That music, by and of itself, cannot express the intellectual element in
the beautiful dream-images of art with precision, is a palpable truth.
Yet, by its imperial dominion over the sphere of emotion and sentiment,
the connection of the latter with complicated mental phenomena is
made to bring into the domain of tone vague and shifting fancies and
pictures. How much further music can be made to assimilate to the other
arts in directness of mental suggestion, by wedding to it the noblest
forms of poetry, and making each the complement of the other, is the
knotty problem which underlies the great art-controversy about which
this article concerns itself. On the one side we have the claim that
music is the all-sufficient law unto itself; that its appeal to
sympathy is through the intrinsic sweetness of harmony and tune, and the
intellect must be satisfied with what it may accidentally glean in
this harvest-field; that, in the rapture experienced in the sensuous
apperception of its beauty, lies the highest phase of art-sensibility.
Therefore, concludes the syllogism, it matters nothing as to the
character of the libretto or poem to whose words the music is arranged,
so long as the dramatic framework suffices as a support for the flowery
festoons of song, which drape its ugliness and beguile attention by the
fascinations of bloom and grace. On the other hand, the apostles of the
new musical philosophy insist that art is something more than a vehicle
for the mere sense of the beautiful, an exquisite provocation wherewith
to startle the sense of a selfish, epicurean pleasure; that its highest
function--to follow the idea of the Greek Plato, and the greatest of his
modern disciples, Schopenhauer--is to serve as the incarnation of the
true and the good; and, even as Goethe makes the Earth-Spirit sing in
"Faust"--
"'Tis thus over at the loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by"--
so the highest art is that which best embodies the immortal thought of
the universe as reflected in the mirror of man's consciousness; that
music, as speaking the most spiritual language of any of the art-family,
is burdened with the most pressing responsibility as the interpreter
between the finite and the infinite; that all its forms must be measured
by the earnestness and success with which they teach and suggest what is
best in aspiration and truest in thought; that music, when wedded to the
highest form of poetry (the drama), produces the consummate art-result,
and sacrifices to some extent its power of suggestion, only to acquire
a greater glory and influence, that of investing definite intellectual
images with spiritual raiment, through which they shine on the supreme
altitudes of ideal thought; that to make this marriage perfect as an
art-form and fruitful in result, the two partners must come as equals,
neither one the drudge of the other; that in this organic fusion
music and poetry contribute, each its best, to emancipate art from its
thralldom to that which is merely trivial, commonplace, and accidental,
and make it a revelation of all that is most exalted in thought,
sentiment, and purpose. Such is the aesthetic theory of Richard Wagner's
art-work.