ABSOLUTE VALUE
It may appear fantastic to assert that art is the only sphere where
absolute values appear, and that the function of art in the Universe
is to create absolute values, but it may be true. It is impossible
to avoid the insistent demand of the human instinct for absolute
values. This exists, an insatiable craving which will not rest content
with the good but demands the better. And yet it is impossible to
discover values that are absolute in themselves. The very notion is
a meaningless abstraction. I do not even believe we can prove that
Beethoven’s music is better music than Mozart’s or that Shakespeare’s
poetry is better than Milton’s, or _vice versa_, unless we first of
all limit the idea of music or poetry to something intellectually
measurable. For example it would be difficult to convince all
music-lovers that Bach’s counterpoint was better than Beethoven’s, or
that Palestrina’s was better than Bach’s; for what is to determine
“good” counterpoint? Very few musicians would accept any individual
theorist’s rules--all rules being mere abstractions or generalizations
from practice, and varying according to their historic date, so that
even the academic theory of one age differs from that of another. Even
in judging a fugue, one has ultimately to fall back upon expression,
significance, or meaning, and who is to say--and on what universally
acceptable principle is it to be said--that Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue is
better than Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” Op. 133?
There is exactly the same difficulty in poetry. In an excellent and
well-known book on the English Sonnet a definition is given of perfect
sonnet form which is intellectually satisfactory. But we find that most
of the greatest English sonnets are not written in this form, while
thousands of mediocre sonnets observe it correctly. The same is true of
Bach’s Fugues. You cannot value them according to their correctness.[4]
What then becomes of our “perfect” sonnet and our “perfect” fugue?
Each is apparently an unreal abstraction--like all other attempts at
creating absolute value. But are these “absolute” ideas necessarily
valueless in themselves? I do not think so, for they correspond to and
are the formalization or _death-shapes_ of desires ineradicably rooted
in the human soul, those desires which create all values, and that
profounder urge which is satisfied with none.
What is important to recognize is the diversity of these desires and
to understand that it is the diversity (in itself profoundly desired)
which nullifies standards. We can say that this fugue is more perfect
than that fugue--having made an abstract and definable conception
of the fugue form and separated it from all life. Criticism is an
application of such abstract conceptions--derived by analysis from the
practice of artists--from all past works of art to one present work of
art and, again, backwards, from all existent works of art to one past
work of art. The former is historical criticism (when a composer is
judged only on what preceded him) and the latter is, or should be, the
absolute æsthetic criticism. But what prevents its being so is that it
leaves out the future. The work of art is judged by the present and
the past but the future is unknown and the judgment is thereby vitiated
and is not and cannot be an absolute judgment. But this does not mean
that the future does not exist _now_, somewhere. To demonstrate this,
however, would take me on too far-stretching a parabola. I would merely
draw attention to this reservation, and say that its relevance will
appear later.
My belief is that when I say, as I do emphatically say, that Beethoven
is a greater composer than Bach and find my assertion difficult
or impossible to prove I am judging by an instinctive but not yet
intellectually formalized sense of value, or values, which will only
emerge in the future to take a place among all the other principles
and standards--the totality of life in its sum of _death-shapes_
so far created. So we see there can be no such thing as a perfect
fugue-in-itself but only the idea of one. The actual fugue must
have a meaning, it must be an expression of life; a fugue-in-itself
without relation to life, perfect and completely, is an impossibility.
Nevertheless a musician like Bach finds in himself the fugue-idea as
well as the fugue-emotion, the fugue-form as well as the fugue-content,
and there is a constant struggle between them to coincide exactly and
to materialize in one indivisible unity. Sometimes the fugue idea
prevails and sometimes the fugue-emotion prevails, and the result
always is an imperfect fugue. But this imperfection in all its varying
degrees is the musical reality. Absolute perfection, absolute unity is
annihilation, the end of all things and the attainment of Nirvana. But
even the fugue-idea is not a constant unchangeable abstraction or fixed
shape. It is modified by the actual fugues which are created, for it
is an abstraction, a general principle from examples, an induction
from particulars; and as fresh particulars arise, the induction must
be modified. Again, I spoke of the content or fugue-emotion, but this
fugue-emotion is not--except perhaps in the simplest and most feeble
examples--single but, on the contrary, multiple. Who is to appraise
or range in order of value these emotions? How is it to be done? The
belief that any single judgment may do it--the mind of any one critic,
expert or practitioner--is preposterous. But this does not suspend
individual judgment or make it vain, since it is through the conflict
or discord of all genuine individual judgments that new conceptions
or attempts at concord emerge. This conflict arises from unsatisfied
desire and, in the end, we think Beethoven better than Bach only
because Beethoven more profoundly satisfies our desire or satisfies
a deeper desire than any satisfied by Bach. Just as new conceptions
emerge or are induced from discordant or unrelated conceptions so
new emotions and new desires are induced from the discordance or
conflict of our desires. This process of organization would seem
infinite--a conception which I, personally, find intolerable and
incomprehensible--were it not for a strange phenomenon, and this
phenomenon is that ultimately at the core of all men there seems to be
the same desire.
The world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters,
sculptors, scientists, mathematicians, musicians and poets. We may not
be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that Beethoven is
greater than Bach, that Bach is greater than Haydn, that Palestrina
is greater than Verdi, but we are all strangely certain that it is so.
What are we to make of this? Evidently there is a unity somewhere in
our diversity, and it is more than a lowest common factor--a far-away
dim primitive element, never quite lost sight of but growing ever
fainter, linking all men and all art. It is not that touch of nature
making the whole world kin, for that--although it might enable us to
have some sympathy with all things--would not enable us to range them
in value. Such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally
relate us. It is, on the contrary, by our very essence, by the most
spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united. We are not
unanimous about Scriabin, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, just as we are not unanimous
about Aubrey Beardsley, Sargent, El Greco, or about Byron, Tennyson,
and Conrad.
Apparently each of us carries within him a fundamental note which
picks out all the notes struck upon us by nature and mankind and
ranges them in a series. And it is this which gives to each one his
values. The fundamental note which any individual carries may not be
the fundamental note of mankind, or of the Universe, but it must have
a more or less simple relationship with them. Thus the values of one
individual are true for all others, within their limits. They are real
values though not necessarily ultimate values; they can and will be
related to all other values but can only be so related through a more
fundamental note--hence the importance of such a note. It is my belief
that the profoundest, most fundamental note in music, so far, has
been struck by Beethoven. There is nothing in the music of any other
composer which his does not comprehend. But his, on the other hand, has
a new foundation to which no other music reaches.
[Illustration]
But this analogy of the fundamental note must be understood merely as
an analogy, suggestive rather than explanatory. Of all the simpler
musical intervals I find that of the seventeenth the most satisfying
to my ear. I may wonder what is the secret of the purity of its
concord--so much greater than that of the perfect fifth or the perfect
fourth, which at first sight seem to be more intimate relationships.
Then I discover that the ratio of the vibrations of the two notes
of the seventeenth is 1:5, whereas that of the perfect fifth is 2:3,
of the perfect fourth 3:4. Stated thus this may not mean much to the
non-mathematically minded reader but it denotes that the seventeenth
is a perfect and not a syncopated interval. That is to say there is no
syncopation of the vibrations of the two notes, but they beat together
in a closer more united rhythm than that of a perfect fifth or perfect
fourth.
But the twelfth
[Illustration]
(I use the tenor or C clef partly because it is more obscure and will
annoy those who are only accustomed to the treble and bass clefs)
has a ratio of 1:3 which also is not a syncopated interval but has
the same kind of perfection as that of the octave (1:2) and the
seventeenth (1:5). Yet the twelfth is not so pleasing an interval as
the seventeenth, and the octave is inferior to them both. Nevertheless
the twelfth and octave are mathematically closer relationships than the
seventeenth. Evidently there is another principle to be discovered, and
I will call it the principle of affinity in unlikeness and illustrate
it by an analogy which may seem far-fetched but which I believe to be
illuminating and significant.
Let us imagine that the unison or note A represents oneself; that
the relationship of the octave (1:2) represents that of father and
daughter; the relationship of the perfect fifth (2:3) that of brother
and sister; the relationship of the perfect fourth (3:4) that of two
brothers; the relationship of the twelfth (1:3) that of male and
female cousins--in which a new element that of sexual affinity, is
introduced, bringing with it a deeper reverberation although the blood
relationship is more distant. And, finally, the relationship of the
seventeenth, that of unrelated lovers which--although the most distant
of all in blood--strikes a still profounder sympathy and beauty. It is
now possible to understand more clearly why my analogy of the relation
of Beethoven to the rest of music as that of a more fundamental note is
not to be taken in its literal meaning. With Beethoven, a new element
came into music, an element of such sublimity and beauty that its
advent into the world of imagination is comparable in importance with
that of sex in the physical world.
Sex as we know it did not always exist; it does not exist in the
inorganic world, hardly in the vegetable world, but dimly in the animal
world. It is a human discovery, and upon that new more fundamental
note (fundamental not in the vertical sense but in a focal sense)
rises the whole wealth of man’s intellectual and physical harmony.
But even in sex we have not touched an absolute. The presage of a
still profounder intimacy trembles fitfully here and there in music
throughout the historical European period. In the music of Palestrina,
of Byrd, of all the rarer spirits up to Bach, Mozart and Wagner there
are fitful gleams of a more central desire until, finally, a love that
plumbs deeper than even the love of sex rings forth unmistakeably in
the music of Beethoven and immediately creates for us a new hierarchy
of values. And so here we find for the time being an Absolute. The
world of art, we find, resembles both the world of the atom and the
world of solar space. There are greater and lesser planets and greater
and lesser satellites. We can imagine that if there were inhabitants
upon the Moon they might think the Earth was the primary fact of
their being, since it was the focal point of their orbit, whereas
the Sun would seem so eccentrically placed as to be an irregular and
incomprehensible singularity; until by a process of more profound
imagining they conceived the more fundamental though more distant
relationship in which it stood to them.
Just as the Sun is the centre of the only system of the physical
universe so far formulated--for no centre has been found to the
innumerable suns of the stellar universe--so Beethoven is our temporary
Absolute in the world of music. And just as the Sun is the source of
all vegetable and animal life upon the earth, so I believe that in art
we find the vital spirit which animates our human life. Thus it would
seem to be true--as I suggested we might discover--that the function of
art in the world is to create absolute values in the imagination upon
which the human species can continually re-create its intellectual,
moral, and physical structures. And if this is so it means that in the
values of art we approach most nearly to Truth.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See Mr. Harvey Grace’s excellent book on the organ works of J. S.
Bach.