The excellence and the wisdom of these thoughts need no pointing out.
What is the defect in them--or, rather, wherein are they incomplete?
This may be seen, in the first place, by playing off Maeterlinck's
theory against that of Wagner. It is quite true, as Wagner says, that
his kind of music-drama has one great advantage over the poetical
drama: that by surrendering certain outlying interests it can
concentrate all its power on the central interest--giving full play,
as Wagner would express it, to the inner motives of the dramatic
action. But, on the other hand, music must, from its very nature, fail
to touch a score of ideas and passions that are within us, and for
whose expression we are compelled to go to poetry that is unhampered
by music. Thus there are certain mental states with which music can
have practically no communion. The girl can sing, as Ruskin has told
us, of her lost love, but the miser cannot sing of his lost money-bags.
For a study of the miser, then, and of all the shades of character
that resemble his, we must look, not to music, but to poetry or prose.
Again, any one who has seen Verdi's _Otello_ on the stage must have
been struck with the relative feebleness of the character-drawing
of Iago. A monster of this kind, made up entirely of cunning and
deception, is a concept almost entirely foreign to the art of music,
which does indeed give a heightened value to the primary emotions,
but, on the other hand, has difficulty in reaching beyond these. One
frequently finds it hard to believe that Wagner's Mime, who sings such
pleasant music, is really a hateful character, owing to the difficulty
music has in expressing the mean and despicable. It can render, mainly
by physical means, the horrible and the terrible, but the contemptible,
the abortive, are practically beyond its sphere.
Nor, again, even in the field where music and poetry meet, does
music so far cover the ground, as Wagner would contend, as to make
non-musical poetry a superfluity, a mere echo of what can be heard in
fuller tones in the drama that is a blend of poetry and music. For the
sheer emotional beauty of pity, for exquisite tenderness and complete
consolation, nothing, in any art, could surpass certain portions of
_Parsifal_. But it is essentially _emotion_ here, not thought; it
is wholly esoteric; it achieves its miracle by withdrawing into its
own lovely atmosphere the crude, hard facts of the world, and there
transforming them. If we want an expression of pity that shall bear
more closely on our real life, give us the emotional balm at the same
time that it allows free play to our philosophic thought, we must go to
poetry. Look at the colloquy of the pots in the Rubaiyat, in which the
humanist Omar empties the vials of his compassion upon the marred and
broken beings of this world:--
"Said one among them--'Surely not in vain
My substance of the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'
Then said a Second--'Ne'er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy:
And He that with His hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.'
After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
'They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?'"
There is not here the sensuous anodyne of Wagner's music, but there is
something equally precious; the thought is farther flung; it brings
more elements of reality back with it to be bathed and softened in
emotion; it stirs the more vital philosophic depths. As one reads
the verses, one thinks sadly of all the bruised and broken beings
of the world, the poor misshapen souls who carry within them, from
no fault of their own, the seeds of the things that are to blight or
slay them--the men afflicted with incurable vices of body or mind or
will, the criminals, often more sinned against than sinning, upon whom
society wreaks its legalised vengeance. We have not merely a warm wave
of pity passing through us, as in the case of _Parsifal_; the exquisite
art of the thing is strengthened by the closeness of its association
with innumerable problems of theology, of philosophy, and of social
science. So, again, with the line Maeterlinck himself places in the
mouth of old Arkel, after one of the most terrible scenes in _Pelleas
and Melisanda_: "If I were God, how I should pity the heart of men!"
Music, in its grave, wise speech after a dire catastrophe, may almost
compass some such wealth of ethical significance as this; but there
is in Maeterlinck's line a peculiar fulness of divination that can
be conveyed to us only in words. Numberless other instances might be
cited, all proving this existence of a philosophic sphere to which even
the greatest music can, by reason of its indefiniteness, never have
access. Matthew Arnold may have been a prejudiced witness, being a poet
himself; yet one feels that he has the right with him in that passage,
in his _Epilogue to Lessing's Laocöon_, in which he points out how the
painter and the musician excel respectively in expressing "the aspect
of the moment" and "the feeling of the moment," but that the poet deals
more philosophically with the total life and interlacement of things:--
"He must life's movement tell!
The thread which binds it all in one,
And not its separate parts alone.
The movement he must tell of life,
Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife;
His eye must travel down, at full,
The long, unpausing spectacle;
With faithful unrelaxing force
Attend it from its primal source,
From change to change and year to year,
Attend it of its mid career,
Attend it to the last repose,
And solemn silence of its close."
Arnold's expression might perhaps have been a little more artistic,
but there is no controverting the general truth he voices--that poetry
looks before and after in a way that music cannot possibly do; is wider
in its philosophic sweep than music, clearer in its vision, making up
for its weaker idealism by its sympathetic evocation of a hundred notes
that are denied to music.