which on the whole cannot be denied in Brahms, it is the only serious
flaw in a man equally great on the emotional and the intellectual
sides. Very remarkable is the richness and at the same time the
balance of Brahms's nature. He recognized early in life that feelings
were valuable, not for their mere poignancy, but by their effect on
the central spirit; and he labored incessantly to express them with
eloquence and yet with control. It is only little men who estimate
an emotion by its intensity, and who try to express everything, the
hysterical as well as the deliberate, the trivial and mischievous as
well as the weighty and the inspiring. They imagine that success in art
depends on the number of things they say, that to voice a temperament
is to build a character. But great men, though they reject no sincere
human feeling, care more to give the right impression than to be
exhaustive; and the greatest feel instinctively that the last word of
their art must be constructive, positive, upbuilding. Thoreau remarks
that the singer can easily move us to tears or laughter, but asks,
«Where is he who can communicate a pure morning joy?» It is Brahms's
unique greatness among modern composers that he was able to infuse his
music, in which all personal passion is made accessory to beauty, with
this «pure morning joy.» His aim in writing is something more than to
chronicle subjective feelings, however various or intense. And that is
why we have to consider him the greatest composer of his time, even
though in particular departments he must take a place second to others.
Steadily avoiding all fragmentary, wayward, and distortive expression,
using always his consummate mastery of his medium and his synthetic
power of thought to subserve a large and universal utterance, he points
the way for a healthy and fruitful development of music in the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Of particular works of Brahms that the reader
might wish to study, here are some of the most characteristic and
well known. Piano pieces: The Waltzes, op. 39; the Clavierstücke,
op. 76, particularly No. 2; the two Rhapsodies, op. 79; and, in his
later, more complex style, the piano pieces, op. 116, 117, 118 and
119. Songs: Liebestreu, op. 3, No. 1; Wiegenlied, op. 49, No. 4; the
Sapphic Ode, op. 94, No. 4; Ständchen, op. 106, No. 1; Meine Liebe
ist grün, op. 63, No. 5; O Kühler Wald, op. 72, No. 3. Chamber works:
the two Violin Sonatas, op. 78 and 100, are among his most genial
works; the Quartets, op. 25 and 26; the Trio, op. 8; the Sextet, op.
18. Of his orchestral works none are finer than the Second and Third
Symphonies, the Violin Concerto, op. 77, and the Variations on a Theme
of Haydn, op. 56a. The choral works, of which the Song of Destiny is
the greatest, are unhappily seldom given.
VIII
EPILOGUE: THE MEANING OF MUSIC
VIII
EPILOGUE: THE MEANING OF MUSIC
In the foregoing studies we have been considering, first, certain
fundamental principles of musical effect in the light of which
alone all special contributions to music, however various, can be
understood, and second, the particular contributions of half a dozen
of our contemporary composers, in which we have seen those principles
exemplified. We have assumed, all along, that music is of undeniable
interest to us, that it has something to say, that it is of sufficient
human value to be worth studying. But now, before closing, it will be
well to examine for a moment the grounds of that tacit assumption, to
ask ourselves what, after all, is the reason of our interest in music.
Why do we care for it? What does it mean? To such questions there are
doubtless many answers. Doubtless different hearers take different
kinds of delight in it, and its modes of appeal are as various as
their temperaments. Yet music has one sort of appeal which is deeper
than all others, which indeed acts universally, and which depends on
its extraordinary power to tranquilize the heart, to instil a peace
quite magical and beyond explanation. It soothes while it excites;
and more wonderful than its ability to stimulate our emotions is its
power to reconcile and harmonize them. And this it does without the aid
of any intellectual process; it offers us no argument, it formulates
no solacing philosophy; rather it abolishes thought, to set up in
its stead a novel activity that is felt as immediately, inexplicably
grateful. To suggest how the combination of sounds can have upon us so
profound an effect will be the object of this final paper.
Mortal life, as we become acquainted with it in experience, unshaped
by any philosophic or artistic activity, is complex, confused, and
irrational. From our babyhood, when we put our fingers in the pretty
fire and draw them forth cruelly burned, until the moment when a
draught of air or the bursting of a blood-vessel suddenly arrests our
important enterprises in mid-course, we constantly find our faculties,
both animal and divine, encountering a world not kindly adjusted.
On the material plane we find drought, frost, and famine, storm,
accident, disease. On the plane of feeling and sentiment there are the
separation of friends, the death of dear ones, loneliness, doubt, and
disappointment; in the world of the spirit are sin and sorrow, the
weakness and folly of ourselves and of others, meaningless mischance,
and the caprice of destiny. In such a world, good fortune must often
seem as insulting as bad, and happiness no better than misery. Where
all is accidental, how can aught be significant? When our highest
interests are defenceless against the onslaught, not of grave evil but
of mere absurdity, how is it possible to live with dignity or hope?
Nevertheless, men have, by various means, fought sturdily against the
capriciousness of life and the despair it engenders. All practical
morality, to begin with, is one form of defence--comparatively a low
form, but still of use. The moral man, facing the universe undaunted,
asserts his own power to develop in it at least his personal particle
of righteousness. As much strength as he has shall be spent on the
side of order. If the world be unjust, he at least will love justice.
If every one else be ruled by chance, he at least will be ruled by
reason. If wicked men pursue evil, he will pursue good. From the
earliest to the latest times literature has recorded such resolve.
The letters of Stevenson no less than the journal of Marcus Aurelius
relate the purpose of the brave individual to graft, to impress--yes,
to inflict--human meaning upon an untamed universe. The stoic faith
has always built on the practical power of the single man; a phrase of
Thoreau's might serve for its motto: «In the midst of this labyrinth
let us live a _thread_ of life.»
The intellect is more ambitious than the moral sense. Not content
with the degree of unity a man can develop in the seething world by
his single action, philosophy seeks to prove that the world itself,
as a whole, deriving its nature as it must from mind, is orderly.
Constructive idealism, beginning with the argument that a subject
cannot truly know an object unless both are included in a higher
mental organism, deduces from the common facts of consciousness the
real existence of an all-inclusive Spirit. Furthermore, one of its
ablest modern exponents, Professor Josiah Royce, has worked out the
ethical implications of the doctrine in a way that concerns us here. He
shows that the apparent irrationality of our world proceeds from the
fragmentariness of our finite view, and that God, who sees his universe
as a whole, must find it rational; so that «our chaos is his order,
our farce his tragedy, our horror his spirituality.» Were our span of
consciousness widened until we could perceive the whole of existence
in one thought, we should find the deep organic beauty that now we
yearn for in vain. Philosophy, then, assures us both of the fundamental
perfection of the world as a whole and of the inaccessibility of this
perfection to us. Deeply satisfying because so sure and so ultimate, it
tells us nothing of details, it has no direct word for the sorrows and
the perplexities of our daily lives. It leaves us often longing for a
warmer, nearer assurance of the rightness of things.
And so, to many, human love first reveals the divine unity all are
seeking. The lover reasons little about consciousness; he knows,
directly and overpoweringly, that his one need is to serve the beloved.
This commanding aim employs all his impulses and appetites, and he
finds in pure disinterested service a peace that his own warring
desires cannot invade. He comprehends for the first time his own true
identity, he becomes integral and serene. Furthermore, as his love
grows deeper, as it spends its inexhaustible wealth more widely,
learning to take for object not only the human beloved, but all virtue
and beauty, his spiritual life becomes daily larger and surer, it
unifies an ever complexer body of thought and deed in its perfect
organism. It acquires an alchemy with which it can dissolve even the
stubborn externalities of fate; for fate itself cannot take away the
power to serve, and in service love finds its joy. Renunciation,
even, it never enters upon except to gain a higher good, and that
essence in the soul which makes a sacrifice is one with that which
in happier circumstances would enjoy. Love thus shares already the
nature of religion, and confers the same benefits. In exacting entire
self-surrender it bequeaths superiority to accident, an unassailable
serenity. Indeed, religion is but love expanded and made universal.
Religion, then, man's final means of reading rationality in the
countenance of an irrational world, is the culmination toward which the
other three naturally tend. It is the natural goal of love, because he
who loves the divine in one person must soon love it in all. It is the
goal of science and philosophy, because these place the heart open-eyed
upon the threshold of the radiant reality, where it cannot but worship.
It is the natural outcome of morality, too; for the moral man, seeing
others eager for goodness, learns that the divine virtue is everywhere.
And religion retains in itself the character of all these tributary
insights. Like morality it prompts devotion of personal strength to the
good cause; like philosophy, it affords clarity and breadth of vision;
it is animated by the same pure, deep passion that is at the soul of
love. It offers man a code of conduct, a cosmology, and an object of
devotion. Surely, one would think he could ask for nothing more.
But, alas! we are not perfect creatures, capable of living always on
these heights. Hours of weariness and confusion overtake us, our
glimpses of the shining cosmos fade away, and we are left groping in a
formless world. The universe does not change, but our faculties become
jaded, we cannot keep them at the necessary pitch. The moralist knows
moods of discouragement, when his power is at ebb, and the forces of
evil press him sorely, entering even his own heart in the forms of
temptation, sloth, and despair. The scientist encounters facts which
his schemes cannot embrace, and for the moment interprets his own
limitation as a disorder in nature. The philosopher often finds the
universe more than a match for his synthetic powers of thought. Love
has its tragedies, and faith its hours of eclipse. Even Christ must
cry out, «My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?» The world, in a
word, is too big for us. Facing its vast whirl and glitter with our
modest kit of senses, intellect, and spirit, we are blinded, deafened,
dizzied, completely bewildered. And then, recalling with wistful regret
our partial insights, we fancy them gone forever and ourselves wholly
lost.
It is just at these moments, when the mind momentarily fails in its
unequal struggle with reality, that we discover the deep meaning
and the supreme service of Art. For Art is the tender human servant
that man has made himself for his solace. He has adjusted it to his
faculties and restrained it within his scope; fashioning it from the
infinite substance, he has impressed upon it finite form. It is a voice
less thunderous than nature's, a lamp that does not dazzle like the
great sun. It simplifies the wealth that is too luxuriant, and makes
tangible a fragment of the great ethereal beauty no mortal can grasp.
Thus art is visible and audible rightness; it is the love of God made
manifest to the senses, a particular symbol of a universal harmony.
When we are too weary to be comforted by the remote, abstract good that
religion promises, art comes with its immediate, substantial, caressing
beauty. Seeking to prove nothing, making no appeal to our logical
intellects, requiring of us no activity, saying nothing of aught beyond
itself, it is supremely restful. Finding us defeated in our search for
rationality, it says, «Search no longer, puzzle no more; merely listen
and look; see, here it is!» Its beauty answers our problems never
directly, but by gently making them irrelevant.
Art, then, differs from morality, philosophy, love and religion,
in that it presents directly to sense the variety in unity which
they manifest only to the mind and spirit. Like them, it deals with
life, but the unity that it attains by selection and exclusion is
unlike their unity in being tangible. Made by man, it has this one
supreme advantage, that it is adapted from the outset to his needs.
What it cannot unify it can exclude. Though nature care nothing for
the peculiarities of the eye, a landscape painter can omit a tree
that upsets the balance of his composition. Actual men and women
present all sorts of incongruities of figure, but the sculptor can
suppress the stooping shoulders, the knobby hips, and the bandy legs.
Language bristles with trivial and vulgar words, but no poet except
Walt Whitman thinks it necessary to write about hatters, who cannot,
according to Stevenson, «be tolerated in emotional verse.» Out of the
infinite number of sounds that besiege our natural ears, musicians
have selected about ninety definite tones, preordained to congruity,
with which to weave their marvelous fabric. That is ever the method
of art; it excludes the irrelevant or the discordant, in order to
secure a salient and pure integrity. By sacrificing something of the
richness of experience, it gains a rationality unknown in experience.
Browning's Pippa is a gentle, noble soul, bringing goodness everywhere;
in real life she would be a poor mill-girl insulted by a thousand
sordid and accidental details. Shelley portrays Beatrice Cenci in the
transfiguring light of poetic truth; actual experience would show her
tortured by a sinister and ignoble fate. No Greek youth could have
matched the perfect plastic beauty of the Disk-thrower, and no Italian
woman ever symbolized cruel, sphinx-like loveliness as does the Mona
Lisa. Corot's nature is grayer and softer and more harmonious than ever
existed on earth. And such songs as Schumann's «Ich Grolle Nicht» and
Tschaïkowsky's «Nur Wer die Sehnsucht Kennt» pulsate with a passion as
intense but far less torn and fragmentary than that by which they were
inspired. This serene perfection, which wraps like a mantle all works
of genuine art, results from harmonious organization, and is attained
only by excluding the irrelevancies always present in nature. Whistler
is wise as well as witty when he exclaims that «to ask the painter
to copy nature as he sees it is to invite the pianist to sit on the
keyboard.» Were there, to be sure, a perfect adjustment between nature
and our faculties, were we able to discern the unity that must exist
even in the infinitely complex Whole of the world, then such a dictum
would be outgrown, and selection would cease to be the procedure of
art. But until we have grown to possess universal synthetic power art
will have its solacing mission and its selective method as now.
Meanwhile it will have also, of course, its inevitable limitations.
If it be more orderly than nature, it will be far less rich and
various; effects that nature presents in a bewildering drench of
experience, a work of art will have to isolate and develop alone. A
pictured landscape, however perfect, is but one phase of the reality;
in nature there is ceaseless play and change, mood succeeds mood, and
the charm is more than half in the wayward flux and transformation.
A portrait shows but one character; a human face is a whole gallery
of personalities. The wealth of experience excites even while it
bewilders us, and when we turn to the work of art we unconsciously
adopt a narrower standard. Primitive art especially impresses us as
bare and denuded, because the primitive artist has neither technical
skill nor synthetic power of thought to combine more than a few
elements. Thus early painting and sculpture, in dealing with the human
figure, carry delineation little further than to show man with head
and body, two legs and two arms. Refinements of contour and proportion
are left to be observed by later artists. Similarly the folk ballads
in which poetry takes its origin confine themselves to elementary
incidents and emotions. In general, rudimentary art is always so far
behind nature as to seem to have hardly any connection with it at all.
As time goes on, however, art passes through an evolution, becoming
gradually more potent in its treatment of reality. Its progress
takes the form of a curious zigzag, the resultant of two alternating
tendencies; what happens is something like this. For a while it
develops its power of synthesis (a power dependent both upon technical
skill in handling material and on organizing force of thought)
until it is able to present a few simple factors of effect in clear,
salient unity. This is what is called a period of classicism. Then,
dissatisfied with its attainment, desiring a richer reflection of the
great whirl of experience, it reaches out after novel effects; its
vision is for a while more extended than clear, and, presenting many
effects which it cannot yet unify, it becomes brilliant, suggestive,
fragmentary, turgid, inchoate. There has been a sacrifice of the old
simple clarity for a richer chaos, or, in the trite terminology, a
romantic movement. Now, however, technical skill and synthetic power
of thought again advance, and a new and complexer order supervenes on
the temporary confusion. Unity of effect is regained, art is classic
once more (but with increased wealth of meaning), and the time is ripe
for another burst of romanticism. By this alternation of impulses art
grows, and when either tendency is defective we have a diseased art.
If there be no romantic movement, if art remains contented with its
acquired scope, there is stagnation, pedantry, academicism; if there be
no classical period of assimilation, we have vagueness and turgidity,
qualities even more fatal, since, as we have seen, the justification
of art is its power to clarify. The general formula for wholesome
artistic advance might, then, run thus: «Increase in the variety of the
selected elements, without loss of the ideal unity imposed upon them.»
And the ideal goal of art is a representation of the whole of life,
stamped with complete unity.
Turning now to music, we must point out that, although it has in a
general way undergone a development like that of the other arts, made
up of alternating classic and romantic movements, it has had from
the first certain advantages over them in the struggle for richness
and clarity, advantages proceeding from its fundamental nature. For
tones are unique in our mental experience as being at once more
directly expressive of the emotional essence of life than any other
art-material, and more susceptible of orderly structure.
That music is beyond all the other arts directly expressive of man's
deeper passional life scarcely needs theoretic proof; the fact is
in the experience of every one who has listened to a military band,
to a homely song lovingly rendered, or to a ragged Hungarian with a
violin. These things take a physical grip upon our emotions, they
stir our diaphragms, galvanize our spines, and compel us to shiver,
laugh or weep. Combined with such physical affections, moreover, are
ideas of indescribable vividness and poignancy. Joy and grief, hope
and despair, serenity, aspiration, and horror, fill our hearts as we
listen to music. They come in their pure essence--not as qualities of
something else. And this is what is meant by the familiar statement
that the other arts are representative while music is presentative.
Poetry, painting, and sculpture show us things outside ourselves,
joyful or grievous things perhaps, hopeful or desperate or beautiful
or ugly things, but still _things_. But music shows us nothing but
the qualities, the disembodied feelings, the passional essences. Let
the reader recall for a moment the effects of painting or of poetry,
the way in which they present emotion. Is it not always by symbolism,
by indirection? Does not the feeling merely exhale from the object
instead of constituting the object as it does in music? In looking
at a pastoral landscape, for instance, do we not first think of the
peaceful scene represented, and only secondarily feel serenity itself?
In reading «La Belle Dame sans Merci» is it not only by a process of
associative thought that we come to shudder with a sense of unearthly
and destructive passion? Yes, in the representative arts emotion
is merely adjective; in music alone is it substantive. We see in a
portrait a lovely woman; we behold in marble a noble youth; we read
in poetry a desperate story; in music, on the contrary, we hear love,
nobility, despair. And since this emotional life is the deepest reality
we know, since our intuitions constitute in fact the very essence of
that world-spirit which is but projected and symbolized in sky, sun,
ocean, stars, and earth, music cannot but be a richer record of our
ultimate life than those arts which deal with objects and symbols
alone. It is the penetration, the ultimacy, of music that gives it
such extraordinary power. The other arts excel it in definiteness, in
concreteness, in the ability to delineate a scene or tell a story; but
music surpasses them all in power to present the naked and basic facts
of existence, the essential, informing passions.
A secondary and subordinate advantage of music proceeds from the nature
of its material. Tones, produced and controlled by man, are far more
easily stamped with the unity he desires than the objects of external
nature. These are stubborn outer facts, created without regard to the
æsthetic sense, and in a thousand ways unamenable to it. The great
dazzle of sunlight is too keen for human eyes, which perceive better
on dim, gray days; many of nature's contours are larger than we can
grasp. Every painter will tell you that there are inharmonious colors
in the sunset, and one daring critic has gone so far as to impugn the
«vulgarity of outline» of the American hills. It matters not whether
the maladjustment indicate a fault in nature or a limitation in man;
the point to note is that the representative arts deal with a material
less pliable than tones. Words, the material of poetry, occupy in
this respect a curious intermediate position. Like tones, they are
man-made, but, like outer objects, they are «given,» fixed and indocile
to man's æsthetic needs. (We remember the example of the «hatter.»)
Though made by man, in fact, they are made not by his æsthetic but by
his practical energy. They were devised, not for beautiful adjustment,
but to convey thoughts, and when the poet comes and uses them to make
an art he finds them almost as perverse as the painter's trees and
hills. Tones, however, have no practical utility whatever; not only do
they not exist outside of music, but they would be of no use if they
did. Hence they may be chosen and grouped by the free æsthetic sense
alone, acting without let or hindrance, except what is imposed by the
thing to be expressed. For hundreds of years man has been testing and
comparing, accepting and rejecting, the elements of the tonal series,
with the result that we have to-day the ladder or scale of ninety-odd
definitely fixed tones, out of which all music is composed. And though
the series has been developed wholly by instinct, and it is only within
the last half-century that the natural laws underlying it have been
discovered, yet it has been built up so slowly and tentatively, and
with so sure and delicate a sense of its internal structure, that it
is an unsurpassable basis for complex and yet perfectly harmonious
tone-combinations. In a word, the material of music is by origin
self-congruous, fitted to clear structure, preordained to an order at
once rich and transparent.