"Vesuvius wears his brilliant plume
Above a sun-lit dome of snow;
And darkly thro' the illumin'd gloom
Extends his mighty base below:
On Mount St. Angelo's ponderous crest,
And in his furrows, snow, too, sleeps;
Great glitt'ring clouds are piled o'er that:
All rises out of glamourous deeps;
For, glinting up, thro' olive bowers,
And many an arm-outstretching tree,
Is the sun-tipt, early-winter-morning,
Slumberous, breathing sea."
In the sister arts--sister graces--painting and music, down to Turner
and the Turner of music, Beethoven (he also would have given us the
Python slaying Apollo, and the going home of the Teméraire, the Plague
of Darkness, Æneas leaving Carthage, and Italy, Ancient and Modern:
Schumann, too, is very Turner-like, perhaps more so, has more of that
mystical glamour--Beethoven, like Rembrandt, only ideal); in the
sister arts, Nature could not fail to be celebrated, or rather let us
say ideally reproduced, and even transfigured, through the geniuses of
these arts, her eldest children--nay, herself (made man). In
Beethoven, then--a tone-poet, German, and _born on the Rhine_, at,
perhaps, its grandest part--as we might expect, this worship and
celebration of nature, this apotheosis in tone, culminates. Her
sweetness and her grandeur, coloured, too, by his own Beethoven-soul,
are by him sublimely revealed--in many a page and passage dear to the
sympathetic knower. It was, then, impossible that Beethoven should
_not_ write (betitled or not) a Pastoral Symphony; and this, if only
as one manifestation of his (like nature) many-sidedness. Moreover,
though the Greek poesy reads as fresh as if written yesterday,
nevertheless nature-worship, such as we understand it--an overpowering
sense of her mysticism, a rapturous _losing_ of ourselves in
her--seems a thing not only specially Teutonic and modern, but modern
even among the Teutonic peoples themselves, dating after the
Reformation; and, indeed, almost as though nature-worship was to
supply the place of religion (in the narrow sense, worship of an
anthropomorphic maker of nature), rapture in her to supply the place
of religious rapture, no longer possible; if so, a beautiful
ordinance! Hence, then, if we go a little way below the surface, the
present masterpiece, Beethoven's universally favourite (though far
from greatest, indeed, the Symphony in D is superior--much more
powerful, especially the first movement, and at least equally fresh)
"Pastoral Symphony." It does not, indeed (at least the opening
allegro), celebrate that peculiar, that sacred sentiment we have been
speaking of; it does not utter the unutterable, but it is a true and
lovely nature-poem nevertheless, worthy of all acceptation; without it
the splendid series of symphonies would have been incomplete. Let us
approach it.
What STRIKES us in this "household-word" work, especially in the first
movement, is its significant simplicity. It is wonderful, as revealing
to us how _profoundly_ simple a great man can be, and is; sublime in
that, as well as in his opulence and power; indeed, simplicity is an
inevitable concomitant and _sine quâ non_ of power; even in a
Napoleon, let alone a Shakespeare, a Newton, and a Beethoven.
So simple is the allegro, that it almost seems studiously so--almost
as though Beethoven thereby wished to convey a reproach, at least a
monition, to the artificial, and said, "Thus I hold the mirror up to
Nature!" Musically, the piece (as it has always seemed to us) rather
suffers by this. The ideas are more than usually re-repeated; and,
remarkably, reiterations (though perhaps there was a psychological
reason for this in the soul of Beethoven, as instinctively expressive,
over and over again, of the one great joy he felt, or as
saying--"After all, the essence and compelling spirit of this great
Nature is one"). Moreover, the ideas, though in themselves beautifully
pure and characteristic, seem almost _too_ simple, nay we had almost
said languid, for they rather suggest to us the gratification of a
convalescent than of a passionately profound (aye, and profoundly
passionate) lover of nature, such as all Germans are, such as Schumann
intensely was, and such as Beethoven must have exceptionally been.
(Brendel says, Haydn's love of nature, as revealed in his music, was
that of her very child, unconscious; Beethoven's, that of a
town-dweller, conscious. But to this I would reply, town-dweller by
compulsion). On the other hand, if Beethoven wished to enter a protest
against _Schwärmerei_, for nature, none could be more effective than
this movement. But nature ever was and remains mystic, and no
celebration of her, above all by a Beethoven, can satisfy us which
does not shadow forth, is not overpowered by, a sense of this--sense
peculiar to this latter age; more so, even, than the similar
companion-sense of love. Love without _Schwärmerei_ were not love; no
more is love of nature. For these profounder realizations of nature,
"glances into the deepest deeps of beauty," (Carlyle, on the remark
about "the lilies of the field") reflected adumbrations of her
wizardry, a sense of her intoxicating aroma, the ecstasy in her bosom,
that mesmerizing infinitude of hers, we must look to Beethoven's
sonatas, or other portions of his symphonies; and to such music as
Schumann's; hardly in his Pastoral Symphony (except somewhat in the
andante); more in his Pastoral Sonata--_that_ first movement is
_profound_, as well as richer. There we see the poet-philosopher, nay,
high-priest of nature; and the movement, four-square, almost perfect,
is one of the masterpieces, and most precious legacies of Nature's
Eldest Child. In the present movement we have peaceful pleasure, but
not rapture, if even joy, or delight (in the Sonata Pastorale we have
contemplative joy)--though Beethoven may possibly have expressly
chastened the expression of feeling, as being, so, more "pastoral." Be
that as it may, here we have sweetness rather than power (except,
indeed, behind all); nay, rather the gratification of an habitual
dweller in the country (and he no longer a young man), than the burst
of rapture we might have expected from a lover of nature only just let
loose from town. However, Beethoven _has_ written over the
movements--"_Awakening_ of cheerful emotions on arrival in the
country." He further said, the symphony was feeling rather than
painting. This is a matter of course from a Beethoven; and note, it is
a Beethoven's feelings that are depicted. What we have in the work is
Nature _plus_ Beethoven--nature photographed after passing through
him, and so becoming idealised. We have, however, both scene-painting
and soul-painting through the emotions here excited and described; we
see also the landscape which to a great extent occasioned them; (thus,
this, like Goethe's, is an occasional poem). It is a truly pastoral
district; quiet, sunny scenery, with a scent of the earliest hay; but
nature in her splendour, with, say, in the distance, the great sea;
nature, a blaze of flowers embosomed in hills, as in our own beautiful
England in May; let alone nature in spring, with her background of
Alps and Appenines. Nature, whose greatest hint--the secret of whose
greatest power is, Immortality; a promise of that is hardly here
celebrated; or, rather, that hint is not, for it is in every
landscape:--"I, too, have looked upon the hills in their hazy veil,
but their greatest charm, to me, was their promise." Neither, in spite
of Elterlein's charming allusion, have we the scenery where, or the
time when (_soust_) as Goethe so truly, sublimely expresses it (in two
of his most inspired lines)--
"_Stürzte_ sich der Himmelsliebe Kuss
Auf mich herab in ernsber Sabbath stille."
When Beethoven wrote this music he had not in mind his revered
Shakespeare's magnificent--
"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heaving alchemy."
This, rather, the immortal Symphony in A suggests; or such lines as
these:--
"My other mighty passion was for thee,
Thou glimmering, glamouring, manifestation of God!
Unspeakable Nature, with thy distant sea,
Wave-framing hills, dim woods, and flowery sod;
My haziest, sweetest memories, are of you,
Where inland-county beauty guards its stream;
Oh! 'violet' memory 'dim' with _my_ tears' dew;
Oh! shadowy pausing, touch'd with earliest beam;
And sea-side recollections stir my heart,
The calm's majestic cheerfulness, the storm,
The bluff that through the vapours seem'd to start,
A thousand miracles of tint and form;
And ever as I yearn'd on wave and hill,
The unconscious secret was thy Promise still."