EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE
A technical analysis of the art of music as practised in Europe during
the past few hundred years would be interesting, but it lies outside
the scope of this book. What is relevant is to consider the emotional
and intellectual significance of the music composed during that
period. Folksong, from which most great composers have consciously
or unconsciously drawn, is the emotional substratum of all European
music. At its best it is simple, sensuous and passionate--the heart-cry
of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life, whose
joys are too short, or whose griefs are too enduring. Where it chiefly
differs from similar, later, more sophisticated music is in the
simple intensity of the emotion. In a society more subject to extreme
vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it
was easier, and natural, to believe that mere irresponsible “accident”
or mischance separated men from happiness.[5] In a beautiful old
Neapolitan song collected by Madame Geni Sadero the singer bewails
the loss of his love carried off by Moorish pirates in a raid on the
Italian coast. Such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody,
rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest
composers. These melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity, of
a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment, richly
provided with compensations. Any attempt at such sincerity would
to-day be insincere.[6] Equally insincere would be any modern
composer’s attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the
Sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the Sun in a wonderful
song included in the Sadero collection. In our civilized society man
knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday, and that
next year or the year after he may love again. It is not Moorish
pirates, or the accident of plague, or the malefic interference of
an unfriendly God that will bear away his happiness. It is happiness
itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his
possessions and asks himself, what he used not to ask himself: “Why do
I live?”
I do not lament this change as a disaster. I merely wish to point out
the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the
music of yesterday. Those who believe that music is a purely abstract
art (mere negation this, which I have abundantly shown to be empty of
reality) will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man’s life;
but the great composers themselves knew better:
“The error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a Means
of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of
Expression (the Drama) has been made a means.”
Those words of Wagner’s show clearly that to Wagner, as Mr. Newman
aptly puts it:
“To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it
till it was ‘workable’ and then to weave it along with others of the
same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined
for him by tradition--this was something he could not imagine himself
doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire
musicians engaged in.... Wagner always protested against the current
fashion of performing Beethoven’s symphonies as if they were nothing
more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns.”
My preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why Wagner’s
instinct was right, although his mode of expression is so inexact as
to be often confusing and misleading.[7] What Wagner means is that
intellectual forms or _death-shapes_ are given no significance by
being manipulated, dove-tailed, and re-arranged by the intelligence
working from rules and examples. It is “life” that gives significance,
a spiritual urge into creation, and where this is absent there is no
artistic creation. We may perceive by his use of the word “drama”
that Wagner’s conception of “life” was a limited one; but he could
only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his
recognizing this. But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an
artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic
or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute
composers. The difference between all these composers (including
Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the
individual _psyche_--not in their musical faculty as composers. It
was natural to each one of them that his vital activity should run
into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has
made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. But
this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for--to quote Mr. Newman
again, since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate
here than the words of a poet or sculptor, besides being admirably
clear--
“It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians
who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our
perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing are inextricably
interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of
sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of
music, the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of
musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the
musician; in every musician something of the poet and the painter; in
every painter something of the musician and the poet. The character
of the man’s work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the
tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or
weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts.”
Thus we can explain the sensuous individuality of an artist as being a
result of the special and peculiar bias and intermixture of his senses.
But this is only a part of his character or personality, and it is my
argument that it is the minor (though essential and indispensable)
and not the major or most important part. For besides this physical
individuality he has a spiritual individuality. The former is the
instrument, the latter is the “life,” and, in the case of music, the
physical expression, the communication, the tangible (eye and ear are
“touch” at a distance) _death-shape_ is the musical creation or form--a
Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart or Wagner opera, a Schubert
song.
The importance of Beethoven--which Wagner was the first to
understand--lay in that stupendous stream of “life” within him which
burst through all the old academic forms, as the sap bursts through a
tree into colour and blossom, and strewed the history of music with
those gigantic skeletons of spiritual life which we know as his works.
But we have yet to discover the meaning of these compositions. Their
full meaning can only be felt, it cannot be re-stated--except when his
works are adequately performed; but they have a characteristic to which
I shall try to give a verbal construction because I think it immensely
important. It is not a quality for which there exists a word, or a
phrase, or even a poem; but it is a particular kind of desire. “_Like
as a hart desireth the water-brooks so thirsteth my soul after the
living God_,” that--were it not for its association with the desires
of Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans, Anglicans, Catholics, Mohammedans,
Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and all those bodies of
people known to-day as “religious”--would perhaps be suggestive. At
any rate it would serve to distinguish the quality of this desire or
passion from the passion which created _Tristan und Isolde_. And,
magnificent and beautiful as that was, its magnificence compared with
the magnificence of Beethoven’s passion is as the magnificence of a
coloured duck to a black swan. The simile is a totally unworthy one,
for we have nothing to which we can compare Beethoven. We can easily
find similes for Wagner, but Beethoven is a _rara avis_.
It is natural to the young to be idealists, an old idealist is
generally either a rogue or a fool--unless he happens to be a
Beethoven. The young find something stirring in their hearts when
listening to Beethoven which they never find when listening to Bach,
Mozart or Wagner, great as these composers are. Beethoven awakes a
feeling so romantic, so idealistic, of so fine and exquisite a bloom
that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret.
What Beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous
delights of Debussy and Strauss, from the fatiguing excitements of
Stravinsky and Jazz, from the gaieties of Verdi and Rossini, from the
sentimental nostalgia of Brahms, from the solid satisfaction of Bach,
from the sensitive melancholy of Mozart and from the lesser loves of
Wagner; but why it does so we cannot tell.
“Had I been willing,” said Beethoven to Schindler in 1823, in the
course of a conversation about the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, “to
surrender thus my vital power and my life what would have been left of
the best and noblest in me?” What a different ring this plain statement
has beside the rhetorical pæans to renunciation on the lips of Wagner,
who was satisfied to accept what would never have satisfied Beethoven.
It is a peculiarity of Beethoven that he can use the words “best” and
“noblest” without making an intelligent man laugh up his sleeve. If we
do succeed in laughing it is with the wrong side of our mouths. The
very words “good,” “noble,” “spiritual,” “sublime,” have all become in
our time synonymous with humbug. In Beethoven’s music they take on a
new and tremendous significance and not all the corrosive acid of the
most powerful intellect and the profoundest scepticism can burn through
them into any leaden substratum. They are gold throughout. Am I wrong
in thinking this an achievement without parallel in the modern world?
Point to me in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, _anywhere_, one
other artist who has recreated (not paid lip-service to) the meaning of
good and left to us the _imagination_ of a love transcending both the
sacred and the profane. There is none.
We cannot live without values and at present we cannot conceive a
state when men would not ask themselves: “Why do I live?” “Is life
worth living?” This is the theme which touches us to-day when we marry
and settle down with our love, measure the spots on the Sun, and fear
neither plagues, pirates, nor eclipses:
“Here I am an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee-deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I am an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.”
The bravest, the most intelligent, the most sensitive are oppressed
with that profound sense of the futility of life which Mr. Eliot
expresses so admirably in the above lines. It is, indeed, the constant
burden of the most characteristic of our modern poets:
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Yes, we are convinced. This _is_ the way the world ends and we have no
more faith in anything. Democracy, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, have
all been added to the list of the Great Superstitions. Mussolini and
Lenin have made moonshine of Socialism and Communism. God is a word
used only in treatises on tribal magic, when it is spelt correctly
as god. Love has been appropriated by the writers of silly magazine
stories and even sillier novels. All honest men are reduced to silence
before the daily avalanche of fraudulent lies from pulpit, printing
press, parliament and platform. Everywhere men speak with the tongues
of serpents and the minds of manufacturers of chewing gum. And deep in
all men’s hearts there is only one thought:
“I grow old--I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
But in the midst of futility and inanity, in the midst of desperation
and despair there sounds the music of Beethoven which says without
bombast or credo: “This is _not_ the way the world ends.” And says it
in such a way that we are forced to listen. We listen to Beethoven when
we would listen to nobody else because he is a man without any of the
world’s illusions. How feeble and superficial seems the disillusionment
of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s poems compared with the agony of the Cavatina in
the B flat Quartet with its mysterious pause--as if the pulse of the
whole Universe were stopped and might not continue; of the Fugue in B
flat Op. 133; and of the last Pianoforte Sonata which Beethoven wrote.
In this last Sonata we feel the agony of a man whose imagination is
grappling with some insupportable horror. Let us conceive the Captain
of a ship standing on its bridge in a calm, unconscious sea. The boats
are useless because land does not exist anywhere. From the deck come
the cries, curses and weeping of the doomed crew, who are only his own
embodied emotions, for he is really alone. Slowly they are going down
into the unruffled water. The Captain does not shake his fist defiantly
into the sky and deny that he is going down, but knowing that he is
going down never to return sinks passionately into the sea. Such is
the mind and temper of Beethoven. There is agony but no whimper, and
if that is not ending with a bang I don’t know what is. In the music
of Beethoven there are no anodynes, no lullings of sense, no deceits
of the intelligence, but pure _virtus_. And this _virtus_ is thrilling
absolutely, without reservations. After the tremendous drama of the
first movement of the C minor Sonata, for example--a drama in which
there is the whole ecstatic misery of life--we are not assuaged by a
dream. The conflict does not cease. That wonderful Arietta--surely
the most wonderful thing in all music--is no bringer of peace and
resignation. In it something passes away but _its passing away is an
act of creation not of extinction_. It is this which gives Beethoven’s
music its peculiar significance, for Creation not Nirvana is the
essence of Beethoven. It has its root therefore in human personality
and may be most accurately described as the supremest imagination of
love in human art. But though beyond the conception of the Neapolitan
fisherman mourning for his lost bride it does not lessen but enriches
that ancient love-song, making it impossible for us to feel that it was
meaningless.
And if anyone should say that the question: “Why do I live?” has not
been answered, I reply that Beethoven has rendered it ridiculous.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] The ancient Greeks with characteristic intellectual power did not
believe in mere irresponsible accident.
[6] Compare for example the feebleness of our contemporary love-songs
and ballads.
[7] For example we can ask nothing more than that a composer should
write “exciting musical patterns.” It all depends upon what is meant by
“exciting.”