XI

One point still remains to be discussed, though we need only touch on

it very briefly. How far can music represent external things--ought

it, indeed, to try to represent external things at all? It was

Schopenhauer, I think, who said that music was not a representative

but a presentative art. But that was very superficial psychologising

even in his day, and it is still more superficial in ours. The whole

problem is exceedingly simple if people, in their anxiety to prove

that music cannot "imitate," would not confuse it unnecessarily.

Heaven only knows how much bastard æsthetic has been born of that

unfortunate remark of Beethoven's about the Pastoral Symphony, which

we have already had occasion to examine. As a specimen, look at this

quotation from Victor Cousin, intended to demonstrate, in its own

way, that music must not be "painting," but only an "expression of

emotion." "Give the wisest symphonist a tempest to render. Nothing is

easier than to imitate the whistling of the winds and the noise of the

thunder. But by what combination of ordered sounds could he present

to our sight the lightning flashes which suddenly rend the veil of

night, and that which is the most terrific aspect of the tempest, the

alternate movement of the waves, now rising mountain high, now sinking

and seeming to fall headlong into bottomless abysses? If the hearer

has not been told beforehand what the subject is, he will never divine

it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite

of scientific skill and genius, sounds cannot represent forms. Music,

rightly advised, will refuse to enter upon a hopeless contest; it will

not undertake to express the rise and fall of the waves and other like

phenomena; it will do better; with sounds it will produce in our soul

the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes

of the tempest. It is thus that Haydn will become the rival, even the

conqueror of the painter, because it has been given to music to move

and sway the soul even more profoundly than painting."[37]

The point is, be it observed, that unless you were told beforehand, you

could not say whether a given orchestral piece was meant to represent

a tempest or a battle; the composer is therefore advised not to try

to paint a tempest, but to "produce in our soul the feelings which

successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest."

Why, how in the name of all æsthetic innocence does this help us? How

are we, in the absence of a verbal indication, to distinguish "the

feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of

the tempest" from the feelings which would arise in us during the

various scenes of a battle? We only hear, that is, a certain mass of

sound; how are we to know, from the mere "feeling" this arouses in us,

that it refers to a battle or a tempest or anything else? What man, for

example, listening to solemn music, can possibly know whether it is

meant to describe the death of Napoleon, the funeral of Mr. Gladstone,

the poetic contemplation of nature, the opening of the St. Louis

Exhibition, the life-work of John Stuart Mill, or anything else under

the sun? The "feelings" are perfectly incompetent to pierce through

the indefinite tone to the definite scene that inspired it. What the

composer has to do is to tell us what this definite scene is; nobody,

for example, would have guessed that the fourth movement of Schumann's

_Rhenish_ symphony had its origin in the installation of the Archbishop

of Geissel as Archbishop of Cologne, if the composer himself had not

told us so. Nobody would have known that a certain part of the Pastoral

Symphony represents a peasant's gratitude after a storm, if Beethoven

had not said so himself. The "feelings" are no more reliable guides in

cases of this kind than the "painting" is. And if the composer has to

give us a verbal clue in order to let us know definitely what feelings

he is representing, he has only to give us a verbal clue to make it

quite clear to us what his painting is intended to represent; and there

is no more odium in needing the verbal clue in the latter case than

there is in the former.

No one in his senses has ever pretended that music alone could depict

external things so accurately that we could recognise them infallibly

at once, without any assistance from the sight, as in opera, or from

a verbal accompaniment. As M. Alfred Ernst has put it: "It is not a

question of painting an object--music could not succeed in doing that;

nor is it a question of reproducing exactly the sounds of nature,

such as the murmur of flowing water, the rumbling of thunder, the

song of birds; but, when these phenomena are in the subject that is

being treated, of recalling them to the mind by means of tone.... Thus

conceived, music does not materialise itself in becoming descriptive;

it would be more accurate to say that it spiritualises the phenomena of

nature...." And he shows how Mozart, for example, employs description.

"In his _Don Juan_ he has more than once translated the gesture, the

mimic, of his personages. We may cite, for instance, the ascending

scales in the orchestra in the duel between the Commandant and Don

Juan. The figures in the bass refer to the old man, those above to

Juan; each time that one of the two adversaries steps towards the other

and attacks, this figure comes out, strident, quick as the thrust of a

sword, and at the moment when Don Juan presses the Commandant, lunges

at him time after time, strikes him and kills him, the violin scales

succeed each other without giving the auditor time to breathe....

At the beginning of the sextet, when Leporello tries to slip away,

fearing to be taken for Don Juan, the orchestra reproduces his stealthy

movements; we see the unhappy wretch creeping along cautiously, his

back bent, feeling round for a way out."[38] Nor does one need to be

reminded of the numerous pieces of "description," of "imitation," in

Wagner--of the water-music, the fire-music, the swish of Klingsor's

spear, the voices of the forest, and so on. Every dramatic, or, indeed,

vocal writer is full of passages of this kind; it simply cannot be

avoided in music that aims at something beyond abstract note-spinning.

But in every case, as we can see, the music is not left to tell its

story alone; we are not compelled to guess the subject represented

merely from the tones themselves. The subject is told us in some way

or other--we see Don Juan thrusting at the Commandant, or the spear

flying at Parsifal's head, or the fire licking the couch of Brynhilde;

or else there is, in the words of the song or opera, some suggestion

of the external thing that is being illustrated in the music. And in

the symphonic poem, all that we require in order that everything may

be perfectly clear is a statement, in the programme, of the picture

upon which the music is based. I am not expected to know, merely from

the tones alone, what the "giant" motive in the _Rheingold_ is meant

to represent; but when I am told that it relates to the giants, I

can take delight in the expressiveness of its lumbering, unwieldy

movements. Similarly I must be told that the opening pages of _Also

sprach Zarathustra_ are meant as a representation of the majesty and

spaciousness of Nature. And--again to draw upon the argument of the

foregoing pages--there is nothing that can be done in this line in

the song or the opera that cannot be done quite as effectually in

the symphonic poem, if composers would only give their hearers the

same full insight into their literary intentions as the song or opera

writer does, and if hearers would only take the trouble to master

these intentions before they listen to the music that is based upon

them. If they would do this, their pleasure in the symphonic poem

would be enormously increased; everything in it would be alive to

them. For myself, at any rate, to listen to _Till Eulenspiegel_ or

_Ein Heldenleben_ or _Don Quixote_ is not only to enjoy the music but

to see the whole action as clearly as if I were reading it in a book

or watching it on the stage. I get none of the boredom, none of the

unfortunate provocations to laughter, that are inseparable from that

artificial, stagey form of art, the opera. I miss, of course, some of

the factors that make opera so glorious--the inexpressible thrill

communicated by the human voice, the quickening of the pulse that is

given by the movements of the actors and the catastrophes of the stage;

but on the other hand I am spared a great many things, and I have the

satisfaction of knowing that my sense of form is receiving the purest,

most undiluted pleasure it is possible for it to receive in poetic

music. The case for programme music is quite as strong as the case for

opera or for the symphony. That many stupid things have been done in

its name, that many fools and weaklings have fought under its banner,

counts for nothing; how many symphonies, how many operas, are there

that the world would willingly let die! The rightness of the form is

not affected by the wrongness of the people who choose to work in it;

and that the form itself is essentially right, I have, I hope, given

adequate proof. Finally, to the question of how far music is justified

in trying to suggest external things, we can only say that it is better

not to be too dogmatic. Things that would have seemed impossible a

hundred years ago are done with ease to-day. Who would believe that a

windmill could be represented in music? Yet Strauss's windmill in _Don

Quixote_ is really extraordinarily clever and satisfying; he suggests

wonderfully, too, the caracoling of the horse as the knight puts him

through his paces. His pictorial faculty, indeed, is something unique

in the history of music; Wagner's is only an imperfect instrument by

the side of it. The representative power of music is growing day by

day. The only æsthetic fact we can be sure of is this, that no piece

of representation will be tolerated unless it is at the same time

_music_. That is the ultimate test; the imitative passages that make us

smile are the passages that are merely imitative, without sufficient

musical charm to keep them alive for us. But here, of course, we simply

get back to the position already advanced in this article--that in all

poetic music there must be as thorough a satisfaction as possible not

only of the literary or the pictorial but of the musical sense.