I
There are three stages in the history of every new truth. Take, as
an example, the Darwinian theory. First of all it is assailed with
tooth and claw by a thousand people who know nothing about it and
have never given ten minutes' consecutive thought to it, but who hate
it simply because it disturbs their long mental inertia. Then, when
its truth becomes more and more evident, and too many clear-headed
people believe in it for it to be laughed down, and too many strong
people adopt it for it to be howled down, the partisans of the older
school become obnoxiously polite to it; they no longer call it a mass
of error, but they graciously permit it to take rank, after their
own particular theory, as a secondary and imperfect kind of truth.
Finally, it is universally accepted, purged of its admixture of error,
and both it and its predecessors are then seen to be just inevitable
stages in the development of the human mind, the second having no more
title than the first to be considered the end of the story. At first
Darwin's theory of development is thought to be crushed by the mere
flinging at it of citations from the Bible; then the professional
theologians try to impress it into their own service; finally its
victory over misunderstanding and ignorance and prejudice is complete,
but by this time it is no longer the ultimate theory of things, but
only a stepping-stone to other theories. Something of the same kind
has happened, or is in process of happening, with programme music.
Formerly the dear old virginal academics shuddered if the foul word
polluted their chaste ears; now they condescend to discuss it, more
or less temperately, but always with the idea that it is merely an
inferior branch of the great music-family--a kind of poor relation of
absolute music; in a little while the rationality of the thing will be
beyond question, but by that time it will probably be making way for
something still newer than itself--though what that may be we have at
present no means of knowing. Just now we are in the second stage of
the controversy upon the subject. The advocate of programme music, it
should be said at once, is not necessarily a hater of absolute music,
nor is the lover of absolute music necessarily an enemy of programme
music. One can like Wagner and Strauss and Liszt and Berlioz and still
appreciate to the full the Bach fugue or the Mozart or Beethoven or
Brahms symphony. Still it is an unfortunate fact that too often a
liking for the one kind of art goes along with an abhorrence of the
other. Any narrowness of this kind is to be regretted on either side;
but if one partisan exhibits more of it than the other, I should say
it is the absolutist, who is usually much less fair towards programme
music, and less open to conviction, than the programmist is to absolute
music. And since the contest between the two schools is very strenuous
just now, and as one of the services of the critic is to give an art
room to breathe and grow by clearing away dead traditions from around
it, some good may be done to the creative musician, as well as to the
ordinary concert-goer, by a review of the field of dispute between the
antagonists.