In books it is easy to make mention of the forgotten dead to whom we are
indebted, and to acknowledge an obligation at the same time and place
that we incur it. The more original a writer is, the more pleasure will
he take in calling attention to the forgotten work of those who have gone
before him. The conventions of painting and music, on the other hand,
while they admit of borrowing no less freely than literature does, do not
admit of acknowledgement; it is impossible to interrupt a piece of music,
or paint some words upon a picture to explain that the composer or
painter was at such and such a point indebted to such and such a source
for his inspiration, but it is not less impossible to avoid occasionally
borrowing, or rather taking, for there is no need of euphemism, from
earlier work. Where, then, is the line to be drawn between lawful and
unlawful adoption of what has been done by others? This question is such
a nice one that there are almost as many opinions upon it as there are
painters and musicians.
To leave painting on one side, if a musician wants some forgotten passage
in an earlier writer, is he, knowing where this sleeping beauty lies, to
let it sleep on unknown and unenjoyed, or shall he not rather wake it and
take it—as likely enough the earlier master did before him—with, or
without modification? It may be said this should be done by republishing
the original work with its composer’s name, giving him his due laurels.
So it should, if the work will bear it; but more commonly times will have
so changed that it will not. A composer may want a bar, or bar and a
half, out of, say, a dozen pages—he may not want even this much without
more or less modification—is he to be told that he must republish the ten
or dozen original pages within which the passage he wants lies buried, as
the only righteous way of giving it new life? No one should be allowed
such dog-in-the-manger-like ownership in beauty that because it has once
been revealed to him therefore none for ever after shall enjoy it unless
he be their cicerone. If this rule were sanctioned, he who first
produced anything beautiful would sign its death warrant for an earlier
or later date, or at best would tether that which should forthwith begin
putting girdles round the world.
Beauty lives not for the self-glorification of the priests of any art,
but for the enjoyment of priests and laity alike. He is the best
art-priest who brings most beauty most home to the hearts of most men.
If any one tells an artist that part of what he has brought home is not
his but another’s, “Yea, let him take all,” should be his answer. He
should know no self in the matter. He is a fisher of men’s hearts from
love of winning them, and baits his hook with what will best take them
without much heed where he gets it from. He can gain nothing by offering
people what they know or ought to know already, he will not therefore
take from the living or lately dead; for the same reason he will
instinctively avoid anything with which his hearers will be familiar,
except as recognised common form, but beyond these limits he should take
freely even as he hopes to be one day taken from.
True, there is a hidden mocking spirit in things which ensures that he
alone can take well who can also make well, but it is no less true that
he alone makes well who takes well. A man must command all the resources
of his art, and of these none is greater than knowledge of what has been
done by predecessors. What, I wonder, may he take from these—how may he
build himself upon them and grow out of them—if he is to make it his
chief business to steer clear of them? A safer canon is that the
development of a musician should be like that of a fugue or first
movement, in which, the subject having been enounced, it is essential
that thenceforward everything shall be both new and old at one and the
same time—new, but not too new—old, but not too old.
Indeed no musician can be original in respect of any large percentage of
his work. For independently of his turning to his own use the past
labour involved in musical notation, which he makes his own as of right
without more thanks to those who thought it out than we give to him who
invented wheels when we hire a cab, independently of this, it is
surprising how large a part even of the most original music consists of
common form scale passages, and closes. _Mutatis mutandis_, the same
holds good with even the most original book or picture; these passages or
forms are as light and air, common to all of us; but the principle having
been once admitted that some parts of a man’s work cannot be
original—not, that is to say, if he has descended with only a reasonable
amount of modification—where is the line to be drawn? Where does common
form begin and end?
The answer is that it is not mere familiarity that should forbid
borrowing, but familiarity with a passage as associated with special
surroundings. If certain musical progressions are already associated
with many different sets of antecedents and consequents, they have no
special association, except in so far as they may be connected with a
school or epoch; no one, therefore, is offended at finding them
associated with one set the more. Familiarity beyond a certain point
ceases to be familiarity, or at any rate ceases to be open to the
objections that lie against that which, though familiar, is still not
familiar as common form. Those on the other hand who hold that a
musician should never knowingly borrow will doubtless say that common
form passages are an obvious and notorious exception to their rule, and
the one the limits of which are easily recognised in practice however
hard it may be to define them neatly on paper.
It is not suggested that when a musician wants to compose an air or
chorus he is to cast about for some little-known similar piece and lay it
under contribution. This is not to spring from the loins of living
ancestors but to batten on dead men’s bones. He who takes thus will ere
long lose even what little power to take he may have ever had. On the
other hand there is no enjoyable work in any art which is not easily
recognised as the affiliated outcome of something that has gone before
it. This is more especially true of music, whose grammar and stock in
trade are so much simpler than those of any other art. He who loves
music will know what the best men have done, and hence will have
numberless passages from older writers floating at all times in his mind,
like germs in the air, ready to hook themselves on to anything of an
associated character. Some of these he will reject at once, as already
too strongly wedded to associations of their own; some are tried and
found not so suitable as was thought; some one, however, will probably
soon assert itself as either suitable, or easily altered so as to become
exactly what is wanted; if, indeed, it is the right passage in the right
man’s mind, it will have modified itself unbidden already. How, then,
let me ask again, is the musician to comport himself towards those
uninvited guests of his thoughts? Is he to give them shelter, cherish
them, and be thankful? or is he to shake them rudely off, bid them
begone, and go out of his way so as not to fall in with them again?
Can there be a doubt what the answer to this question should be? As it
is fatal deliberately to steer on to the work of other composers, so it
is no less fatal deliberately to steer clear of it; music to be of any
value must be a man’s freest and most instinctive expression. Instinct
in the case of all the greatest artists, whatever their art may be, bids
them attach themselves to, and grow out of those predecessors who are
most congenial to them. Beethoven grew out of Mozart and Haydn, adding a
leaven which in the end leavened the whole lump, but in the outset adding
little; Mozart grew out of Haydn, in the outset adding little; Haydn grew
out of Domenico Scarlatti and Emmanuel Bach, adding, in the outset,
little. These men grew out of John Sebastian Bach, for much as both of
them admired Handel I cannot see that they allowed his music to influence
theirs. Handel even in his own lifetime was more or less of a survival
and protest; he saw the rocks on to which music was drifting and steered
his own good ship wide of them; as for his musical parentage, he grew out
of the early Italians and out of Purcell.
The more original a composer is the more certain is he to have made
himself a strong base of operations in the works of earlier men, striking
his roots deep into them, so that he, as it were, gets inside them and
lives in them, they in him, and he in them; then, this firm foothold
having been obtained, he sallies forth as opportunity directs, with the
result that his works will reflect at once the experiences of his own
musical life and of those musical progenitors to whom a loving instinct
has more particularly attached him. The fact that his work is deeply
imbued with their ideas and little ways, is not due to his deliberately
taking from them. He makes their ways his own as children model
themselves upon those older persons who are kind to them. He loves them
because he feels they felt as he does, and looked on men and things much
as he looks upon them himself; he is an outgrowth in the same direction
as that in which they grew; he is their son, bound by every law of
heredity to be no less them than himself; the manner, therefore, which
came most naturally to them will be the one which comes also most
naturally to him as being their descendant. Nevertheless no matter how
strong a family likeness may be, (and it is sometimes, as between Handel
and his forerunners, startlingly close) two men of different generations
will never be so much alike that the work of each will not have a
character of its own—unless indeed the one is masquerading as the other,
which is not tolerable except on rare occasions and on a very small
scale. No matter how like his father a man may be we can always tell the
two apart; but this once given, so that he has a clear life of his own,
then a strong family likeness to some one else is no more to be regretted
or concealed if it exists than to be affected if it does not.
It is on these terms alone that attractive music can be written, and it
is a musician’s business to write attractive music. He is, as it were,
tenant for life of the estate of and trustee for that school to which he
belongs. Normally, that school will be the one which has obtained the
firmest hold upon his own countrymen. An Englishman cannot successfully
write like a German or a Hungarian, nor is it desirable that he should
try. If, by way of variety, we want German or Hungarian music we shall
get a more genuine article by going direct to German or Hungarian
composers. For the most part, however, the soundest Englishmen will be
stay-at-homes, in spite of their being much given to summer flings upon
the continent. Whether as writers, therefore, or as listeners,
Englishmen should stick chiefly to Purcell, Handel, and Sir Arthur
Sullivan. True, Handel was not an Englishman by birth, but no one was
ever more thoroughly English in respect of all the best and most
distinguishing features of Englishmen. As a young man, though Italy and
Germany were open to him, he adopted the country of Purcell, feeling it,
doubtless, to be, as far as he was concerned, more Saxon than Saxony
itself. He chose England; nor can there be a doubt that he chose it
because he believed it to be the country in which his music had the best
chance of being appreciated. And what does this involve, if not that
England, take it all round, is the most musically minded country in the
world? That this is so, that it has produced the finest music the world
has known, and is therefore the finest school of music in the world,
cannot be reasonably disputed.
To the born musician, it is hardly necessary to say, neither the
foregoing remarks nor any others about music, except those that may be
found in every text book, can be of the smallest use. Handel knew this
and no man ever said less about his art—or did more in it. There are
some semi-apocryphal {128} rules for tuning the harpsichord that pretend,
with what truth I know not, to hail from him, but here his theoretical
contributions to music begin and end. The rules begin “In this chord”
(the tonic major triad) “tune the fifth pretty flat, and the third
considerably too sharp.” There is an absence of fuss about these words
which suggests Handel himself.
The written and spoken words of great painters or musicians who can talk
or write is seldom lasting—artists are a dumb inarticulate folk, whose
speech is in their hands not in their tongues. They look at us like
seals, but cannot talk to us. To the musician, therefore, what has been
said above is useless, if not worse; its object will have been attained
if it aids the uncreative reader to criticise what he hears with more
intelligence.