THE BRAIN PROPRIETOR
“Why do you call this a work on art,” says Mrs. Ogi, “when you are
dealing entirely with literature?”
“All the arts are one,” says her husband. “They are expressions of the
human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We
realize this when we see an artist like Michelangelo using blocks of
marble and molecules of paint and printed words, and giving us with each
medium the record of the same personality. There have been others who
used the acted drama and the lyric, like Shakespeare; or words and
music--”
“Let us see how your thesis works out with music,” says Mrs. Ogi.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct
of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and
decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their
lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The
musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his
own peril. For example, Mozart; at the age of six he was a child
prodigy, exhibited as a curiosity before all the crowned heads of
Europe; but he grew up to a life of slow starvation, and a death from
tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. The sum total of his earnings
from seven hundred and sixty-nine compositions was not enough to keep
his small family alive.
But now comes a mighty genius, who discovers how to make music an art of
power, an expression of the deepest experiences of the human soul.
Beethoven was born in 1770, his mother being a cook and his father a
broken-down musician drinking himself to death. Beethoven became the
child slave of this drunkard; he was driven by beatings to practice the
piano at the age of four, and at the age of seven had a job in a theater
orchestra. I wonder, when we go to the “movies” and listen to the
banging and scraping, may there be among those servants of imbecility
some lad who is destined to raise the art of music to a new height, and
to die in misery for his pains?
Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the
dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric,
self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was
composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his
delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the
rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were
accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them;
but Beethoven thought his playing was of importance, and when they
failed to keep silence he struck his fist upon the piano keys, and
sprang up, exclaiming: “I will not play for such swine!”
A terrible calamity befell him, the worst that a musician could
imagine--he began to grow deaf. At the age of thirty he could no longer
hear a musical note. That seemed the ruin of his life; his enemies
jeered, saying that he poured out his preposterous compositions because
he did not know how horrible they sounded. Also Beethoven suffered from
near-sightedness, caused by smallpox in childhood. His health at times
gave way entirely, and he contemplated suicide. “My art alone deterred
me,” he wrote.
He was, like Milton, a Puritan, though he did not use the word. He had
an ideal of love, and did not squander himself in casual intrigues. His
profession brought him into intimacy with the ladies of the great world;
they would be overwhelmed by his genius, but then they would think it
over, and realize what it would mean to marry a social inferior--and a
deaf one at that. One brilliant young lady tortured the great man’s
heart, and then went off and married a count. So Beethoven withdrew into
himself, becoming more eccentric, more irritable, and more passionate
and terrifying in his compositions. Said Weber when he heard the Third
Symphony: “Beethoven is now quite mad.”
The composer’s life was one long struggle with poverty and debt. There
were wealthy noblemen in Vienna who appreciated his genius, and wanted
him to stay and play for them; they subscribed an income for him, but
then forgot to pay it, and left him to struggle along. To be sure, he
was none too easy with his patrons; he went to stay with one, and the
good man persisted in taking off his hat every time he laid eyes on
Beethoven. The composer, who abhorred ceremony, ran away.
Beethoven was a reader of Plutarch, and held the ideals of the old Roman
republic; he believed in universal suffrage, and in liberty, and had no
hesitation in voicing his convictions to anyone. He hailed Napoleon as a
defender of liberty, and dedicated his “Eroica” symphony to him. Later
on, when Napoleon accepted a crown, Beethoven changed this dedication,
“To the _memory_ of a great man.” He dedicated another symphony to a
French general, the conqueror of the Bastille; and you can imagine how
reactionary Vienna welcomed that.
After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchs entered into what they called
the “Holy Alliance,” to rivet Catholic absolutism upon the continent
forever. Vienna became the center of world reaction, and dungeon and
torture were the fate of men who raised their voices for human rights.
Here was Beethoven, old, deaf, and poverty-stricken; but he never
yielded an inch of his principles. “Words are bound in chains,” he said,
“but sounds are still free.” He poured his feelings into his wonderful
Ninth Symphony, which occasioned such a tornado of applause that the
police considered it necessary to interfere.
Here, you see, was no maker of pretty sounds for the entertainment of
the rich; here was a great mind, one who read and thought for himself,
and understood not merely dancing and mating, but the nature of
organized society. In a time of universal subservience and fawning he
clenched his hands and behaved like a democrat. When his brother, full
of the pride of a newly rich bourgeois, presented him with a card
inscribed, “Johann van Beethoven, Land Proprietor,” the composer
scrawled under it, “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain Proprietor.”
There is a story of his meeting with the poet Goethe. As we shall see,
Goethe had made his way by conforming to the customs of a court; he was
now sixty-three years of age, stiff to the rest of the world, but
pliable to the nobility. Beethoven was forty-two, willing to be humble
to a poet of genius, but not to rank and arrogance. They met in the open
air, in a park where there were many people; and suddenly came word that
the duke and the empress were coming. The people formed two lines, and
stood, hats in hand, to do homage; and Goethe took his place among them.
Beethoven was furious; he remonstrated with the poet in vain, then he
jammed his hat down over his head and strode toward the duke and
empress, and they were the ones who did homage to him. Goethe never
forgot this scene, and he did not care to listen to Beethoven’s music,
because he said he found it “disturbing.”
We are told by our “art for art’s sake” dilettanti that art has nothing
to do with moral questions. Let them take their answer from the father
of modern music, the greatest genius who has used that lofty art. No
higher authority could be found; and his words were these: “I recognize
no sign of superiority in mankind other than goodness.” By that
principle he lived, and by it he wrote; his art is overwhelmingly
ethical, and if we were to tear up every record of his life, every word
in the way of title or dedication or inscription upon his compositions,
if we had nothing but the musical notes of his sonatas and symphonies,
we should get precisely the same impressions; we should know that we
were in the presence of a titanic conflict of the human will against the
forces of fate, the blind cruelties of nature and the deliberate
cruelties of class. We might not know that this man became deaf at the
height of his powers; we might have no definite image to attach to the
terrible hammer strokes of the Fifth Symphony; but we should know that
here is torture, here is defeat and despair crying out, here is
loveliness broken to pieces, trampled, crushed out of life; here also is
man, clenching his hands and setting his teeth in grim resolve,
proclaiming the supremacy of his own spirit, and rising to heights of
power, in which he makes his joy out of the very materials of his
torment. Some friend in Beethoven’s presence called upon God; and the
composer answered with the motto of his life: “O man, help thyself!”