noticed nothing but his short trousers, or that in his high artistic
effort he was entirely without sympathy. Few men have been more
fortunate in their friends. The love and veneration of his many pupils,
and of such men as Chabrier, Pierné, and Fauré, made an atmosphere
in which his heart expanded and his ambition grew. One of this group
of admirers tells how they would surround him on his return to Paris
in the autumn, to ask what he had done, what he had to show. «Vous
verrez, repondait-il»--the French alone can render the endearing vanity
and _naïveté_ of his reply--«vous verrez, repondait-il en prenant
un air mysterieux, vous verrez; je crois que vous serez content....
J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien travaillé.» It was a similarly frank
and guileless self-satisfaction that made him apparently unaware of
the coldness of his audiences, who were generally puzzled or bored.
Happy, as M. d'Indy records, in having given his friends the pleasure
of hearing him play his own compositions, in spite of the scanty
applause he never failed to bow profoundly. Thus untroubled by the
indifference of the crowd, surrounded by a few men who gave him their
warm and discriminating admiration, and inspired by a genius peculiarly
exalted and disinterested, bent on beauty alone, and superior to petty
jealousies, César Franck lived his quiet, fruitful, and happy life. He
died at Paris in 1890. The last anecdote we have of him tells of his
finding strength, four days before his death, to praise the «Samson et
Dalila» of Saint-Saëns, then running at the Théâtre Lyrique. «I see him
yet,» says M. Arthur Coquard, «turning towards me his poor suffering
face to say vivaciously and even joyfully, in the vibrant tones that
his friends know, 'très beau, très beau.'» The words, expressing that
pure love of art which animated his whole career, lodge in the mind
of one who studies it, together with those other words of his, which
none ever had a better right to use, «J'ai beaucoup travaillé et bien
travaillé.»
It has been necessary to dwell at some length on Franck's life and
character because they throw so much light on his music. To an
unusual degree it is the expression of himself, full of his peculiar
contemplative emotion. The harmonic background is rich, somber,
and vague, like the prevailing mood of a religious devotee; from
it constantly emerge phrases of song, phrases of the most poignant
aspiration, like passions in a dream, voicing those intense yet elusive
feelings which irradiate none but introspective minds. They are like
the cries of human lovers in a world of silence and mystery, or,
better, they are the cries of a finite soul that yearns for God and
finds him not. One feels always in Franck's music the tragedy of the
finite and the infinite. Those groping, shifting harmonies, above which
the pathetic fragments of melody constantly sound for a moment, somehow
irresistibly suggest the great unknown universe in which men's little
lives are acted. All is vague save the momentary feature, and that
presses on towards a fulfillment that perpetually eludes it. All shifts
and passes, save only that never-ceasing mood of aspiration, that
restless striving of the fragment for completion. Spiritual unrest is
the characteristic quality of this music--the unrest of a spirit pure
and ardent but forever unsatisfied.
Now, it is perhaps not too fantastic to find in the mingled vagueness
and poignancy of this music the proper artistic expression of
mysticism. So _must_ a mystic express himself. For it is characteristic
of the mystical temperament to yearn for ideal satisfactions, but to
find none in finite forms. Mysticism, in fact, is one of the ways of
solving, or perhaps we should say of ignoring, that primal and protean
mystery of human life, the conflict between ideal needs and actual
facts. Realism meets it by denying the needs and exalting the facts;
idealism attempts to mold the real into conformity with the ideal, of
course with very partial success. The mystic, too earnest to follow
the realistic method, too impatient to endure the plodding progress of
idealism, cuts the Gordian knot by discarding the actual altogether.
He pronounces it too inelastic, too constricting, and dispenses with
it. He hugs the ideal to his heart, but can see no virtue in the real.
Actualities, objects, events, and forms which to the idealist are
precious if only partial expressions of spiritual values, are to him
wholly recalcitrant, wholly external and illusory. The really precious
thing, he says, is something transcendent, something remote, something
that cannot transpire in events or body itself in forms, because it is
infinite and complete, while these are finite, broken, and limited.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel, a man peculiarly dominated by this way of viewing
things, wrote in his Journal, «Nothing finite is true, is interesting,
is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and
all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but
the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.»
Now, whatever may be the merits of this point of view, it obviously
involves a certain degree of artistic failure. The mystic cannot
be entirely successful in art. For art depends on organization in
definite forms, and the mystic rejects all particular forms as finite.
«Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary,» writes Amiel,
«repel and even terrify me.... The life of thought alone seems to me
to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the
irreparable; practical life makes me afraid.» Accordingly, men of this
temperament are defeated in their search for beauty by an unconquerable
shyness of all its incarnations. They fear that in defining their fancy
they will vulgarize it. It is their fate to long for an all-inclusive
form in a world where forms are mutually exclusive, to strive to utter
truth in one great word, when even the shortest sentence must occupy
time. Amiel himself is a pathetic example of the mystic's destiny
in art. Haunted all his life by the vision of infinite beauty, the
conception of absolute truth, he could never bring himself to accept
the limitations of all human performance, and his talent was almost as
unproductive as it was exalted. He never could embody his aspirations.
Tantalizing him with the suggestion of supernal beauties, they resisted
all his efforts to come up with and embrace them, because he denied
himself the use of those definite forms in which alone, however
inadequately, ideals can be realized.
In many respects César Franck is the analogue in music of Amiel in
literature. That vague richness of his emotional tone, which like a
dark background of night is constantly lighted up by meteoric outbursts
of passion, is strangely like the somber moralizings and speculations,
in the «Journal Intime,» among which Amiel's cries of spiritual pain,
doubt, and longing stand out with such sudden, poignant pathos. Franck
has in common with Amiel the mystic's longing for ideal satisfactions,
and the mystic's distrust of all finite means of attaining them. He,
too, is «afraid» of the forms of practical life, of the conventional
devices of musical structure and the types evolved by tradition. He
avoids always the obvious, the natural even, and gropes toward some
unattainable ideal of expression. So great is his distrust of the
understood, the accepted, the usual and intelligible, that he is always
leaving the beaten track and roaming afield after some novel and
untamed beauty. It will be worth while to get to closer quarters with
this tendency, and to see exactly how it operates.
It is hard to make those unacquainted with musical technique understand
how much of fixity there is in the musical idiom, how definite are the
types of musical form, how potent the requisitions of musical syntax.
Yet, without a sense of this fixity in the material, it is impossible
to estimate justly those impulses and motives which may lead a composer
to violate usages and to disappoint expectations. In the matter of
harmony, for instance, there are certain types of procedure, certain
progressions and sequences of chords, that are as stable and uniform
as the types of animal or vegetable form. A horse, a dog, or a man
is not a more definite organism than the two chords in the «Amen» of
a hymn tune. This group or cluster of two chords, linked together by
a common tone held over from one to the other, yet made distinct by
progression of the other voices, is typical of a kind of harmonic form
that long usage has established as part of our mental furniture. We are
used to thinking of chords thus welded by a common tone, and we demand
this sort of coherence in our harmonic progressions, just as we demand
that a horse's body shall be furnished with a horse's legs, or that
a transitive verb shall have an object. To be sure, this particular
sort of cluster, in which both chords are, as we say, consonant, is
somewhat less determinate than another sort which we shall describe
presently, because, since all the tones of the first chord are equally
important, any one may be selected as the link, and there will be
consequently some latitude in the choice of the second chord, which
completes the group. But within these limits this sort of harmonic type
is definite and fixed, and that it is deeply ingrained in our mode of
thought is proved by our horror of «consecutive octaves» and «fifths,»
those bugbears of harmony students, which are bad chiefly because they
are not compatible with the retention of a common linking tone between
the two members of the group.
Here we have, then, one of those fundamental harmonic forms which are
in music what idioms or phrases are in language. It is striking how
sedulously César Franck, distrustful of the definite, the conventional,
avoids them. Compared with the work of a keen rationalist like
Saint-Saëns, his music is curiously incoherent, curiously loose-knit,
groping, and indeterminate. His pages are studded with departures and
evasions; he delights in going some other way than we expect, or in
writing chords that do not give us even any basis of expectation.
Consecutive octaves and fifths, so terrible to lovers of cogency and
sequence, are an especial feature of his harmony, giving it that
curious lapsing effect so characteristic and indescribable. His entire
tone-mass has a trick of sliding bodily up or down, which disconcerts,
even while it fascinates, one who is accustomed to harmonic stability.
The student need only play over the opening of the Symphony or the
first page of the String Quartet to feel that here is a man who treats
traditions debonairly, and who thus suggests novel beauties without
defining them.
Equally irresponsible is he in his treatment of another sort of
harmonic form which is intrinsically even more definite than the
clusters of consonant chords like the «Amen.» When there is a dissonant
tone in the first chord, a tone which, having slight justification for
being, presses urgently toward a neighboring tone in the next chord,
into which it is said to «resolve,» then the cluster, as a whole, is
even more determinate. The dissonance introduces a tension that must be
relieved in one definite way. It involves its own resolution just as
unstable equilibrium in a body involves its falling in the direction
of the greatest pull. The alien tone in the chord is got rid of by
the path of least resistance; it is a foreign element that must be
discharged. So potent is this tendency of dissonant tones to resolve
that it is one of the chief means of vitalizing the entire musical
fabric. Unless music constantly got out of harmony with itself it would
no more progress than a man would walk unless before each step he lost
his balance. It would stagnate. Consider, for example, the last phrase
of that highly vitalized tune, «The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte
Carlo.» No one could attribute stagnation to this phrase, whatever
other faults he might find in it; and its impetus is largely due to
the vigor with which it lands on the dissonant chord next before the
last, and the consequent pull of this chord into the last. Try to
conceive of ending without that last chord, that resolution in which
the foreign element is discharged and all comes to rest. It is told of
Mendelssohn that he rushed down-stairs in his night clothes early one
morning to resolve a dominant seventh chord (such as we have on the
syllable «Car») which some waggish friend struck and left uncompleted.
Mendelssohn was of course unusually sensitive to harmonic law, but it
is not too much to draw from this incident the conclusion that a chord
which can get a man out of bed in the morning to resolve it must pretty
potently suggest resolution. Dissonant chords, in fact, are anything
but inert elements in the chemistry of harmonic composition. They have
strong affinities and combine powerfully.
Yet César Franck is inclined either to ignore these tendencies or to
shift them into unexpected and circuitous channels. The dissonant
chords, though they occur often in his work, seldom take their normal
course. They are led into new dissonances, diverted to alien keys,
subjected to ingenious modifications, and in all ways wrested from
the realm of the obvious. Towards the end of the Introduction to the
first movement of the String Quartet, for instance, the student will
find dominant sevenths most interestingly unfaithful to their family
tradition, and effecting modulation through distant keys. Similar
treatment will be found on almost any page in this Quartet, in the
Quintet, the Symphony, and the piano works. Thus, Franck not only goes
counter to the less determinate harmonic types in which both chords
are consonant, but he loves to disappoint our expectations when they
are strongly established by dissonances. Nothing is more characteristic
of him than the formal indefiniteness of his harmony. Full as it is
of delicious and unwonted beauties, it lacks accurate organization,
clarity and solidity of chord sequence. It is a web of shifting tones,
without obvious interrelationship and inevitable progression.
When we turn to Franck's treatment of meter and rhythm, we get some
new side-lights on the way his mysticism affects his music. He is,
in the first place, noticeably lacking in that vigor of pulse, that
strong accentuation, which is the delight of active temperaments. He
sings constantly, almost never dances. After a while the intensity of
the song-like phrases, so packed with emotion, becomes cloying, and
we long for a little of the headlong, thoughtless progress of Grieg
and Dvořák. We need the relaxation of muscular activity. It would be
a relief to stop feeling for a moment and be borne along on a wave
of perfectly unemotional «passage-work.» But Franck never relieves
himself and his hearer by passages of brisk motion in which the
interest is entirely active; he is, so to speak, a very sedentary
composer. And so the rare beauties that stud the page lose something
by being set so thickly. The richness of Franck's emotional impulse
is a disadvantage to his metrical structure. The same thing, again,
is true of his rhythm or phraseology. We saw in the Introduction how
elementary metrical groups--measures--were built up into phrases and
tunes, and how the strongest synthetic minds got the greatest variety
and breadth of phrase. Now Franck's phrasing, like Grieg's, is of the
primitive kind that reveals lack of mental concentration, inability to
build up wide and complex forms. Draw a line across his staff at every
breathing-point, and your lines will fall pretty regularly after the
measures whose numbers are multiples of four. Try the same thing with
Beethoven, and there will be no telling where the lines will come, so
varied is the phraseology. In comparison, Franck's themes seem hardly
more than bundles of motifs, loosely tied together. And of course this
effect is unfortunately reinforced by the peculiarities of his harmony.
How could a theme hold itself together in such a kaleidoscope? How
could it sustain itself on such a tonal quicksand? Thus his tunes, rich
as they are in single phrases of poignant beauty, seldom develop much
breadth. They start out well, but soon lose themselves in the web or
fall into poorly welded segments. In the larger structural arrangement
of his material as well as in his primary metrical order he falls short
of the perfect organization of more powerful minds.
Franck illustrates, then, in many ways, in his erratic treatment of
harmony, in his metrical monotony, and in his «shortness of breath,»
the mystic's failure to master form. And yet, so beautiful are his
effects, so arresting is his personality, one feels instinctively
that there is in him something which destructive criticism cannot
assail. The very inarticulateness of the mystic is, in fact, a sort
of eloquence, perhaps all the more persuasive because it hints at
beauties rather than defines them. However beyond his reach his
aspirations may be, so long as they are genuine and ardent he will
have his unique artistic message. His work will gain a pathetic appeal
from the very fact that it suggests feelings it cannot embody, and his
inarticulateness may even open up ways to new modes of utterance by
reminding men that there are truths other than those their formulas so
smugly stereotype. Thus a writer like Amiel, ineffective as he seems
from one point of view, is not without his liberalizing influence in
literature. In the same way, César Franck, the mystic among musicians,
thanks to his profound insight and emotion, combined though they be
with the characteristic shortcomings of the seer, will widen the scope
of future musical technique and expression.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--The Prelude, Choral, and Fugue for Piano are
to be had in the Collection Litolff. The Prelude, Aria, and Finale
are published by J. Hamelle, Paris. These are the only piano pieces
of Franck that are easily obtainable. The house of Hamelle also
issues a four-hand arrangement of the Symphony, and Durand, of Paris,
publishes a four-hand arrangement of the three masterly Chorals for
organ, as well as the original edition of these, and of two sets of
organ pieces, one of six and the other of three. The «Beatitudes»
has been reprinted, with English words, by G. Schirmer. A few of
Franck's songs, particularly «La Procession,» «Panis Angelicus,» and
«Le Mariage des Roses,» will be found in the portfolios of most large
music dealers.
VI
PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY
[Illustration: PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY]
VI
PETER ILYITCH TSCHAÏKOWSKY
One of the constant temptations of the biographer is that of seizing
on some salient trait in his subject, magnifying it beyond all
relation to others which supplement or modify it, and portraying an
eccentric rather than a rounded personality, a monster rather than a
man. Human nature is complex, many-sided, even self-contradictory to
any but the most penetrative view; and so slender are the resources
of literature for dealing with such a paradox as a man, that writers,
resorting to simplification, sacrifice fullness to intelligibility. In
books Napoleon is apt to be denied all scruples, Keats all virility,
Marcus Aurelius all engaging folly; the real men were probably not so
simple. It is certain, at any rate, that Tschaïkowsky, the greatest
of Russian musicians, one of the two greatest of all composers since
Wagner, cannot have been the mere incarnation of concentrated gloom
that his critics have drawn. Some worthier powers than that of eloquent
lamenting must have contributed to mold him. He was not simply a sort
of neurasthenic Jeremiah with a faculty for orchestration.
It is only too easy and plausible, to be sure, to label him with one
of those insidiously blighting epithets, «neurasthenic,» «decadent,»
or «morbid.» He was, in fact, of an unfortunate heredity; his
grandfather was epileptic, and his own symptoms pointed to an inherited
nervous irritability. He was troubled more or less, all his life, by
sleeplessness, fatigue, depression; and in his thirty-seventh year
had a complete nervous collapse. But to discredit a man's insight by
pointing out his physical misfortunes is as misleading as it is unkind.
The fact that Schopenhauer, with whose temperament Tschaïkowsky's had
much in common, had some insane and idiotic ancestors, and suffered
much from his own unusual sensitiveness, does not in the least abate
the truth of his philosophic teaching, though it may call attention
to its one-sidedness. And so with the musician; knowledge of his
personal twist ought not to make us deaf to whatever is universal
in his utterance. We may remember that he reports but one aspect of
the truth; but if he reports that truly, we may supply the other,
and need not carp at the way he got his information. And indeed is
it not, after all, an artificial circumscription of life to ignore
its sadder verities, however moral Pharisees may stigmatize the
perception of them as «morbid»? Has not disease, as well as health,
its relation to our fortunes? Is not man's weakness an organic part of
his strength, his fear of his courage, his doubt of his faith? That
mere facile optimism which smiles blandly at all experience, with
unseeing eyes, is as partial and false as the unrelieved pessimism
into which the contemplation of it sometimes drives the sensitive.
The world is no more all light than it is all shadow. All human life,
with its suffering as well as its happiness, is one, and every sincere
human experience has its own weight. And so Tschaïkowsky, in spite of
grandfathers and symptoms, has a right to be respectfully heard.
The tendency to depreciate men like Tschaïkowsky and Schopenhauer
generally rests on a confusion between what may be called sentimental
and rational pessimism. The sentimental pessimist, the weak malcontent,
who sees everything through the blue spectacles of egotism, or, like
the cuttlefish, muddies his world with a black humor of his own,
deserves indeed nothing better than a shrug. Like all other forms
of sentimentality, his pessimism is based on selfishness. It is an
emanation, not an insight. It is that form of colic, to use the figure
of Thoreau, which makes him discover that the world has been eating
green apples. Quite different from such a sentimentalist, however,
is the sensitive man who feels impersonally the real evils of life.
Such a man's experience is viewed by him, not as the end, but as the
means, of insight. His own pains, however keen, appear to him but as
symbols of the universal suffering of humanity, and however much his
view may be subjectively jaundiced, it does not terminate in, but only
begins with, the petty self. He is not a devotee of the luxury of woe.
«A very noble character,» says Schopenhauer, «we always conceive with
a certain tinge of melancholy in it--a melancholy that is anything
but a continual peevishness in view of the daily vexations of life
(for such peevishness is an ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of
maliciousness), but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight
into the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfulness of all living,
not alone of one's own fortune.» And Tschaïkowsky, in describing
Beethoven's Choral Symphony, writes, one can see, from precisely the
same standpoint: «Such joy is not of this earth. It is something ideal
and unrealizable; it has nothing in common with this life, but is only
a momentary aspiration of humanity towards the holiness which exists
only in the world of art and beauty; afterwards, this vale of earth,
with its endless sorrow, its agony of doubt and unsatisfied hopes,
seems still more gloomy and without issue. In the Ninth Symphony we
hear the despairing cry of a great genius who, having irrevocably lost
faith in happiness, escapes for a time into the world of unrealizable
hopes, into the realm of broken-winged ideals.» Now undoubtedly
these passages, especially the latter, are guilty of false emphasis;
undoubtedly one can truly reply to Tschaïkowsky that the ideal is
necessarily fairer than reality, as the flower is fairer than the
soil from which it springs, that «this vale of earth» is not «without
issue,» however gloomy, since it does in fact produce the ideal world
of art and beauty, and that it is precisely the glory of hopes that
they are unrealizable, and of happiness that it exists only on a level
higher than that of finite life. But, however one-sided may be the
opinions expressed, the attitude of mind is free from the taint of
petty selfishness; it is frank, open-eyed, and manly. Such utterances
proceed only from natures nobly human, however burdened with a greater
sensibility than is common among men.