musician is not exempted from the difficulties of his brother artists.
If they work in a less plastic material, he has to govern subtler
and more wayward forces. He can attain a wonderful perfection, but
only through unremitting labor. His task is to embody the turbulent,
irrational human feelings in serene and beautiful forms. He is to
master the dominating, to reconcile the warring, to impose unity on
the diverse and the repellant. Mozart and Haydn might handle their art
with ready ease, because their emotions were naïve; but Beethoven,
who essayed to look into the stormy and tortured heart of man, found
himself involved in a travail Titanic and interminable. Nevertheless he
did succeed in harnessing the vast forces with which he deals, and his
success is as conclusive a vindication as we could desire of music's
power to deal with its profound verities. When we think of Beethoven's
immortal works, immortal both by their strength and by their beauty,
can we doubt that music expresses our deepest emotional nature with
unrivalled fullness, and yet so reconciles it with itself as to
symbolize our highest spiritual peace?
From the swelter and jungle of experience in which it is our lot
to pass our mortal days, days which philosophy cannot make wholly
rational, nor love wholly capable of service, nor religion wholly
serene, we are thus privileged to emerge, from time to time, into
fairer realms. Tantalized with an unattainable vision of order, we turn
to art, and especially to music, for assurance that our hope is not
wholly chimerical. Then
«Music pours on mortals
Its beautiful disdain.»
Disdainful it is, truly, because it reminds us of the discord and the
rhythmless onmarch of our days. It voices the passions that have torn
and mutilated and stung and blinded us; we meditate the foolishness,
the fatality, of our chaotic lives. But beautiful it is also; and it
has been wisely said that beauty offers us «a pledge of the possible
conformity of the soul with nature.» Music, at once disdainful and
beautiful, shows us our deepest feelings, so wayward and tragic in
experience, merged into ineffable perfection.
Printed in the United States of America.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. The expression n^{th} represents
"nth", i. e., "n" followed by the superscript "th".
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's From Grieg to Brahms, by Daniel Gregory Mason