the great symphonies taken together are like a book of life in which everything is faithfully set forth in due proportion and balance.
I have said that the symphony contains everything and that it has room for disorder. This is its ultimate purpose. The secret of its power lies in this. Life itself is an inexplicable thing. The great symphony compresses it into an hour of perfection in which all of its elements are explicable. Here that dream of man which he calls by such names as “heaven” or “happiness,” and which he has always sought in vain, becomes not only a reality, but the only reality possible for him. For nothing would be more terrible than endless happiness or a located heaven.
The history of the symphony is the history of all art. It moves in cycles; it marks a parabola. It began as a naïve expression of feeling; it learned little by little how to master its own working material, and as it mastered that, it became more and more conscious in its efforts; as soon as new instruments for producing it were perfected, it immediately expanded its style to correspond to the new possibilities; as its technique permitted, it continually sought to grasp more and more of the elements of human life and human aspiration and to express them. In Haydn we see it as naïve, folk-like, tuneful music, not highly imaginative, smacking of the soil—like Burns, but without his deep human feeling. In Mozart it reaches a stage of classic perfection which may be compared to Raphael’s paintings. Hardly a touch of the picturesque, the romantic, or the realistic mars its serene beauty; it smiles on all alike; it is not for you or for me,—as Schumann is,—but for every one. And being purely objective it belongs to no time and lasts forever. And how delightful are Mozart’s digressions. He is like Fielding, who, when he wants to philosophize about his story, proceeds to write a whole chapter during which the action awaits the philosopher’s pleasure. Later writers never drop the argument for a moment; if there is a lull in the action it is somehow kept in complete relation to the subject-matter. Mozart often enlivens you with a story by-the-way, but he always manages to preserve the continuity of his material. The difference between his method and that of Brahms, for example, is like that between Fielding’s philosophic interlude chapters in “Tom Jones” and Meredith’s “Our Philosopher,” who, looking down from an impersonal height upon the characters in the story, interjects his Olympian comment.
A new and terrific force entered music through Beethoven, new to music, old as the human race—namely, the spirit of revolt. The world is always the same. In its fundamentals, human life, within our historical retrospect, remains what it was. An art takes what it can master—and no more. Music was ready; the world was in a turmoil at just that moment, and the result was what we call “Beethoven.” Mozart was his dawn, Schumann and the other Romanticists his mysterious and beautiful twilight. He himself represents at once the spirit of revolution, that inevitable curiosity which such a period always excites, and that speculative philosophy which tries to piece the meaning of new things. The world was full of flame; battle thundered only a few miles from Vienna; the spirit of equality and fraternity was hovering in the air. Beethoven’s piercing vision compassed all this. He sounded the triumph of the soul of man—as in the great theme at the close of the Ninth Symphony; he took the simplest of common tunes and made it glorious—as at the end of the “Waldstein” Sonata; his imagination ranged at will over men struggling in death-grapple, over the gods looking down sardonically on the spectacle. He was the great protagonist of democracy, but he was also a great constructive mind. He never destroyed anything in music for which he did not have a better substitute, and there is hardly a note in his mature compositions that is not fixed in nature.
This great force having spent itself, the art turns away and starts in another direction—as it must. The lyric symphony of Schubert appears. His was the most perfect song that ever asked for expression by the orchestra. With small intellectual power, with but scanty education of any sort, Schubert, by the very depth of his instinct, creates such pure beauty as to make intellectualism seem almost pedantic. He strings together melody after melody in “profuse, unmeditated art.” He was a pendant to Beethoven, and often enough in listening to Schubert’s music we catch the echo of his great contemporary. Then comes the so-called “Romantic School” of Schumann with its tender, personal qualities, its glamour, its roseate hues. Like all other romantic utterance it had a certain strangeness, a certain detachment from reality, and a certain waywardness which give it a bitter-sweet flavor of its own. Like all other romantic utterance, too, it was impatient and refused to wait the too-slow turning of the clock’s hands; it is the music of youth and of hope. Its effect on the development of the symphony was slight. It was ill at ease in the large spaces of symphonic form, for its hues were too changing, its moods too shifting, to answer the needs of the symphony. No really great symphonic composer appears between Schubert and Brahms, but during that period the rich idiom of the Romantic School had become assimilated as a part of the language of music.
Brahms using something of this romantic idiom, but having a broad feeling for construction, and firmly grounded on that one stable element of style, counterpoint, produced four symphonies worthy to stand alongside the best. They are restrained in style, for Brahms has something of that impersonality which is needed in music as much as in other forms of art (and one may say, in passing, that the greatest of all composers, Bach, is the most impersonal). The flexibility of the language of music increased rapidly during the nineteenth century aided by Wagner and the Romanticists, and in Brahms the symphony becomes less didactic and more introspective. I may, perhaps, make the comparison between music like his and that later stage of the English novel wherein the author desires the action to appear solely as the result of the psychology of the characters, and wherein, also, words are made to answer new demands and serve new purposes. Brahms could not have said what he did say had he been limited to the style of Mozart; nor could Meredith had he been limited to the style of Thackeray. Brahms’s symphonies, in consequence of the complicated nature of his style, are not easily apprehended by the casual listener. Let a confirmed lover of Longfellow, or even of Tennyson, take up for the first time “Love in the Valley” and he will have the same experience. Every word will convey its usual meaning to him, but the exquisite beauty of the poem will elude him. He will go back to “My Lost Youth,” or to “Blow, Bugles, Blow,” for healing from his bruises. Any one of my readers who has access to Brahms’s First Symphony should examine the passage which begins twenty measures before the poco sostenuto near the end of the first movement if he wished to understand something of Brahms’s powers of re-creating his material. Here is a melody of great beauty which is derived from the opening phrase of the symphony, and which has a bass derived from the first theme of the first movement. As it originally appeared it was full of stress as though yearning for an impossible fulfillment. Here its destiny is at last attained, and the law of its being fulfilled. Music progresses from one point of time to another.
Contemporaneous with Brahms stands Tschaikovsky to reveal how varied are the sources of musical expression. No two great men could be farther apart than these—one an eclectic, calm, thoughtful, and impersonal, restraining his utterances in order to understate and be believed; the other pouring out the very last bitter drop of his unhappiness and dissatisfaction entirely unmindful of a world that distrusts overstatement and has only a limited capacity for reaction from a colossal passion. Of Tschaikovsky’s sincerity there is no doubt whatever. He so believed; life was to him what we hear it to be in his symphonies. But life is not like that. If it were we should all have been destroyed long since by our own uncontrollable inner fires. So, aside from any technical considerations,—and he contributed nothing of importance to the development of the symphony,—Tschaikovsky represents a phase of life rather than life itself. Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony adds a new and interesting element to symphonic evolution. Dvořák was like Haydn and Burns, a son of the people, and the themes he employs in this symphony are essentially folk-melodies. But where Haydn merely tells his simple story with complete unconsciousness of its possible connection with life in general, Dvořák sees all his themes in their deeper significance. The “New World” Symphony is a saga retold.
A new phase in the development of the symphony appears in César Franck, whose musical lineage reaches back over the whole range of symphonic development and beyond. His spirit is mediæval. In his one symphony rhythm plays a lesser part, and one feels the music to be quite withdrawn from the vivid movement of life, and to live in a realm of its own. Franck was one of those rare spirits who remain untainted by the world. His symphony is a spiritual adventure; other symphonies are full of the actions and reactions of the real world in which their composers lived. This action and reaction always depends for its expression in music on the play and inter-play of rhythmic figures. Franck’s symphony broods over the world of the spirit; his least successful themes are those based on action.
My object in writing all this about the form and substance of the symphony, and in drawing comparisons between it and the novel or poetry, has not been to lead my readers to understand music through the other arts, for by themselves such comparisons are of small value. I have dwelt on these common characteristics of the arts because they exist, because they illuminate each other, and at the same time because they are too little considered. The only way to understand music is to practice it, or, failing that, to hear it under such conditions as will permit a certain opportunity for reflection. We are incapable of understanding symphonic music chiefly because we have so little practice in doing so. An occasional symphony concert is not enough. How shall this difficulty be overcome? There is a natural way out, and it consists in what is called “chamber music.” A piece of chamber music is a sort of domestic symphony. A string quartette, a pianoforte or violin sonata, a trio, quartette, quintette, etc.,—these are all little symphonies; the form is almost identical, the same devices of rhythm, melody, harmony, counterpoint, and so forth, are employed. In chamber music paucity of idea cannot be covered up by luxury of tone color; everything is exposed; so that only the greatest composers have written fine music in this form. Now, if in every community there were groups of people who played chamber music together, and if these would permit their friends to attend when they practice, the symphony would soon find plenty of listeners. Such rehearsals would give an opportunity to hear difficult passages played over and over again; there would be time for discussion, and, above all, for reflection. Every town and village should have a local chamber-music organization giving occasional informal concerts. Under these circumstances a sympathetic intimacy would soon be established between the performers and listeners and the music itself. The inevitable and indiscriminate pianoforte lesson is an obstacle to this much desired arrangement. Some of our children should be taught the violin or the violoncello in preference to the pianoforte. Then the family circle could hear sonatas for violin and pianoforte by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms, and would accomplish what years of attendance at symphony concerts could not bring about. Chamber music has the great advantage of being simple in detail; one can easily follow the four strands of melody in a string quartette, whereas the orchestra leaves one breathless and confused. The practice of chamber music by amateurs would be one of the very best means of building up true musical taste. I cannot dwell too insistently on the fact that the majority of those people who do not care for such music would soon learn to care for it if they had opportunities to listen to it under such conditions as I have described. The argument proves itself, without the evidence—plentiful enough—of individuals who have gone through the experience. Furthermore, by cultivating music in this way, we should gradually break down some of the social conditions which now operate against the art. If we all knew more about it and loved it for itself, we should give over our present adulation of technique. We should put the performer where he belongs as an interpreter of a greater man’s ideas. By our uncritical adulations we place him on far too high a pedestal.
I have spoken of certain social conditions which affect music unfavorably. There has been always a certain outcry against music because of its supposed emotionalism. The eye of cold intelligence, seeing the music-lover enthralled by a symphony, raises its lid in icy contempt for such a creature of feeling. The sociologist, observing musical performers, wonders why music seems to affect the appearance and the conduct of some of them so unfavorably. The pedagogue, who has his correct educational formula which operates like an adding-machine, and automatically turns out a certain number of mechanically educated children, each with a diploma clutched in a nervous hand—he tolerates music because it makes a pleasant break in diploma-giving at graduation time, and because it pleases the parents. The business man leaves music to his wife and daughters and is willing to subscribe to a symphony orchestra provided he does not have to go to hear it play. Now, if the sociologist would put himself in the place of the singer, who, endowed by nature with a fine voice, is able, on account of a public indifferently educated in music, to gain applause and an undue source of money, even though he has never achieved education of any sort whatever—if the sociologist would but think a little about sociology, he would perhaps finally understand that he himself is very likely at fault. For it is very likely that he knows almost nothing of this art which is one of the greatest forces at his disposal. He is, perhaps, one of the large number of persons who make musical conditions what they are. Public performers are the victims, not the criminals. We must remember of old how disastrous has been the isolation of any class of workers from their fellows.
I have referred in this and in the preceding chapters to certain unities in symphonic music—in its several elements of rhythm, melody, and harmony, and in the whole. I have said that every object is unified in itself, and that it is a part of a greater whole. In this sense a symphony is a living thing; every member of it has its own function, and contributes a necessary part to the whole. But is not this equally true if we carry the argument into life itself and say: Here is a thing of beauty created by man; it is a part of him—one of his star-gleams; can he be complete if he loses it altogether? Can his spirit hope for freedom if he depends on his mind alone? Is the satisfaction of intellectual or material achievement enough? Would he not find in music a realm where he would breathe a purer air and be happier because he would leave behind him all those unanswerable questions which forever cry a halt to his intelligence? Moral idealism is not enough for the spirit of men and women, for, humanity being what it is, morality is bound to crystallize into dogma. The Puritans were moral in their own fashion, but they were as far away from what man’s life ought to be—under the stars, and with the flowers blooming at his feet—as were the gay courtiers whom they despised. Intellectual idealism is not enough, because it lacks sympathy. We all need something that shall be entirely detached from life and, at the same time, be wholly true to it. Our spirit needs some joyousness which objects, ideas, or possessions cannot give it. We must have a world beyond the one we know—a world not of jasper and diamonds, but of dreams and visions. It must be an illusion to our senses, a reality to our spirit. It must tell the truth in terms we cannot understand, for it is not given to us to know in any other way.
[12] The reason for this is one to which I referred in the chapter on “The Opera”—namely, that a work of art must not overstrain the capacities of those human beings for whom it was intended.
One of the most unfortunate conditions surrounding our musical life is the small part men take in it. This is not altogether their fault. Their business is engrossing, and concert-going is made difficult for them. There should be some music for the business man between the time when he leaves his office and the hour of his dinner, and it should be so arranged as to cause him the minimum of trouble and give him the maximum of enjoyment. This means a half-hour or forty minutes of good music available, say, at five o’clock, and not too far away. It means, also, that he shall be provided with a repetition of every long or complicated composition so that he may have a chance to understand it. The average listener hears a Brahms symphony once in, say, two or three years, and there is little chance of his finding it intelligible. No doubt, in course of time this will come about. No doubt, too, workers in shops and offices will by and by be able to hear a little really fine music at lunch time.[13] The influx of men into concert rooms would be of great benefit to the cause of music, as well as to the men themselves. We should, after a time, get rid of that curious Anglo-Saxon idea that art is effeminate, and should begin to value it for what it really is. Whenever I think of this mistaken notion the figure of Michael Angelo rises before me. There was as heroic a man as even the world of war ever produced; capable alike of the Herculean task of the Sistine frescoes,—the actual physical labors of which would kill an ordinary man (and Michael Angelo was then over sixty years old),—of the heroic Moses, and again of that most tender and beautiful of all sculpture, the Pietà; a stern and noble nature capable of fighting for his principles no matter what the risk. Or I think of Beethoven, ill, lonely, deaf, and poor, but nevertheless creating virile music of the kind we know. Or of Bach, sturdy as an oak tree, without recognition from the world, bringing up a large family on almost nothing a year, wholesome, profound, and true—the equal in all that goes to make a man of any “captain of industry,” any soldier, or any statesman. These are the ones I should match men with. I would have men listen to the strains of these composers, look at the works of that colossal genius of Italy and ask themselves: Is art effeminate or am I blind and deaf?
But men, having comparatively little leisure, cannot be expected to waste it on sentimental music or on mere virtuosity. A violinist who plays sweet little pieces, or who astonishes you by his technical skill, should expect no response from human beings who are at work day by day and hour by hour facing the hard facts of life. Men, dealing with exact laws or under the necessities of trade and barter, are forced to distinguish between true and false, between reality and unreality, for their very existence depends on so doing. I do not mean by this that these common experiences of men fit them to understand great music, but I think men possess thereby a certain sense of values and a certain discrimination between what is real and what is false, and that a great piece of real music will find an answer in them. I believe that the opera has much to do with the average man’s attitude toward music. To spend from three to four hours in an overheated and badly ventilated opera house after a day of business, and to listen to the sort of hectic emotionalism which is common in opera is enough to disgust the average business man with all music. How patient he is! But Beethoven, who loved and hated, and suffered and triumphed, we can all understand. When we come to listen to the opening of his violin concerto, for example, we must all say: Here is a man. And when we have compassed the whole of that great composition we shall learn to say: Here is reality turned true at last. We shall then have learned one of the great lessons that art teaches—namely, that there is nothing in the world so heroic, so noble, or so profound but that its qualities may be increased by the imagination and the skill of the great artist. For however profound a human emotion may be or however noble a deed, it becomes more profound or more noble when it is seen in relation to the whole of life and over a stretch of time. The artist gives it true perspective, and enables us really so to see it. Dante the poet is greater than Dante the lover.
But my plea that music should be made easy of access for men is based chiefly on the fact that they need it. It is so easy for human beings—men or women—to become completely submerged in the details of life; and the round of daily acts and daily associations does, in course of time, completely engulf many people, so that they only catch glimpses of something beyond—glimpses of a promised land into which they never enter. I can conceive almost any business as being interesting in itself; the “game” of life has its own rewards; and there is no trade, no profession, no business that does not offer some play to the imagination. But every weight needs a counterbalance, and every human being whose daily occupation is full of practical detail must save himself or herself by some equal force in the opposite direction. The law is as old as life itself. The best preparation for an education in engineering is a course in the classics, and the man who grinds all things in the mill of business eventually goes into the hopper himself.
But love of beauty is a secret and inviolate thing. Our tendency to-day is to seek our salvation—of whatever kind—in the crowd. We form literary and musical clubs, and drama leagues, and art circles to accomplish what each person should do alone. This is an old human fallacy. To attempt to be literary or artistic or socialistic or religious by means of an organization is to waive the whole question. There is only one way of being literary and that is to love good literature and to read it in privacy; there is only one way to understand the drama and that is to read by yourself the great plays from Æschylus onward, and to see as many good plays as possible. I know that it is impossible to hear the symphonies of Beethoven except with some thousands of other people; nevertheless, you are yourself alone, and, by yourself, you must solve the mystery. Never can there be a more complete isolation of the individual than when, sitting with the crowd, a piece of fine music begins. Never is your own individuality so precious to you as then. Straight to your soul come these sounds, automatically separating all the diviner part of you from the lower, singling out what is commonly inarticulate and inchoate, and fanning into life again that smothered spark which never wholly dies. How impossible it is to look at pictures with other people. The mind and the imagination demand freedom to wander at will, to ponder, to speculate. What passes from the picture to you, and from you to the picture, is a sort of trembling recognition, too delicate to be shared, too intimate to be uttered. So it is with books. You need silence and retirement so as to feel the perspective of knowledge, so that your mind may wander through whatever courses open to it.
It has often been remarked that, in America, women have now both leisure and independence to pursue the arts and to satisfy their desire for what is called “culture,” and that in this respect they have taken the place frequently occupied by men. The most characteristic element in this situation is, however, that in the pursuit of intellectual or artistic advancement, woman joins a club! These clubs are of very great use to the individuals who belong to them and to the communities in which they flourish when they undertake—as they frequently do—the betterment of social conditions. Any one familiar with what they have accomplished in this respect must pay them a real tribute. But in their pursuit of “culture” they have been less successful, and for the reasons already outlined here. They pursue too many subjects, and they dissipate their energies. But above all, they seem unconscious of the fundamental principle of education which is that one really educates one’s self. For education, after all, consists in the gradual enlargement of one’s own perceptions through coming in contact with greater minds, and its processes are secret and intensely personal. As you read “The Idiot,” for example, you connect Mishkin with Lohengrin, Parsifal, the Arthurian legends, or even with Christ. The extraordinary account of his thoughts as he falls in the epileptic fit, and his use of the words, “And there was no more time,” bring up a whole fascinating sequence of psychological speculations. The character of Nastasya calls to your memory scores of other characters from Kundry down to Sonia, and, as you read, the whole warp and woof of life, shot through and through with its drab and scarlet, flashes before you. Now, these contacts are as nothing if some one else makes them. The spark must strike in your own imagination. You yourself must feel the current of this magnetism which reaches from the earth to the stars and makes all things akin. A good book should be a provocation to the reader. A club for “culture” is a collection of human beings each hoping for vicarious salvation through the other.
Women’s clubs not only waste energy in their pursuit of knowledge, but they debilitate the intellectual strength of the individual woman. Nothing could be worse for the mind than the peaceful acceptance of the point of view of another without resistance and without the test of your own thoughts and your own personality. Smatterings of knowledge are almost useless. Nothing is yours until you make it so.
The relation between music and life is, then, an intimate and vital relation. Any person, young or old, who does not sing and to whom music has no meaning, is by just so much a poorer person in all that goes to make life happy, joyous, and significant. Any community which employs no form of musical expression is by just so much inarticulate and disorganized as a community. Any church that buys its music and never produces any of its own loses just so much in spiritual power.
We all need music because it is a fluent, free, and beautiful form of expression for those deeper impulses of ours which are denied expression by words. Our speech is too highly specialized; we discriminate with words instead of with inflections and gestures; we smother our natural expressiveness; we hold words to be synonyms of thought, whereas thought is half feeling and instinct and imagination, no one of which can really find issue in exact terms. All great literature is inexact.
Music frees us. Not only does it let each of us say for himself what he cannot say in words, but, at its best, it reveals to us a higher reach of life, detached, yet a part of the inmost being of us all. When we truly respond to it, there is set up in us a certain harmonious vibration which tunes us to one another, to the mother earth, the everlasting sea, and to that larger world of suns, stars, and planets of which they are a part.
Nothing ever dies. What we call death is only a transformation from one form of life to another. All the music that ever was still sounds; all the music that is to be still slumbers. Life and death are one, and, in the truest sense, the whole universe is a song.
[13] I do not mean a phonographic record of the tenor solo in “L’Elisir d’Amore,” or anything of that sort. I mean something which will be more than a casual moment’s entertainment.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
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