From the Atlantic Monthly, 1870, by permission of Houghton, Mifflin
and Company
We as a democratic people, a great mixed people of all races,
overrunning a vast continent, need music even more than others. We
need some ever-present, ever-welcome influence that shall insensibly
tone down our self-asserting and aggressive manners, round off the
sharp, offensive angularity of character, subdue and harmonize the
free and ceaseless conflict of opinions, warm out the genial
individual humanity of each and every unit of society, lest he become
a mere member of a party, or a sharer of business or fashion. This
rampant liberty will rush to its own ruin, unless there shall be found
some gentler, harmonizing, humanizing culture, such as may pervade
whole masses with a fine enthusiasm, a sweet sense of reverence for
something far above us, beautiful and pure; awakening some ideality in
every soul, and often lifting us out of the hard hopeless prose of
daily life. We need this beautiful corrective of our crudities. Our
radicalism will pull itself up by the roots, if it do not cultivate
the instinct of reverence. The first impulse of freedom is
centrifugal,--to fly off the handle,--unless it be restrained by a no
less free impassioned love of order. We need to be so enamored of the
divine idea of unity, that that alone--the enriching of that--shall be
the real motive for assertion of our individuality. What shall so
temper and tone down our "fierce democracy"? It must be something
better, lovelier, more congenial to human nature than mere stern
prohibition, cold Puritanic "Thou shalt _not_!" What can so quickly
magnetize a people into this harmonic mood as music? Have we not seen
it, felt it?
The hard-working, jaded millions need expansion, need the
rejuvenating, the ennobling experience of joy. Their toil, their
church, their creed perhaps, their party livery, and very vote, are
narrowing; they need to taste, to breathe a larger, freer life. Has it
not come to thousands, while they have listened to or joined their
voices in some thrilling chorus that made the heavens seem to open and
come down? The governments of the Old World do much to make the people
cheerful and contented; here it is all _laissez-faire_, each for
himself, in an ever keener strife of competition. We must look very
much to music to do this good work for us; we are open to that
appeal; we can forget ourselves in that; we blend in joyous fellowship
when we can sing together; perhaps quite as much so when we can listen
together to a noble orchestra of instruments interpreting the highest
inspirations of a master. The higher and purer the character and kind
of music, the more of real genius there is in it, the deeper will this
influence be.
Judge of what can be done, by what already, within our own experience,
has been done and daily is done. Think what the children in our
schools are getting, through the little that they learn of vocal
music,--elasticity of spirit, joy in harmonious co-operation, in the
blending of each happy life in others; a rhythmical instinct of order
and of measure in all movement; a quickening of ear and sense, whereby
they will grow up susceptible to music, as well as with some use of
their own voices, so that they may take part in it; for from these
spacious nurseries (loveliest flower gardens, apple orchards in full
bloom, say, on their annual _fete_ days) shall our future choirs and
oratorio choruses be replenished with good sound material....
We esteem ourselves the freest people on this planet; yet perhaps we
have as little real freedom as any other, for we are the slaves of our
own feverish enterprise, and of a barren theory of discipline, which
would fain make us virtuous to a fault through abstinence from very
life. We are afraid to give ourselves up to the free and happy
instincts of our nature. All that is not pursuit of advancement in
some good, conventional, approved way of business, or politics, or
fashion, or intellectual reputation, or professed religion, we count
waste. We lack _geniality_; nor do we as a people understand the
meaning of the word. We ought to learn it practically of our Germans.
It comes of the same root with the word _genius_. Genius is the
spontaneous principle; it is free and happy in its work; it is artist
and not drudge; its whole activity is reconciliation of the heartiest
pleasure with the purest loyalty to conscience, with the most holy,
universal, and disinterested ends. Genius, as Beethoven gloriously
illustrates in his Choral Symphony (indeed, in all his symphonies),
finds the keynote and solution of the problem of the highest state in
"Joy," taking his text from Schiller's Hymn. Now, all may not be
geniuses in the sense that we call Shakespeare, Mozart, Raphael, men
of genius. But all should be partakers of this spontaneous, free, and
happy method of genius; all should live childlike, genial lives, and
not wear all the time the consequential livery of their unrelaxing
business, nor the badge of party and profession, in every line and
feature of their faces. This genial, childlike faculty of social
enjoyment, this happy art of life, is just what our countrymen may
learn from the social "Liedertafel" and the summer singing-festivals
of which the Germans are so fond. There is no element of national
character which we so much need; and there is no class of citizens
whom we should be more glad to adopt and own than those who set us
such examples. So far as it is a matter of culture, it is through art
chiefly that the desiderated genial era must be ushered in. The
Germans have the sentiment of art, the feeling of the beautiful in
art, and consequently in nature, more developed than we have. Above
all, music offers itself as the most available, most popular, most
influential of the fine arts,--music, which is the art and language of
the feelings, the sentiments, the spiritual instincts of the soul; and
so becomes a universal language, tending to unite and blend and
harmonize all who may come within its sphere.
Such civilizing, educating power has music for society at large. Now,
in the finer sense of culture, such as we look for in more private and
select "society," as it is called, music in the salon, in the small
chamber concert, where congenial spirits are assembled in its
name--good music of course--does it not create a finer sphere of
social sympathy and courtesy? Does it not better mold the tone and
manners from within than any imitative "fashion" from without? What
society, upon the whole, is quite so sweet, so satisfactory, so
refined, as the best musical society, if only Mozart, Mendelssohn,
Franz, Chopin, set the tone! The finer the kind of music heard or made
together, the better the society. This bond of union only reaches the
few; coarser, meaner, more prosaic natures are not drawn to it. Wealth
and fashion may not dictate who shall be of it. Here congenial spirits
meet in a way at once free, happy, and instructive, meet with an
object which insures "society"; whereas so-called society, as such, is
often aimless, vague, modifying and fatiguing, for the want of any
subject-matter. Here one gets ideas of beauty which are not mere
arbitrary fashions, ugly often to the eye of taste. Here you may
escape vulgarity by a way not vulgar in itself, like that of fashion,
which makes wealth and family and means of dress its passports. Here
you can be as exclusive as you please, by the soul's light, not
wronging any one; here learn gentle manners, and the quiet ease and
courtesy with which cultivated people move, without in the same
process learning insincerity.
Of course the same remarks apply to similar sincere reunions in the
name of any other art, or of poetry. But music is the most social of
them all, even if each listener find nothing set down to his part (or
even hers!) but _tacet_.
We have fancied ourselves entertaining a musical house together, but
we must leave it with no time to make report or picture out the scene.
Now, could we only enter the chamber, the inner sanctum, the private
inner life of a thoroughly musical person, one who is wont to _live_
in music! Could we know him in his solitude! (You can only know him in
yourself, unless he be a poet and creator in his art, and bequeath
himself in that form in his works for any who know how to read.) If
the best of all society is musical society, we go further and say: The
sweetest of all solitude is when one is alone with music. One gets the
best of music, the sincerest part, when he is alone. Our
poet-philosopher has told us to secure solitude at any cost; there's
nothing which we can so ill afford to do without. It is a great vice
of our society, that it provides for and disposes to so little
solitude, ignoring the fact that there is more loneliness in company
than out of it. Now, to a musical person, in the mood of it, in the
sweet hours by himself, comes music as the nearest friend, nearer and
dearer than ever before; and he soon finds that he never was in such
good company. I doubt if symphony of Beethoven, opera of Mozart,
Passion Music of Bach, was ever so enjoyed or felt in grandest public
rendering, as one may feel it while he recalls its outline by himself
at his piano (even if he be a slow and bungling reader and may get it
out by piecemeal). I doubt if such an one can carry home from the
performance, in presence of the applauding crowd, nearly so much as he
may take to it from such inward, private preparation.
Are you alone? What spirits can you summon up to fill the vacancy, and
people it with life and love and beauty! Take down the volume of
sonatas, the arrangement of the great Symphony, the recorded reveries
of Chopin, the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Franz, or even the
chorals, with the harmony of Bach, in which the four parts blend their
several individual melodies together in such loving service of the
whole, that the plain people's tune becomes a germ unfolding into
endless wealth and beauty of meaning; and you have the very essence
of all prayer, and praise, and gratitude, as if you were a worshiper
in the ideal church. Nothing like music, then, to banish the benumbing
ghost of ennui. It lends secret sympathy, relief, expression, to all
one's moods, loves, longings, sorrows; comes nearer to the soul or to
the secret wound than any friend or healing sunshine from without. It
nourishes and feeds the hidden springs of hope and love and faith;
renews the old conviction of life's springtime,--that the world is
ruled by love, that God is good, that beauty is a divine end of life,
and not a snare and an illusion. It floods out of sight the unsightly,
muddy grounds of life's petty, anxious, doubting moments, and makes
immortality a present fact, lived in and realized. It locks the door
against the outer world of discords, contradictions, importunities,
beneath the notice of a soul so richly occupied: lets "Fate knock at
the door" (as Beethoven said in explanation of his symphony),--Fate
and the pursuing Furies,--and even welcomes them, and turns them into
gracious goddesses,--Eumenides! Music, in this way, is a marvelous
elixir to keep off old age. Youth returns in solitary hours with
Beethoven and Mozart. Touching the chords of the 'Moonlight Sonata,'
the old man is once more a lover; with the _andante_ of the 'Pastoral
Symphony' he loiters by the shady brookside, hand in hand with his
fresh heart's first angel. You are past the sentimental age, yet you
can weep alone in music,--not weep exactly, but find outlet more
expressive and more worthy of your manly faith.
A great grief comes, an inconsolable bereavement, a humiliating,
paralyzing reverse, a blow of Fate, giving the lie to your best plans
and bringing your best powers into discredit with yourself; then you
are best prepared and best entitled to receive the secret visitations
of these tuneful goddesses and muses.
"Who never ate his bread in tears,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers!"
So sings the German poet. It is the want of inward, deep experience,
it is innocence of sorrow and of trial, more than the lack of any
special cultivation of musical taste and knowledge, that debars many
people--naturally most young people, and all who are what we call
shallow natures--from the feeling and enjoyment of many of the truest,
deepest, and most heavenly of all the works of music. Take the Passion
Music of Bach, for instance; if you can sit down alone at your piano
and decipher strains and pieces of it when you _need_ such music, you
shall find that in its quiet quaintness, its sincerity and tenderness,
its abstinence from all striving for effect, it speaks to you and
entwines itself about your heart, like the sweetest, deepest verses in
the Bible; when "the soul muses till the fire burns."
Such a panacea is this art for loneliness. But sometimes too it may
intensify the sense of loneliness, only for more heavenly relief at
last. Think of the deep composer, of lonely, sad Beethoven, wreaking
his pain upon expression in those impatient chords and modulations,
putting his sorrows into sonatas, and wringing triumph always out of
all! Look at him as he was then,--morose, they say, and lonely and
tormented; look where he is now, as the whole world knows him, feels
him, seeks him for its joy and inspiration--and who can doubt of
immortality?
Now, in such private solace, in such solitary joys, is there not
culture? Can one rise from such communings with the good spirits of
the tone-world and go out, without new peace, new faith, new hope, and
good-will in his soul? He goes forth in the spirit of reconciliation
and of patience, however much he may hate the wrong he sees about him,
or however little he accept authorities and creeds that make war on
his freedom. The man who has tasted such life, and courted it till he
has become acclimated in it, whether he be of this party or that, or
none at all; whether he be believer or "heretic," conservative or
radical, follower of Christ by name or "Free Religionist,"--belongs to
the harmonic and anointed body-guard of peace, fraternity, good-will;
his instincts have all caught the rhythm of that holy march; the good
genius leads, he has but to follow cheerfully and humbly. For somehow
the minutest fibres, the infinitesimal atoms of his being, have got
magnetized as it were into a loyal, positive direction towards the
pole-star of unity; he has grown attuned to a believing, loving mood,
just as the body of a violin, the walls of a music hall, by much
music-making become gradually seasoned into smooth vibration.
[Illustration: GEORG EBERS.]