IV

This is indeed a rhapsodical production. Miranda was probably right.

Had it not been for Pauline Lucca, I might not have philosophised the

_Nozze_ thus. Yet, in the main, I believe that my instinct was

well grounded. Music, especially when wedded to words, more especially

when those words are dramatic, cannot separate itself from emotion. It

will not do to tell us that a melody is a certain sequence of sounds;

that the composer chose it for its beauty of rhythm, form, and tune,

and only used the words to get it vocalised. We are forced to go

farther back, and ask ourselves, What suggested it in the first place

to the composer? why did he use it precisely in connection with

this dramatic situation? How can we answer these questions except by

supposing that music was for him the utterance through art of some

emotion? The final fact of human nature is emotion, crystallising

itself in thought and language, externalising itself in action and

art. 'What,' said Novalis, 'are thoughts but pale dead feelings?'

Admitting this even in part, we cannot deny to music an emotional

content of some kind. I would go farther, and assert that, while a

merely mechanical musician may set inappropriate melodies to words,

and render music inexpressive of character, what constitutes a musical

dramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to the words of his

libretto such melody as shall interpret character, and the power to do

this with effect.

That the Cherubino of Mozart's _Nozze_ is quite different from

Beaumarchais' Cherubin does not affect this question. He is a new

creation, just because Mozart could not, or would not, conceive the

character of the page in Beaumarchais' sprightly superficial spirit.

He used the part to utter something unutterable except by music about

the soul of the still adolescent lover. The libretto-part and the

melodies, taken together, constitute a new romantic ideal, consistent

with experience, but realised with the intensity and universality

whereby art is distinguished from life. Don Juan was a myth before

Mozart touched him with the magic wand of music. Cherubino became

a myth by the same Prospero's spell. Both characters have the

universality, the symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings.

That there remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the music

made for him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; for

the music made for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychical

condition, and is independent of his boyishness of conduct.

This further explains why there may be so many renderings of

Cherubino's melodies. Mozart idealised an infinite emotion. The

singer is forced to define; the actor also is forced to define. Each

introduces his own limit on the feeling. When the actor and the singer

meet together in one personality, this definition of emotion becomes

of necessity doubly specific. The condition of all music is that it

depends in a great measure on the temperament of the interpreter for

its momentary shade of expression, and this dependence is of course

exaggerated when the music is dramatic. Furthermore, the subjectivity

of the audience enters into the problem as still another element of

definition. It may therefore be fairly said that, in estimating any

impression produced by Cherubino's music, the original character of

the page, transplanted from French comedy to Italian opera, Mozart's

conception of that character, Mozart's specific quality of emotion

and specific style of musical utterance, together with the contralto's

interpretation of the character and rendering of the music, according

to her intellectual capacity, artistic skill, and timbre of voice,

have collaborated with the individuality of the hearer. Some of the

constituents of the ever-varying product--a product which is new each

time the part is played--are fixed. Da Ponte's Cherubino and Mozart's

melodies remain unalterable. All the rest is undecided; the singer and

the listener change on each occasion.

To assert that the musician Mozart meant nothing by his music, to

assert that he only cared about it _quâ_ music, is the same as

to say that the painter Tintoretto, when he put the Crucifixion upon

canvas, the sculptor Michelangelo, when he carved Christ upon the lap

of Mary, meant nothing, and only cared about the beauty of their

forms and colours. Those who take up this position prove, not that the

artist has no meaning to convey, but that for them the artist's nature

is unintelligible, and his meaning is conveyed in an unknown tongue.

It seems superfluous to guard against misinterpretation by saying that

to expect clear definition from music--the definition which belongs

to poetry--would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuous

perception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing

with pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry,

dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject

may be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot

fail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may very

easily interpret in a hundred different ways the message of sound.

But this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive;

rather because they are more limited, more stereotyped, more dead.

They symbolise something precise and unmistakable; but this precision

is itself attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value of

the counter is better understood when it is a word than when it is a

chord, because all that a word conveys has already become a thought,

while all that musical sounds convey remains within the region of

emotion which has not been intellectualised. Poetry touches emotion

through the thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at

all, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has become

thought, has already lost a portion of its force, and has taken to

itself a something alien to its nature. Therefore the message of music

can never rightly be translated into words. It is the very largeness

and vividness of the sphere of simple feeling which makes its

symbolical counterpart in sound so seeming vague. But in spite of this

incontestable defect of seeming vagueness, emotion expressed by music

is nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to take it in, than

the same emotion limited by language. It is intenser, it is more

immediate, as compensation for being less intelligible, less

unmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, an indistinct, where each

consciousness defines and sets a limitary form.

V

A train of thought which begins with the concrete not unfrequently

finds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions. This

is the point to which the performance of Cherubino's part by Pauline

Lucca at the Scala twenty years ago has led me--that I have to settle

with myself what I mean by art in general, and what I take to be the

proper function of music as one of the fine arts.

'Art,' said Goethe, 'is but form-giving.' We might vary this

definition, and say, 'Art is a method of expression or presentation.'

Then comes the question: If art gives form, if it is a method of

expression or presentation, to what does it give form, what does it

express or present? The answer certainly must be: Art gives form to

human consciousness; expresses or presents the feeling or the thought

of man. Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communication

of innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the softening of

manners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at all

events, is its prime function.

While investing thought, the spiritual subject-matter of all art, with

form, or finding for it proper modes of presentation, each of the arts

employs a special medium, obeying the laws of beauty proper to that

medium. The vehicles of the arts, roughly speaking, are material

substances (like stone, wood, metal), pigments, sounds, and words.

The masterly handling of these vehicles and the realisation of

their characteristic types of beauty have come to be regarded as the

craftsman's paramount concern. And in a certain sense this is a right

conclusion; for dexterity in the manipulation of the chosen vehicle

and power to create a beautiful object, distinguish the successful

artist from the man who may have had like thoughts and feelings. This

dexterity, this power, are the properties of the artist _quâ_

artist. Yet we must not forget that the form created by the artist

for the expression of a thought or feeling is not the final end of art

itself. That form, after all, is but the mode of presentation through

which the spiritual content manifests itself. Beauty, in like manner,

is not the final end of art, but is the indispensable condition under

which the artistic manifestation of the spiritual content must he

made. It is the business of art to create an ideal world, in which

perception, emotion, understanding, action, all elements of human life

sublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This

being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should not

only estimate the technical skill of artists and their faculty for

presenting beauty to the æsthetic sense, but that we should also ask

ourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to invest

with form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not necessary

that the ideas embodied in a work of art should be the artist's

own. They may be common to the race and age: as, for instance, the

conception of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of

Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in Raphael's

'Madonna di San Sisto.' Still the personality of the artist, his

own intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar way of thinking and

feeling, his individual attitude towards the material given to him in

ideas of human consciousness, will modify his choice of subject and

of form, and will determine his specific type of beauty. To take an

example: supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is given

to the artist for treatment; this will be the final end of the work

of art which he produces. But his personal qualities and technical

performance determine the degree of success or failure to which he

attains in presenting that idea and in expressing it with beauty.

Signorelli fails where Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely

form to the religious sentiment. Michelangelo is sure of the sublime,

and Raphael of the beautiful.

Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to his

fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with what

man thinks and feels and does. It is as deep as religion, as wide as

life. But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, that

this subject-matter must assume beautiful form, and must be presented

directly or indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the

cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. It does not

teach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract enters into art's domain.

Truth and goodness are transmuted into beauty there, just as in

science beauty and goodness assume the shape of truth, and in

religion truth and beauty become goodness. The rigid definitions, the

unmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in art. Whatever art

has touched acquires a concrete sensuous embodiment, and thus ideas

presented to the mind in art have lost a portion of their pure

thought-essence. It is on this account that the religious conceptions

of the Greeks were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and

certain portions of the mediæval Christian mythology lent themselves

so well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics of

ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic faculty. Art, in a

word, is a middle term between reason and the senses. Its secondary

aim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in beautiful

form has been accomplished, is to give tranquil and innocent

enjoyment.

* * * * *

From what has gone before it will be seen that no human being can

make or mould a beautiful form without incorporating in that form some

portion of the human mind, however crude, however elementary. In other

words, there is no work of art without a theme, without a motive,

without a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive, that

subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad according as

the subject has been well or ill presented, consistently with the laws

of beauty special to the art itself. Thus we obtain two standards

for æsthetic criticism. We judge a statue, for example, both by

the sculptor's intellectual grasp upon his subject, and also by his

technical skill and sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgment

by Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been more

successfully treated than the torments of the wicked, because the

former has been better understood, although the painter's skill in

each is equal. In the Perseus of Cellini we admire the sculptor's

spirit, finish of execution, and originality of design, while we

deplore that want of sympathy with the heroic character which makes

his type of physical beauty slightly vulgar and his facial expression

vacuous. If the phrase 'Art for art's sake' has any meaning, this

meaning is simply that the artist, having chosen a theme, thinks

exclusively in working at it of technical dexterity or the quality of

beauty. There are many inducements for the artist thus to narrow his

function, and for the critic to assist him by applying the canons of

a soulless connoisseurship to his work; for the conception of the

subject is but the starting-point in art-production, and the artist's

difficulties and triumphs as a craftsman lie in the region of

technicalities. He knows, moreover, that, however deep or noble his

idea may be, his work of art will be worthless if it fail in skill

or be devoid of beauty. What converts a thought into a statue or

a picture, is the form found for it; and so the form itself seems

all-important. The artist, therefore, too easily imagines that he may

neglect his theme; that a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced

composition, or, as Cellini put it, 'un bel corpo ignudo,' is enough.

And this is especially easy in an age which reflects much upon the

arts, and pursues them with enthusiasm, while its deeper thoughts and

feelings are not of the kind which translate themselves readily

into artistic form. But, after all, a fine piece of colouring, a

well-balanced composition, a sonorous stanza, a learned essay in

counterpoint, are not enough. They are all excellent good things,

yielding delight to the artistic sense and instruction to the student.

Yet when we think of the really great statues, pictures, poems, music

of the world, we find that these are really great because of something

more--and that more is their theme, their presentation of a noble

portion of the human soul. Artists and art-students may be satisfied

with perfect specimens of a craftsman's skill, independent of his

theme; but the mass of men will not be satisfied; and it is as wrong

to suppose that art exists for artists and art-students, as to talk

of art for art's sake. Art exists for humanity. Art transmutes thought

and feeling into terms of beautiful form. Art is great and lasting

in proportion as it appeals to the human consciousness at large,

presenting to it portions of itself in adequate and lovely form.