BEYOND ALL SENSE
Music will not end with Beethoven. It is possible that the very
problems that confronted him and still confront us will fade out of
the imagination just as those political problems which occupied so
much of the attention of the historical world from the Greek Republics
to the British Empire are ceasing to exist before our very eyes.
And when we think of the religious dissensions of Christendom and
reflect on the questions which once divided father from son, sect
from sect, church from church, it is with difficulty that we can give
them a meaning intelligible to our minds, much less feel any shadow
of the life that was once in them. In the memory of living men,
heartburning intellectual problems have become empty phrases. Darwin,
Huxley, and the Anglican Bishops all seem as unreal as the waxworks of
Madame Tussaud and are seen to be the complementary phenomena of an
intellectual nightmare. No one to-day imagines that Truth wears the
strange Victorian get-up of any of these gentlemen.
Similarly the sociological phantoms of the age of Bernard Shaw and
H. G. Wells, of Karl Marx and Lenin are cutting the last of their
antithetical capers. Socialist and Anti-Socialist, Communist and
Anti-Communist, Conservative and Revolutionary have suddenly caught
sight of their own faces behind the masks of their opponents. Their
passionate reality is seen to be no more than a Fancy Dress Ball--for
all these figments, these fictions, these _Ideas_ were never any more
than the Masks of false passions, passions which have never succeeded
in begetting a progeny, since they are the mere nightmare passions of
social indigestion.
In another five generations there will be no poverty, there may be
no matrimony, there will certainly, if there is no poverty, be no
patrimony. Children may take their mother’s name and then fathers
will have not even a fifty-year royalty upon their creations. Men and
women will look upon their children as artists look upon their works
and will wish others to enjoy them. The world will be so changed that
none of the problems which to-day set our newspapers printing and
our politicians talking will even exist. Our present ideas on sex,
morality, beauty and value will in those days appear as strange,
as fantastic, as illusory as the ideas of our ancestors who took
Beecham’s pills to cure all ills.
Will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day?
Necessarily, since life without change is inconceivable to us and music
that is alive must be changing. But the meaning of this change is not
to be apprehended by the mind, for it is no less than life itself.
A part of it, however, can be apprehended, for, although we feel
instinctively that the more the world changes the more that it is the
same[8] yet we cannot deny that it is the same with a difference. And
it is the difference which matters and is _matter_--that which appears,
is visible and audible--_the death-shape of the spirit_.
It would be boring and futile to consider the methods which may
be invented of distributing music or of making music heard. That a
million persons listen to Beethoven by wireless or gramophone where,
previously, a thousand listened in a concert hall is one of those
statistical changes which it is beyond the wit of man to value.
Fortunately there is a period fixed to the possibilities of “progress”
of this kind; and when every baby is born to Beethoven and to Freedom
then culture and statistics of culture, education and measurements
of education will have simultaneously ceased. There will be in those
days no newspaper interviews with Neo-Edisons because there will be no
newspapers; the people will have forgotten that it is interesting to
know whether a celebrity drinks de-caffeined coffee or dehydrogened
water because there will be no “people” and no celebrities. The Age of
Vulgarity will have passed.
What sort of music will be listened to in those days? The music of
Orpheus, the music that comes out of darkness.
According to Plato when Orpheus descended into hell and succeeded
by the strains of his mysterious music in softening the hearts of
Pluto and Persephone--who themselves were phantoms, prisoners of the
imagination, supernal beings chained to the bottom of Hades because
they were imagined there and existed only in _Imagination_--he brought
back with him but an Apparition. It was an Apparition that he gazed at
so fondly, and which nevertheless vanished before his eyes. His music
was that Apparition; those heavenly strains, mysterious, profound,
issuing from his mouth took form, the form of _Eurydice_--the
imagination of light in darkness, of love in the midst of death.
The forms that music will take in the future are as yet unimagined;
but these forms will always be the form of Eurydice plucked by
Orpheus vainly out of Hell. And they will not be abstract forms but
the apparition of a real love which, bitten by the serpent of life,
descended into the kingdom of Pluto.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The evolutionary theory will no longer be thought of as a
continuous or a discontinuous ascent; biological species will be
regarded as ripples on a pool; the Astronomical Universe will be
conceived as stationary.
THE END