THE MODERN SPIRIT
The need of mastering life, of reducing its multitudinous, thronging
details to some sort of order, that shall lack neither the unity which
alone can satisfy the mind, nor the variety requisite to do justice to
the complexity of experience, is the one perennial need of humanity.
The aim of all the chief human undertakings is to find schemes of
order: physical science is the quest of order in the material world;
morality is the quest of coordination and balance between many
individual wills; religion is the search for the One Spirit which
contains and fuses together all finite souls; art is the pursuit of
that organization of diverse elements, of whatever sort, in one
sensible whole, in which we perceive beauty. But since experience is
bewilderingly many-sided and complex, one scheme after another is made
only to be discarded as inadequate, and progress entails the constant
substitution of more inclusive for less inclusive syntheses. Our most
catholic formulas are provisional and temporary; “opinions are but
stages on the road to truth.”
Such a word as “modern” can therefore have but a relative meaning.
What is modern to-day will be archaic a hundred years hence. Our
contemporary ideas are more liberal than those of our grandfathers,
but they will likely appear as the rigid superstitions of a dark age
to our still more enlightened descendants. When we speak of the modern
spirit we say nothing in regard to the future; we name simply the
attitude of mind which characterizes the present as contrasted with the
past. That new vision or intuition or instinct of truth by which we
of to-day reinterpret in more liberal wise the elements of experience
either interpreted too narrowly or quite ignored by the earlier
generations--that is the “modern spirit.”
We have been considering at some length, in the foregoing chapter,
the characteristic mystical attitude of the mediæval mind. We have
seen how the typical thinkers of the middle age, aware of good but
unable to identify it with an actual world so full of evil, made a
sharp division, a total breach, between the actual and the divine.
The mystic cut the Gordian knot of the world-problem by rejecting
the actual altogether from his house of life. His scheme had its own
harmony, unity, rationality; but being built upon an exclusion, it had
in the nature of things to give place in course of time to a scheme
less disregardful of the true wealth and reality of experience. The
modern mind turned away from mysticism, envisaged the world afresh, and
reinterpreted truth in terms of idealism.
Idealism is, in essence, a belief in the possibility of attaining the
divine through a selective manipulation of the actual. In the respect
it pays to finite life lies its sharp contrast with mysticism. It has
gone far to obliterate the breach between the actual and the divine
which the mystic had made so wide; it has tried to find the eternal
in the temporal, and to nourish the spirit by guiding and developing,
rather than by mortifying, the flesh.[15] Mysticism spurned the
“this,” the “here,” the “now;” idealism, on the contrary, is on its
hither side, so to speak, identical with realism. The idealist believes
in the immediate, and loves the finite, as much as the crassest
realist. He finds in it the point of departure of all desirable truths,
the scaffolding for all mansions of the spirit. But he differs from
the realist in that he does not stop with the real, but, using it as
material for idealism, selects from it the elements of his heart’s
desire. The actual world is to him a sort of keyboard on which he
strikes those chords, and those only, which he wishes to hear. He is,
indeed, an artist in life, and his method is the true artistic method
of selection and synthesis. But on the other hand, he differs even more
radically from the mystic, in that he makes the very materials of his
Celestial City out of those earthly, momentary, and finite experiences
that the latter rejects as dross. All three types of thought find
themselves confronted by the opposition between actual facts and
spiritual desires which is so characteristic of our world: the mystic
repudiates the facts; the realist discredits the desires; the idealist
sets out to win, by a selective or artistic manipulation of the facts,
the satisfaction of the desires.
Characteristic of idealism is therefore its respect for the actual,
in all its phases. It respects, to begin with, the human body. The
tendency of modern thought is towards a wise paganism in physical life,
towards a substitution of hygiene for mortification, of moderation for
abstinence, of the liberal conception of “mens sana in corpore sano”
for the monkish ideal of a soul gradually burning up and sloughing off
its tenement. Development of the body is increasingly manifesting its
true relation to the spiritual enterprises of men--a relation that
repression of it only obscured and distorted. The Hermit of Carmel,
in the poem of that name,[16] spends his days in a painful, endless,
and futile struggle to eradicate fleshly lusts; the young knight knows
another sort of purity, more joyful and bountiful, the purity of the
lover who remembers his beloved. Idealism, like that happy knight,
remembers that it is the mission and destiny of flesh to wait on
spirit.
Again, idealism respects the intellect. The great development of the
physical sciences, generally considered the most striking fact in
nineteenth century history, is the necessary result of an idealistic
faith in the powers of human observation and reason. The modern mind,
believing in its own ability to interrogate nature, has done so with
tireless energy, recording the answers obtained in half a hundred
special “sciences,” ranging from histology to psychology. It has
applied the same method introspectively to such good purpose that
metaphysics, in the hands of Kant and his successors, has radically
altered our conception of how we know truth, and what sort of truth
it is that we know. Nor have the contributions of the enfranchised
intellect stopped with philosophy; they have immensely deepened and
vivified religion. The doctrine of evolution, for example, a product of
the most remarkable keenness, liberality, and patience in intellectual
research, has substituted for the childish anthropomorphic doctrine of
creation the wondrously vital modern conception of a God not remote
and detached, but nearer than thought and more enveloping than the
atmosphere, incarnate in every atom and regnant in every mind.
The emotional or spiritual essence in man is as much respected by
idealism as his body and his intellect. Loyalty to actual feelings as
they well up spontaneously in the heart, rather than mere conformity
to custom, is the modern attitude in all spheres of voluntary life.
Personal conduct is a truer mirror of individual feeling than it used
to be. What a contrast the student of literature observes between the
conventional worldliness of eighteenth-century manners and morals and
the intense individualism of the early nineteenth-century poets in
England and of our own transcendentalist writers--an individualism
which was the logical outcome of the idealist’s championship of human
emotion in and for itself. The greatest men are of course always
ahead of their age, but such sturdy, independent lives as Thoreau’s,
Whitman’s, Darwin’s, George Eliot’s, Stevenson’s, would have created
even more consternation in the eighteenth century than they did in
the nineteenth, dimly stirred to freer ideals. The same regard for
emotional verities that has so deepened individual life is producing a
revolution in all social relations. They are constantly becoming more
spontaneous and genuine--less matters of tradition. Class boundaries
are being obliterated, a man’s success and position coming to depend
less on family and station, more on the man himself. Women’s economic
progress, combined with an increasing sense in both women and men of
the real sacredness and responsibility of love between the sexes, is
making marriage, in many ways the most vital of all social relations,
a free and joyful bond between equals, rather than a yoke imposed by
egotism and endured by helplessness. In sum, the democratic ideal is
substituting, in all social relations, the genuine inner cohesion for
the artificial mortar and cement of external usage. Finally, it is the
same regard for inner realities, so characteristic of idealism, that is
giving to men’s religious experience a new profundity. When once the
heart is awakened, it needs no longer the assurance of antique books
that God exists, and it can worship him no longer as a mere formula,
universal because featureless. Intuition supplants revelation, and men
enter into a personal relation with the God they had before conceived
as austere, characterless, and remote. Modern nonconformity is an
indication of the reality of modern religious feeling.
In countless ways we thus discern the working of the idealistic impulse
in our contemporary life. Independence in personal conduct and thought,
democracy in social relations, nonconformity in religion, stand out
as salient features of the modern world, especially when we contrast
them with the conventionality, paternalism, and ecclesiasticism of the
mediæval.
The foregoing remarks, together with the reflections they will suggest
to the reader, may perhaps suffice to show that idealism has met at
least one of the requirements of human progress, by filling the mind
with a vastly richer and more various mass of contents than mysticism
admitted. The realities it takes account of are far less pathetically
inadequate to match the actual richness of experience than the thin,
impalpable, and austere conceptions of the mystic. Compared with his,
the world of the idealist is a breathing, moving world, not entirely
void of the infinite tragedy and comedy of life itself. Something
of passion and pathos it has, and it is held in shape by the tough
fibres of commonplace--for even the trivial is not excluded. All
this increase of complexity, however, would be quite nugatory were a
principle of unity lacking. The complexity must be built into an order
if it is to be truly a synthesis, satisfying to the mind as well as to
the sense of reality.
It is, therefore, a fact of capital importance, that idealism does
succeed in unifying, as well as in enriching, our conceptions of life.
It systematizes, at the same time that it broadens, our views. Much as
it insists on the variety of experience, even more does it assert its
organic unity. Indeed, the central ideal of idealism, its very heart
of hearts, is its belief in the wholeness, the organized integrity,
of the universe. It respects the body, the mind, and the soul of man;
but even more it respects the whole man, in just balance and full
inward cooperation of functions. Believing man to be an organism, it
sets supreme store by his full or organic activity, and deplores undue
prominence in any element of his life, as injuring the harmony of the
whole. Ardently as it champions individual initiative, it demonstrates,
through philosophy, that the very consciousness of the individual is
dependent on his social relations.[17] It recognizes that democracy
can exist only through mutual service, and that freedom is based
on a universal sense of responsibility. It is clearly aware that a
personal relation with God comes only to him who is willing to obey
God, not in a spirit of passive endurance, but with active joy, as a
part serving the whole in which it has its being. This recognition
of a just relation to the whole as the supreme ideal of all partial
existences is testified to most strikingly by our very vocabulary,
the natural repository of our beliefs. The word “health,” denoting
physical well-being, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “hal,” or whole;
“sanity,” signifying mental well-being, is from the Latin word for
the same idea, “sanus;” and we name the most indispensable of moral
traits “integrity.” True idealism is in no way more certainly to be
distinguished from its sentimental counterfeits than by its constant
recognition that the preservation of the wholeness, as well as the
fullness, of man’s nature, is the _sine qua non_ of human welfare. It
values every least manifestation of his nature, because it considers
each one sacred; but it values even more the coordination and harmony
of all.
Turning from the consideration of idealism in its general effect on
modern life to examine its more special effect upon art, we recognize
at once its importance as an æsthetic force. Art is the expression of
man’s physical, emotional, and spiritual life, in organized fullness.
Wherever there is direct, complete, and beautiful expression of what
seems to man precious, there is art. Wherever, on the contrary, there
is suppression of any genuine human impulse, in fancied service to
some other, as in the case of mediæval mysticism, there is artistic
immaturity or arrest; and wherever there is an exaggerated development
of any one impulse, at the expense of others and of the balance or
symmetry of all, as in the cases of modern French realistic literature
and of program music, for example, there is artistic decadence. And
since idealism insists both on the claims of all legitimate human
impulses to recognition, and on their submission to adjustment in the
interests of a rounded human nature, idealism is a potent stimulus to
true art.
All this is amply illustrated in that great development of art under
the spur of idealism which we name the Renaissance. By renaissance,
or rebirth, is meant a reawakening of the human spirit to fuller
activity, an increased recognition of its native dignity and value
as transcending all artificial sanctions and limits. The renaissance
period was, as it were, the adolescence of humanity. It was the time
of putting away childish things--passive dependence on authority,
superstition, timorous conventionality--and of asserting the freedom
and the responsibilities of men. In the race, as in the individual, it
was primarily an internal event, which reached external expression only
with difficulty and after a struggle. The youth has his vague internal
sense of the sacredness of his convictions long before he can work
these out into the fabric of actual life. A long fight with stubborn
customs, with indifferent circumstances, must take place before ideals
can become actualities. Just so, the idealism of the race had to meet
in mortal combat a thousand opposing conditions, had to conquer its
foes and acquire its ways and means, before it could victoriously
express itself in art. In other words, feeling had to enter into and
transform technique in order that the art might voice fully the
impulse that animated it. When we speak of the renaissance, therefore,
we mean no narrow, special period of time, precisely dated, like a
battle or a treaty. We mean a new spirit of liberty and self-respect
in the human mind, which expressed itself in one way at one time, in
another at another, according to the facility and promptitude with
which it acquired mastery over these ways. The expression followed
the effort only after a long interval, and different expressions came
at different epochs, far apart in time. In a general way we may say
that the Renaissance has occupied the centuries of our era from the
fourteenth to the one in which we live. But each art has also had its
special period of development, reaching in its own good time the goal
of its own particular efforts, under the conditions of its own peculiar
medium.
There are as a rule several successive stages in the evolution an art
thus undergoes under the spur of idealism. First there is the vague
inner sense of a new weight of meaning to be expressed, fresh insight
or intuition that demands utterance. Men awake to the true value of
those inner impressions and feelings which have so long been smothered
under conventions and the worship of the external. They know not
what to do with them, how to voice them; but they have at least what
Stevenson calls “that impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship
aground, which is one of the agonies of youth.” This may be called
the period of the fresh insight. Then comes the period in which some
sort of technical medium is arduously developed for the expression of
the new impulse. This period, in which a vast work must be done by
patient experiment, by slow adaptation, without standards and without
models, is necessarily long and laborious. Often the prompting insight
is almost forgotten in the toil, and the initial passion seems to be
lost in dry formalism and pedantry. But all the while ways and means
are being invented, problems solved, and traditions established, even
as, while the youth toils at desk or plough or counter, forgetful,
for the moment, of the ideals that sent him thither, habits are being
formed, mastery is being acquired. The period of technical equipment,
then, if it be properly conducted, leads over into the period of
achievement, in which the original impulses are adequately expressed
by means of the acquired skill. This is the time of consummation, of
maturity, of balance between the means and the ends of expression.
Such was the age of Pericles in Greek sculpture, the age of Sophocles
in Greek drama, the Elizabethan age in English drama, the age of
Leonardo and Michelangelo in Italian painting, the age of Wordsworth
and Keats in English lyric poetry. Unfortunately, the period of
maturity is generally followed by still another period, in which the
original impulse overshoots its mark and becomes embodied in distorted,
grotesque, and unbeautiful forms. So weak is human nature that it
can seldom recognize justly its own value without going further,
without precipitating itself into the pitfall of over-valuation,
pride, and arrogant self-assertion. The balance of all the elements of
art to which idealism aspires is then lost; special elements become
preponderant, special effects are made fetishes, and degeneration
ensues. Ripeness leads over into decay; wholeness or sanity is lost,
and partiality paves the way to disintegration.
Mediæval painting, for example, was exceedingly rigid, dry, and
conventional. The effort of the ecclesiastical painters was merely to
symbolize religious truths; they were like chroniclers, who aim at
narrating facts, rather than like ballad-writers and minstrels who
are interested also in the beauty of their language, the richness,
charm, and intrinsic appeal of their images and phraseology. But
by imperceptible degrees, led on by the natural human delight in
shapeliness of form and luxury of color, and learning to make the skill
acquired in delineation subserve the higher and more immediate purposes
of art, the painters of the Renaissance gradually substituted for this
merely symbolic treatment a broader one, in which human beauty was as
much sought as religious edification. The nude figure was lovingly
studied, not because the saints happened to be men, but because men
are beautiful. Garments, draperies, fabrics received a new attention,
in the interests, not of historical accuracy, but of the intrinsic
pleasantness of textures and tints. Postures were softened, adjusted,
made less angular and uncompromising than in the almost chart-like
early frescoes. Atmosphere, chiaroscuro, composition, balance, were
deemed worthy of the efforts of painters who considered art an end in
itself. Eventually, by the great pictures of the Venetian, Florentine,
and Neapolitan masters, all the human faculties were called into
harmonious activity; the eye was delighted, the feelings were wooed
and stimulated, the imagination was touched and informed. “Instead
of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority,” says J. A.
Symonds,[18] “instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, [art]
really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty,
and helped to prove the untenability of the mediæval standpoint; for
art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is
free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which
cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of
contemplation.” Whether painting, which thus by insistence on the
intrinsic values of its medium attained maturity, then carried the
process too far, and lost roundness and balance by prizing mere
richness of color above all else, whether, in a word, its consummation
was followed by a decadence, is a question too large for discussion
here. But it is beyond doubt that painting went through the first three
phases of growth pointed out as the results in art of an idealistic
impulse.
In the same way, the story of music from the beginning of the
seventeenth century up to Beethoven, or throughout that section of
its history in which we are at present interested, was essentially
the story of a renaissance, or novel artistic development, under the
spur of idealism. Looking at it from the vantage-point now reached,
we easily trace its evolution through the several regular stages. In
the Florentine reformers’ abandonment of old conventions and their
half-conscious aspiration towards a new utterance, we discern the first
stage of the movement, that of the novel impulse; in the steadfast
and efficient delving away at technical methods, at the involutions
of harmony, counterpoint, and form, which characterized many of the
later composers of the seventeenth century, and occupied much of the
attention of even such men as Haydn and Mozart, we trace the second
stage, that of equipment; and in the glorious works of Beethoven,
who set the keystone in the arch, we find the stage of consummation
and fulfilment. Springing from the foundation of the mystical art of
Palestrina much as modern Italian painting sprang from the foundation
of mediæval religious delineation, the art of Pure Music reached, in
the masterpieces of Beethoven, its maturity.
Now, as we saw in the first chapter, the mature art of Pure Music,
which may be defined as the art of combining pure tones, without words,
into forms expressive of our fundamental emotional life, and congruous
with one another, or beautiful, necessarily possesses three kinds of
value, or modes of effect, to which we have assigned the descriptive
labels “sensuous,” “expressive,” and “æsthetic.” Music has sensuous
value in proportion to the actual physical gratification afforded us by
the tones that compose it; it has expressive value proportional to the
degree in which it excites in us, by association and suggestion, the
fundamental emotions or feelings; it has æsthetic value proportional
to its success in assimilating or organizing all its various effects
into clear unity, thus giving us that sense of ordered richness which
we call beauty. If it be true, then, that music, during the seventeenth
century, under the spur of the idealistic or modern spirit, developed
from a primitive into a mature art, it is obvious that this development
must have rested on progress made in all three kinds of effect; and it
becomes a matter of much interest to trace at least some of the chief
phases of this three-fold blossoming. In the remaining portion of the
present chapter, accordingly, we shall study the most striking features
of the progress made during the seventeenth century in sensuous
charm and in expressive power; and in the following chapter we shall
examine those principles of pure music which underlie its highest,
most indispensable quality of all--that of beauty, or final unity and
harmony of impression.
Remarkable, in the first place, is the development the mere material
medium of music underwent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The sensuous fact at the bottom of all music being the tone, the
sensuous value of music depends on the kind of tones employed and
on the modes of their combination, just as the sensuous value of a
painting depends on the purity and richness of the pigments used and
on the harmoniousness of their arrangement. So long as composers
dealt either with choirs of human voices alone, or with a few crude
instruments like the organs of Bach’s predecessors, the violins of
the early sixteenth century, and the spinets and clavichords of the
same period, they could get little variety or sonority of tonal color.
But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was
made a wonderful mechanical advance. The violin, the most important
of all instruments, not only because of its inimitable beauty and
expressiveness of tone but because it is the nucleus of the orchestra
and of the string quartet, was brought, by the Amatis, Giuseppe
Guarneri, and Antonio Stradivari, the famous Cremonese violin-makers
who flourished from about 1550 to 1737, to a degree of perfection which
the utmost modern ingenuity has been unable to exceed. The organ, which
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was so cumbersome that each
key had to be struck by the entire fist, came by 1600 to something
like its modern condition, as may be seen by looking at the pieces
written for it by Frescobaldi (1583-1644) and Buxtehude (1637-1707).
The prototypes of the modern piano were rather slower to develop. At
the beginning of the sixteenth century the clavichord was a smallish
oblong box without legs, placed on a table when played; its compass
was somewhat over four octaves; one set of strings had to suffice for
several keys, each key being provided with a metal tangent or tongue
that not only sounded the string, but at the same time “stopped” it
at the requisite point for producing the desired tone. The “damping”
or silencing of the strings, entrusted in the modern piano to the felt
dampers, was often done by the left hand of the player. The spinet
differed from the clavichord in that its tones were produced by a hard
piece of quill that plucked the string. Both instruments gave but weak,
short, and rather characterless sounds. But all through the period we
are considering they were being experimented upon and slowly improved
in sonority, variety, and color of tone.
But even after they are provided with perfected instruments, men are
still much restricted in their search for lovely effects of tone unless
they have also a well-developed tonal technique, or science of harmony.
The tools are not enough; the use of them must also be known. As we
have seen, however, the harmony of Palestrina and his school was for
all its purity somewhat colorless and flat. A harmonic fabric made up
exclusively of consonant chords is like a picture painted altogether
with pure, light colors; it is wonderfully bright and transparent,
but its very purity makes it lack force. For the sake of contrast an
admixture of dissonances is required, much as shadow is required in a
picture, or harshness and irregularity in a poem. The entirely sweet,
soft, and mellifluous series of chords at first charms, but finally
cloys.
One of the important tasks of seventeenth century composers,
therefore, was to find out how to introduce dissonances in such a
way as to invigorate without disrupting the fabric. Their harshness
must not be obtruded, but it must be used. The Florentine reformers
and their successors showed great skill in solving the problem.
They learned how to “prepare” a dissonance, that is, to let one of
its constituent tones appear in a consonance and then hold over
while other voices moved to dissonant intervals; they experimented
in harsher and harsher dissonances, admitting them only with great
circumspection, but using their characteristic qualities with striking
effect; and they established, as cadences, conventional formulæ of
chords containing dissonant intervals, which became by mere force of
repetition acceptable and familiar. In this way they introduced into
the material of music a variety and range of color that consonances
alone could never give. “Monteverde,” says Mr. R. A. Streatfield,
“with his orchestra of thirty-nine instruments--brass, wood and strings
complete--his rich and brilliant harmony, sounding so strangely
beautiful to ears accustomed only to the severity of the polyphonic
school, and his delicious and affecting melodies, sometimes rising
almost to the dignity of an Aria, must have seemed something more than
human to the eager Venetians as they listened for the first time to
music as rich in color as the gleaming marbles of the Cà d’Ora or the
radiant canvases of Titian and Giorgione.” If we could disabuse our
minds of all emotional and æsthetic perceptions while listening to
modern music, we should still find it vastly superior to the choral art
of the middle ages in its purely sensuous richness. Sensuously it is a
kaleidoscope of shifting effects, now harsh, now sweet, now resonant
and sibilant, the next moment infinitely wooing and grateful; and
through all ever changing its outlines and melting from color to color
like the iridescent film of a soap-bubble.
But of course we cannot disabuse our minds of emotional and æsthetic
perceptions; no human being can divest himself of such essential parts
of his nature; and indeed it was even more in obedience to higher
requirements than for the sake of mere sensuous richness that the
musicians of the renaissance period so radically remodelled their art.
The essence of their reforms is to be looked for, not in the increase
of the first or sensuous value of music, but in the enhancement of its
expressiveness, and of its plastic beauty.
Expression, in general, may be defined as the presentation of a
feeling or idea by means of an impression. The impression may act
either directly, calling up the specific idea or feeling by virtue
of a long-established association between them, or more generally,
by simply inducing a state of mind congruous with the expression
desired, and so tending to generate it. The former is the case in
verbal expression (language), where certain definite symbols, words,
are immemorially coupled in our minds with certain ideas, conceptions,
or feelings, so that when we hear the word we immediately think the
thing. Musical expression differs from verbal expression in that in
does not act by this direct arbitrary symbolism, but rather by the
more subtle general process which instills a feeling by setting up
its appropriate atmosphere or _milieu_. It is much vaguer and more
general, and for that very reason far more potent. The word “love,”
for example, arbitrarily denotes a certain idea, not because it is
anything like the idea, but because we all agree that that word is to
mean that thing.[19] An amorous piece of music, on the contrary, utters
no definite symbol; it makes our heart beat faster and deeper, it
makes our blood circulate, it ravishes our senses and our minds, until
whether we will or not we know what it says, though for our lives we
could not put its burden into words.
It is by this direct establishment in us of a congruous or favorable
state of mind that the consonances of the mediæval music express
religious peace; and it is no otherwise that dissonance, that powerful
engine of the modern musician, expresses the inward division, the
struggle and sweet torment, of idealistic states of feeling. The
harshness, disagreeable in itself but essential to a process in which
it is organically linked with sweetness and rest, arouses by an
association of ideas a sense of the stern beauty, the tragic splendor,
of the experience of the human heart. It reproduces in the sphere
of sound that same series of states, that pain merging into joy,
which we recognize in the sphere of our consciousness as so deeply
characteristic of finite life. And so doing, it suggests or shadows
forth the very essence of our nature, it echoes the utterance of our
very hearts. It is no expurgated reading of the book of life: it is the
full text, with all its shuddering horror and all its celestial joy.
Probably of all the employers of dissonance for the purpose of
emotional expression, in the whole course of the seventeenth century,
when the aims of musicians were so tentative that it required courage
to brave convention, the most daring was Claudio Monteverde. “As
Monteverde most frankly of all musicians of his time,” writes Sir
Hubert Parry,[20] “regarded music as an art of expression, and
discords as the most poignant means of representing human feeling,
he very soon began to rouse the ire of those who were not prepared
to sacrifice the teaching of centuries and their own feeling of what
really was artistic without protest. That he should presume to write
such simple things as ninths and sevenths without duly sounding them
first as concordant notes[21] was so completely at variance with the
whole intention of their art that it struck them with consternation.
And well it might, for small as these first steps were they presaged
the inevitable end of the placid devotional music. The suddenness of
the poignancy which unprepared discords conveyed to the mind implied
a quality of passionate feeling which musicians had never hitherto
regarded as within the legitimate scope of musical art. They had never
hitherto even looked through the door which opened upon the domains of
human passion. Once it was opened, the subjective art of the church
school, and the submissive devotionalism of the church composers, was
bound to come rapidly to an end. Men tasted of the tree of knowledge,
and the paradise of innocence was thenceforth forbidden them.
Monteverde was the man who first tasted and gave his fellow men to eat
of the fruit; and from the accounts given of the effect it produced
upon them they ate with avidity and craved for more.”
Parry gives in illustration of Monteverde’s style a fragment known as
“Ariadne’s Lament,” from the opera “Arianna,” so characteristic that
it must be reprinted here:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE IV.
“ARIADNE’S LAMENT,” BY MONTEVERDE.]
_Lasciatemi morire! Lasciatemi
morire! E che volete voi.... che mi conforte_
_In cosi dura sorte, in cosi gran martire?
Lasciatemi morire! lasciatemi morire!_
In studying this remarkable fragment, the reader will not only note
the striking unprepared dissonances of measures 2, 5, 11 and 13 (the
latter peculiarly poignant), but if he will take the trouble to
compare the effect of the passage as a whole with that of the bit
of Palestrina given in Fig. III., he will be amazed at the increase
in expressiveness, especially if it be remembered that “Arianna” was
produced probably in 1607, or only thirteen years after Palestrina’s
death. The “Lament” is reported to have moved everyone who heard it
to tears. Its pathos is largely due to the skilful way in which harsh
dissonances are made to alternate with the consonances into which they
naturally and inevitably lead--a process which, though not directly
expressive of the facts of human emotion, in the sense in which the
word is directly symbolic of the thing which usage has coupled with
it, is yet indirectly and generally expressive, in that it reproduces
in tones a series of impressions identical with the series of feelings
we everywhere experience in actual life. Pain linked to pleasure by
an organic bond--that is the universal experience of everyone who
cherishes an ideal, since an ideal is a yearning for something which
now is not, but which must eventually come to be.
The melodic character of the “Lament” is as impressive as its harmonic
style. In its short and poignant phrases the accent of passion is
unmistakably heard. And this is true not only of Monteverde’s work
as a whole, but of that of all the other composers of the Florentine
“new music.” As early as the year 1600 Jacopo Peri wrote an opera on
the subject of Euridice, to be performed at the wedding of Henry IV
of France to Maria Medici. A study of the passages in which he tried
to express the grief of Orpheus at the loss of Euridice, and his joy
in their reunion, brings home forcibly to the mind the advance that
composers had even at that time made in eloquence of expression. They
are as follows:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE V. TWO PASSAGES FROM PERI’S “EURIDICE.”]
_O mio core O mio speme
O pace O vita
Ohime Chi mi t’ha tolto
Chimi t’ha tolto
Ohime...... deve segita_
[Illustration]
_Gioite al canto mio
selve frondo se Gioite amati
coli e d’ogni intorno.
Ecco rimbombi dalle valle ascose._
In spite of the primitiveness of the style, there is considerable force
and even definiteness of expression here. As Sir Hubert Parry points
out: “the phrases which express bereavement and sorrow are tortuous,
irregular, spasmodic--broken with catching breath and wailing accent;
whereas the expression of joy is flowing, easy and continuous.” It was
in fact the aim of the inventors of the type of operatic recitative
here exemplified, to imitate, while idealizing, the actual cadence
of the voice in emotional speech. The music of the choral epoch had
carefully avoided the impression of passionate feeling; the new music
as persistently sought it. The old music had been written for chorus,
which by mere virtue of numbers is quite impersonal; the new was put
into the mouths of individuals. The melodic style of the former was
dignified, formal, severe; that of the latter was mobile, flexible,
constantly adaptable to the most subtle changes of mood. Here again,
then, we see the effect of the idealistic impulse on music. Idealism,
insisting on the worth of finite experience, focusses man’s attention
on himself, on his actual feelings, petty as well as universal, base
and noble alike, and makes him, whether for good or evil, vividly
self-conscious. It believes in the hopes and fears, the aspirations and
disappointments, of men and women; believes that in human beings, in
spite of their pathetic weakness, there is a unique original value, not
to be denied without crippling that august whole of which they are the
minute but essential parts. The music of Peri, Caccini, and Cavaliere,
and later of Monteverde, succeeded in voicing, at first dimly but with
increasing eloquence, the primitive human emotions that mysticism had
disdained as worldly; the tendency they initiated gathered force apace,
and passed with Cavalli and Lulli into France, where it culminated in
the work of Gluck. The great contribution of early modern opera to pure
music was the accent of genuine and various human feeling.
A third tendency toward distinctively modern methods that was steadily
gaining ground throughout this period was the tendency toward metrical
and rhythmic vigor. We have seen how vigorous meter, in music, serves
to express our active impulses, how it grows out of that ordered
gesticulation we name dance.[22] We have seen how devoid was the
mediæval choral music of meter,[23] and indeed how inappropriate to
its peculiar genius metrical qualities would have been.[24] The moment
men’s attitude toward their own ordinary activities changed, however,
and they began to see in them life rather than death, their expression
in art became a desideratum. And it is a fact that very early in the
sixteenth century, even before the pure choral music had reached its
perfect maturity, some composers had begun to write simple dances for
unaccompanied instruments, generally a combination of strings with
harpsichord.
For a long while these efforts remained tentative and inchoate,
because the men who made them were neither very clearly aware what
they were trying to do, nor acquainted with technical means for doing
it. But the scheme of treating dances as the basis of instrumental
movements, the chief expression of which was that of energy, vitality,
the more active and effervescent emotions, was afterwards elaborated
by more trained masters, and eventually bore fruit in the innumerable
suites and partitas, or bundles of dances, of the eighteenth century,
and in the symphonic minuet and scherzo.
The mere fact that composers of the seventeenth century paid respectful
attention to the popular minstrelsy, which had been treated with such
scant courtesy by ecclesiastical masters, and that they so persistently
imitated its methods, is in itself strong testimony to the change of
attitude that was taking place. The songs and dances of the people
are the most spontaneous expressions of purely personal feeling in
the entire range of music. They were upwellings of primitive emotion,
as instinctive and unsophisticated as the cries and gestures from
which they were developed. And for these reasons they were norms of
the proper expression of naïve feeling in music--all music, so far as
it aims to express personal feeling at all, makes use of the melodic
phrases derived from the cry, and of the dance-rhythms derived from the
gesture. Consequently, so soon as musical artists became inspired with
the new ideal of personal expression, they turned to the popular music
for inspiration and methods.
Thus in all ways the tendency of music in the seventeenth century
was toward a fuller, more varied, and more poignant emotional
expressiveness. Men were willing to forego without a murmur all the
advantages of the perfected technique of the earlier choral age, and to
trust themselves on the pathless sea of the New Music, because, like
the pilgrims who in the same century left European civilization behind
them to seek a larger if more difficult life in an uncharted country,
they were inspired by a love of the human spirit in its fullness and
freedom. All arbitrary limitations and denials of it, no matter how
hallowed by long usage, were to them not religious, but sacrilegious.
To them, as to Terence, “nothing human was alien”; and they might have
cried, with Whitman, to every human trait, however trivial, ignoble,
or commonplace, “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”
We need not wonder that for a while they paused helpless before the
task of assimilating into an order all these rich materials that their
humanism had evoked out of chaos. At first they were more discoverers
than artists. But genuine progress, as we say, takes place only when
a richer variety is stamped with a broader but still obvious unity.
Art is not merely expression, of howsoever varied and penetrative a
quality; it is congruous, harmonious expression, delighting us not only
mediately by what it says, but immediately by what it is. In other
words, it rises from the plane of interest to the plane of beauty, and
becomes genuine art, only by the possession of that third or æsthetic
value which depends on the ultimate unity of all the various factors
of effect. This highest value music came, in the course of time, to
possess; and the conquest of new forms, intrinsically beautiful, in
which all the novel sensuous and expressive effects could be embodied,
was of all the achievements of the seventeenth century the most
important.
It remains, therefore, to study, in another chapter, the means by
which musicians learned, after long trial and patient experiment, to
give shape and integral life to all this motley array of feelings and
effects that they had summoned out of the depths of the human spirit.
Their task, as may easily be believed, was an arduous one. We need not
follow all the steps they took on that long road. It will suffice to
examine some of the more important stages of their progress, to get
before our minds the general artistic principles which underlay their
practices, and to see what point they had reached by the time Haydn,
the first great forerunner of Beethoven, came to take his share in
their great enterprise.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] “Vice,” says Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his brilliant, paradoxical
way, “is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the
canonical vices.”
[16] “The Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems,” by George Santayana, New
York, 1901.
[17] See the writings of Royce, Baldwin, and other writers on the
social genesis of consciousness.
[18] “The Renaissance in Italy.”
[19] In the case of onomatopoetic words, of course, the general
expression is added to the specific one--the word does sound like the
thing.
[20] “The Oxford History of Music,” vol. III, p. 45.
[21] “Preparation”: see above, page 104.
[22] See Chap. I, p. 9.
[23] See Chap. II, p. 12.
[24] See Chap. II, p. 26.