That music, by and of itself, cannot express the intellectual element
in the beautiful dream-images of art with precision, is a palpable
truth. Yet, by its imperial dominion over the sphere of emotion and
sentiment, the connection of the latter with complicated mental
phenomena is made to bring into the domain of tone vague and shifting
fancies and pictures. How much further music can be made to assimilate
to the other arts in directness of mental suggestion, by wedding to it
the noblest forms of poetry, and making each the complement of the
other, is the knotty problem which underlies the great art-controversy
about which this article concerns itself. On the one side we have the
claim that music is the all-sufficient law unto itself; that its
appeal to sympathy is through the intrinsic sweetness of harmony and
tune, and the intellect must be satisfied with what it may
accidentally glean in this harvest-field; that, in the rapture
experienced in the sensuous apperception of its beauty, lies the
highest phase of art-sensibility. Therefore, concludes the syllogism,
it matters nothing as to the character of the libretto or poem to
whose words the music is arranged, so long as the dramatic framework
suffices as a support for the flowery festoons of song, which drape
its ugliness and beguile attention by the fascinations of bloom and
grace. On the other hand, the apostles of the new musical philosophy
insist that art is something more than a vehicle for the mere sense of
the beautiful, an exquisite provocation wherewith to startle the sense
of a selfish, epicurean pleasure; that its highest function--to follow
the idea of the Greek Plato, and the greatest of his modern disciples,
Schopenhauer--is to serve as the incarnation of the true and the good;
and, even as Goethe makes the Earth-Spirit sing in "Faust"--
"'Tis thus ever at the loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by"--
so the highest art is that which best embodies the immortal thought of
the universe as reflected in the mirror of man's consciousness; that
music, as speaking the most spiritual language of any of the
art-family, is burdened with the most pressing responsibility as the
interpreter between the finite and the infinite; that all its forms
must be measured by the earnestness and success with which they teach
and suggest what is best in aspiration and truest in thought; that
music, when wedded to the highest form of poetry (the drama), produces
the consummate art-result, and sacrifices to some extent its power of
suggestion, only to acquire a greater glory and influence, that of
investing definite intellectual images with spiritual raiment, through
which they shine on the supreme altitudes of ideal thought; that to
make this marriage perfect as an art-form and fruitful in result, the
two partners must come as equals, neither one the drudge of the
other; that in this organic fusion music and poetry contribute, each
its best, to emancipate art from its thraldom to that which is merely
trivial, commonplace, and accidental, and make it a revelation of all
that is most exalted in thought, sentiment, and purpose. Such is the
æsthetic theory of Richard Wagner's art-work.