MUSIC AND LIFE
A STUDY OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN OURSELVES AND MUSIC
BY
THOMAS WHITNEY SURETTE
AUTHOR OF “_The Development of Symphonic Music_” AND (WITH D. G. MASON)
OF “_The Appreciation of Music_”
[Illustration: Decoration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press
Cambridge 1917
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THOMAS WHITNEY SURETTE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published March 1917_
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author desires to express his thanks to the Editor of the _Atlantic
Monthly_ for permission to use, as a part of this book, material from a
series of articles that appeared in his magazine.
CONTENTS
[Illustration: Decoration]
_INTRODUCTION_
CHAPTER I
_WHAT IS MUSIC?_
I. DISTINCTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE OTHER ARTS 1
II. THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC 6
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC 13
IV. “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY” 18
CHAPTER II
_MUSIC FOR CHILDREN_
I. TRAINING THE SENSE FOR BEAUTY 26
II. THE VALUE OF SINGING 36
III. CURRENT METHODS OF TEACHING 41
IV. WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN SING? 45
V. THE FALLACY OF THE INEVITABLE PIANOFORTE LESSON 50
VI. THE REAL GOAL 56
CHAPTER III
_PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC_
I. IDEALS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION 61
II. THE VALUE OF MUSIC IN PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION 68
III. FALSE METHODS OF TEACHING 74
IV. GOOD OR BAD MUSIC 83
V. ATTEMPTS AT REFORM 91
VI. OTHER ACTIVITIES IN SCHOOL MUSIC 97
CHAPTER IV
_COMMUNITY MUSIC_
I. MUSIC BY PROXY 103
II. OUR MUSICAL ACTIVITIES 108
III. WHAT WE MIGHT DO 117
IV. AN EXPERIMENT 129
V. MUSIC AS A SOCIAL FORCE 134
CHAPTER V
_THE OPERA_
I. WHAT IS OPERA? 145
II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE 149
III. WAGNER AND AFTER 158
IV. WHEN MUSIC AND DRAMA ARE FITLY JOINED 166
V. OPERA AS A HUMAN INSTITUTION 175
CHAPTER VI
_THE SYMPHONY_
I. WHAT IS A SYMPHONY? 179
II. HOW SHALL WE UNDERSTAND IT? 187
III. THE MATERIALS OF THE SYMPHONY 196
IV. TONE COLOR AND DESIGN 210
CHAPTER VII
_THE SYMPHONY_ (_Continued_)
I. THE UNITY OF THE SYMPHONY 216
II. STAGES OF ITS DEVELOPMENT 226
III. CHAMBER MUSIC AS AN INTRODUCTION TO SYMPHONIES 234
IV. THE PERFORMER AND THE PUBLIC 237
Chapter VIII
CONCLUSION 241
INTRODUCTION
During the last twenty or thirty years there has been an enormous
increase in the United States of what may be called “institutional”
music. We have built opera houses, we have formed many new orchestras,
and we have established the teaching of music in nearly all our public
and private schools and colleges, so that a casual person observing all
this, hearing from boastful lips how many millions per annum we spend
on music, and adding up the various columns into one grand total, might
arrive at the conclusion that we are really a musical people.
But one who looks beneath the surface--who reflects that the thing
we believe, and the thing we love, that we do--would have to do a
sum in subtraction also; would have to ask what music there is in
our own households. He would find that in our cities and towns only
an infinitesimal percentage of the inhabitants sing together for the
pleasure of doing so, and that the task of keeping choral societies
together is as difficult as ever; that the music we take no part in,
but merely listen to, is the music that flourishes; that our operatic
singers, the most highly paid in the world, come to us annually from
abroad and sing to us in languages that we cannot understand; that,
in short, while music flourishes, much of it is bought and little of
it is home-made. The deduction is obvious. This institutional music
is a sort of largess of our prosperity. We are rich enough to buy the
best the world affords. We institute music in our public schools and
display our interest in it once a year--at graduation time. We see
that our children take “music lessons” and judge the result likewise
by their capacity to play us occasionally a very nice little piece.
Men, in particular,--all potential singers, and _very much needing to
sing_,--look upon it as a slightly effeminate or scarcely natural and
manly thing to do. Music is, in short, too much our diversion, and too
little our salvation.
And to form a correct estimate of the value of our musical activities
we should need also to consider the quality of the music we hear; and
this, in relation to the sums we have been doing, might make complete
havoc of our figures, because it would change their basic significance.
For if it is bad music, the more we hear of it the worse off we are.
If a city spends thirty thousand dollars a year on bad public-school
music, it is a loser to the extent of some sixty thousand dollars. If
your child is painfully acquiring a mechanical dexterity (or acquiring
a painful mechanical dexterity) in pianoforte playing and is learning
almost nothing about music, you lose twice what you pay and your child
pays twice for her suffering. What is called “being musical” cannot
be passed on to some one else or to something else; you cannot be
musical vicariously--through another person, through so many thousand
dollars, through civic pride, through any other of the many means we
employ. Being musical does not necessarily lie in performing music; it
is rather a _state_ of being which every individual who can hear is
entitled by nature to attain to in a greater or less degree.
Such are the musical conditions confronting us, and such are the
possibilities open to us. My purpose is, therefore, to suggest ways
of improving this situation, and of realizing these possibilities;
and, as a necessary basis for any such suggestions, to consider first
the nature of music itself. Is it merely a titillation of the ear?
Are Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert merely purveyors of sweetmeats?
Does music consist in an astonishing dexterity in performance? Is
it, as Whitman says, “what awakes in you when you are reminded by
the instruments”? Or has it a life of its own, self-contained,
self-expressive, and complete? These questions need to be asked--and
answered--before we can formulate any method of improving our musical
situation.
They are not asked. We blindly follow conventional practices; we
make little effort to fathom the many delightful problems which
every hearing of music presents to us; we submit to being baffled
every time we hear an orchestra play; we take no forward step on the
road to understanding. Beethoven was a heart, a mind, a will, and an
imagination; we, in listening, absorb his emotion and hardly anything
else. His grotesque outbursts make us uncomfortable, as would a
solecism of behavior. His strange, bizarre, uncouth, and extraordinary
themes, every one of which fits perfectly into his plan, leave us
wondering what he intends. His sentiment, which is always _relative_ to
his humor or his roughness, we understand only by itself.
Our children, after years of conventional music study, are finally
taken to hear an orchestral concert. A great man is to speak to them.
He does not use words. What he has to say issues forth in a myriad of
sounds, now soft, now loud, now fast, now slow. This that the child
hears is what is called _music_, seemingly a mere succession of sounds,
really a vision of what a great man has seen of all those inner things
of life which only he can truly see. These sounds are formed into a
perfect order. Their very soul may hide in the peculiar tone of the
oboe or horn; they change their significance a dozen times in as many
moments; slender filaments of them run through and through as in a
fairy web. The child gapes. “Is this music?” it says; “I thought music
was the black and white keys, or holding my hand right, or scales, or
the key of F or G, or sonatinas, or something.” No one has ever told
her what music really is. She has only her delicate, tender, childlike
feelings as a guide What she has been doing may have been as little
like music as grammar is like literature.
Both the child and the adult must be brought into contact with music;
with rhythmic movement in all its delightful diversity; with great
musical themes and the uses to which they are put by composers; with
musical forms by means of which pieces of music are made coherent;
with harmonies in their primary states, or blended into a thousand
hues. They must learn to listen, so that, as the music unfolds, there
takes place within them an unfolding which is the exact answer to the
processes going on in the music. All this cannot be brought about save
by intention.
It is the purpose of this book, then, to lead the reader by what
capacity he possesses to such an understanding of the art of music as
shall make every part of it intelligible to him. And since some readers
may have little knowledge of music, this book also attempts to set
forth the common grounds upon which all art rests, and to tempt those
who are interested in the other arts to become inquisitive about music.
Curiosity is a necessary element in human intelligence.
MUSIC AND LIFE
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS MUSIC?
I. DISTINCTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND THE OTHER ARTS
Any discussion of the art of music,--of its significance in relation
to ourselves, of its æsthetic qualities, or of methods of teaching
it,--to be comprehensive, must be based on a clear recognition of the
one important quality which is inherent in it, which distinguishes it
from the other arts and which gives it its peculiar power. Painting
and sculpture are definitive. It is not possible to create a great
work in either of these mediums without a subject taken from life;
for, however imaginative the work may be, it must depict something. In
painting, for example, the very soul of a religious belief may shine
from the canvas,--as in the Sistine Madonna,--but that belief cannot
be there presented without physical embodiment. And when the physical
embodiment is reduced to its simplest terms, as in some of Manet’s
paintings, there is still the necessity of portrayal; Manet’s wonderful
light and opalescent color must fall on an object. Turner paints a
mystical landscape, a mythological vale, such as haunts the dreams
of poets, but it is impossible for him to produce the illusion _by
itself_; the vale is a vale, human beings are there. Sculpture, which
makes its effects by the perfection of its rhythms around an axis, and
by its shadows,--effects of the most subtle and, at the same time,
of the most elemental kind,--it, too, must portray; the emotion must
take form and substance, and that form must be drawn from the outward,
visible world.
In poetry the same limitations exist. It, too, must deal in human life
with a certain definiteness. But the greatest poetry is continually
struggling to slough off the garment of reality and free the soul from
its trammels. It trembles on the verge of music, seeking to find words
for what cannot be said, and attaining a great part of its meaning by a
sublime euphony. The didactic is its grave.
Before I attempt to describe the peculiar quality which distinguishes
music, it will be well to state quite clearly what it cannot do. This
can best be understood by a comparison between it and poetry, which
of all the arts is nearest to music, because it exists in the element
of time, whereas painting and sculpture exist in space. Poetry is
made up of words arranged in meaning and euphony. Each of these words
signifies an object, idea, or feeling; the word “chair,” for example,
has come to mean an object to sit upon. Now, while notes in music are
given certain alphabetical names indicating a pitch determined by sound
waves, the use of these letters is arbitrary and has no connection with
their original hieroglyphic and hieratic significance. The musical
sound we call _a_, for example, means nothing as a sound, has no common
or agreed-upon or archæological significance. Combine the note _a_
with _c_ and _e_ in what is known as the common chord and you still
have no meaning; combine _a_ with other notes and form a melody from
them, and you have perhaps beauty and coherence of form,--a pleasing
sequence of sounds,--but still no meaning such as you get from the
combination of letters in a word like “chair.” Combine _a_ with a great
many other notes into a symphony, and this coherence and beauty may
become quite wonderful in effect, but it still remains untranslatable
into other terms, and without such definite significance as is attained
by combining words in poems. So we say that notes have no significance
in themselves; that musical phrases have no meaning as have phrases in
language; that melodies are not sentences, and symphonies not poems.
If we compare music with painting or sculpture we find much the same
contrast. Just as music does not mean anything in the sense that words
do, so it has no “subject” in the sense that Turner’s The Fighting
Téméraire has, or Donatello’s David. It does not deal with objects. It
cannot portray a ship or a star. It may seem to float, it may flash
for a moment, but it does not describe or set forth. Furthermore, it
cannot, strictly speaking, give expression to ideas. It may be so
serious, so ordered, so equable--as in Bach--that we say its composer
was a philosopher, but no item of his philosophy appears. Above all
it is unmoral,[1] and without belief or dogma. Too much stress can
hardly be laid on this negative quality in music, for it is in this
very disability that its greatest virtue lies. I shall refer later to
the frequent tendency among listeners to avoid facing this problem by
attaching meanings of their own to the music they hear. I need only
note in passing that these so-called “meanings” seldom agree, and that
the habit is the result either of ignorance of the true office of
music, or of mental lassitude toward it. “It is not enough to enjoy
yourself over a work of art,” says Joubert; “you must enjoy it.”
Now the one distinguishing quality of music is this: it finds its
perfection in itself without relation to other objects. It is what it
is in itself alone. It is non-definitive; it does not use symbols of
something else; it cannot be translated into other terms. The poet
seeks always a complete union of the thing said and the method of
saying it. Flaubert seeks patiently and persistently for the one word
which shall not only be the exact symbol of his thought, but which
shall fit his euphony. The painter so draws his objects, so distributes
his colors, and so arranges his composition as to make of them plastic
mediums for the expression of his thought, and the greatness of his
picture depends first of all and inevitably on his power of fusing his
subjects with his technique. In sculpture precisely the same process
takes place. Neither of these arts actually copies nature; each
“arranges” it for its own purpose.
In music this much-sought union of matter and manner is complete; the
thing said and the method of saying it are one and indivisible. It is,
as Pater says, “the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in
music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or
matter, the subject from the expression.”
II. THE ELEMENTS OF MUSIC
The primal element in music is vibration. Sound-waves in some ordered
sequence--silent till they strike our ears--are formed by our ingenuity
and sense of order into patterns of beauty. They exist in time, not in
space. They are motion. And these vibrations are the very substance of
all life; of stars in their courses, of the pulse-beats of the heart,
of the mysterious communications from the nerves to the brain, of
light, of heat, of color. The plastic arts are static. Painting has the
power
“to give
To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time
The appropriate calm of blest eternity.”
Sculpture is motion caught in a moment of perfection. Music is motion
always in perfection. This rhythm exists also in literature and the
other arts. Poe would be nothing without it; Whitman uses it in long
swelling undulations which are sometimes almost indistinguishable; the
composition in a great painting is a rhythm; the Apollo Belvedere is
all rhythm. But in music rhythm is a physical, moving property; rhythm
in being, not rhythm caught in a poise. The possibilities of rhythmic
play in music far exceed those in poetry, for in the latter the sense
or meaning would be clouded by too much rhythmic complication. It
would be impossible to do in poetry, for example, what Beethoven does
at the beginning of a movement in one of his string quartettes,[2]
where the ’cello, entirely alone, repeats one note fifteen times in
two rhythmic groups; there is no melody and no harmony--merely one
reiterated rhythmic sound. It is also impossible for poetry to present
three or four different rhythms simultaneously, as music often does;
nor can poetic rhythms carry across a complete rhythmic disruption
whose whole æsthetic sense lies in its relations to a permanent rhythm
which it momentarily violates, as is the case in the first movement of
Beethoven’s Third Symphony. In short, rhythm in music has a diversity,
a flexibility, and a physical vigor quite unparalleled in any other art.
Melody in music consists in a sequence of single sounds curved to some
line of beauty. Whereas rhythm is conceivable without any intellectual
quality,--as a purely physical manifestation,--melody implies some
sense of design, since it progresses from one point in time to another,
and without design would be merely a series of incoherent sounds. In
this design rhythm plays a leading part, and the themes having the
most perfect balance of rhythms are the most interesting. Examples
of diverse but highly coördinated melodies may be found in the slow
movement of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata, Opus 13, and in Brahms’s
pianoforte quartette, Opus 60, the synthetic quality of which is like
that of a finely constructed sentence. Melody, being design, gives
conscious evidence of the personality of its creator. Schubert, for
example, is like Keats and represents the type of pure lyric utterance.
Bach, on the contrary, is essentially a thinker, and his melodies are
full of vigorous and diversified rhythms.
Folk-song was the beginning of what we call “melody,” and the best
specimens of folk-songs are quite as perfect within their small range
as are the greatest works of the masters. Their contour and rhythm are
sometimes as delicately balanced as the mechanism of a fine instrument.
And when we remember that these melodies were the spontaneous utterance
of simple, untutored peoples who, in forming them, depended almost
entirely on instinct, we realize how intimate a medium music is for
the expression of feeling. People who could neither read nor write and
who had little knowledge or experience of artistic objects could,
nevertheless, create perfect works of beauty in the medium of sound.
Harmony is an adjunct to the other two elements. It is in music
something of what color is in painting. As contrasted with the long
line of melody and the regular impulses in time of rhythm, harmony
deals in masses. Melody carries the mind from one point to another;
harmony strikes simultaneously and produces an immediate sensation.
Its effect upon us is probably due to a subtle physical correspondence
within ourselves to combinations of sounds that spring direct from
nature. The whole history of music shows a gradual assimilation by
human beings of new combinations of sounds, and it is probable that
only the first chapters of that history have been written.
We have spoken of the synthetic quality of melody, and it is obvious
that the larger the scope of music the more important this quality
becomes. When a composer creates a sonata or symphony he must so
dispose all his material--rhythms, melodies, and harmonies--as to give
to the work perfect coherence. A work of art expressed in the element
of time needs this synthesis more than one expressed in space. For
although there is in music no “subject,” yet beauty is being unfolded
and the need of a cumulative and coördinated expression of it is quite
as great as it would be were the music “about” something. There are
various ways of arranging musical material so as to attain this end.
The chief principle of its synthesis is derived from the volatile
nature of sound itself. It is this: that no one series of sounds formed
into a melody can long survive the substitution of other series,
unless there be given some restatement, or at least some reminder,
of the first. The result of this is that in the early music there
was an alternation of one phrase or one tune with another; and this
in turn was followed by all sorts of experiments tending to bring
about variety in unity. (These simple forms somewhat resemble what
is known in poetry as the triolet.) The most common form in music is
threefold. It is found in folk-songs, marches, minuets, nocturnes, and
so forth, and--expanded to huge proportions--in symphonic movements.
In folk-songs this form consists in repeating a first phrase after a
second contrasting one. In minuets, nocturnes, romances, and the like,
each part is a complete melody in itself. In a symphonic movement the
first part--save in such notable exceptions as the first movement of
the “Eroica” of Beethoven--contains all the thematic material, the
second contains what is called the “development” of the material stated
in the first, and the third part restates the first with such changes
as shall give it new significance.
It is in this synthetic quality that much of the greatness of symphonic
music lies. No other quality, however fine in itself, can take its
place. Schumann, for example, created interesting and beautiful
themes in profusion, but his compositions in the larger forms lack a
complete synthesis. Bach was the greatest master in this respect. So
perfect is the ordering of his material that it gives that impression
of inevitability which distinguishes all great art everywhere. It is
obvious enough that parallels to this form will be found in literature,
for it is a part of life and nature. It is youth, manhood, and old age;
it is sunrise, noon, and sunset; it is spring, summer, and winter.
So it must be; for art is only life in terms of beauty, and human
life is only nature expressing itself in terms of man and woman. This
then is the thing we call music: rhythm, melody, and harmony arranged
into forms of beauty, existing in time. It is without meaning, it is
without “subject,” it is without idea. It creates a world of its own,
fictitious, fabulous, and irrelevant--a world of sound, evanescent yet
indestructible.
III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC
Music deals first of all with feeling or emotion. But since emotion
may be guided by the mind and transfused by the imagination,--since
emotion is not a separate and isolated part of our being,--so music
may be so ordered by the mind and so transfused by the imagination as
to become intellectual and imaginative. It is true that the greater
part of the music produced and performed deals only with emotion, but
this is equally true of literature. The popular novel is nine tenths
emotion, one tenth mind, and the rest imagination. So it is with music,
though such illogical invention as one constantly finds in many popular
novels would be intolerable in any music. Since there seems to be an
incongruity between the statement that music has no definite meaning
and the statement that it is intellectual, let us take a specific
illustration and see if we cannot reconcile the apparent confliction.
We must first of all distinguish between the quality itself and the
expression of the quality. A person may have a mind stored with wisdom
and be completely what we call “intellectual,” without ever expressing
himself by a spoken or written word. His wisdom exists by itself and
for itself, entirely separated from its expression. If he expresses
himself, and with skill, we call that expression literature, but, in
any case, it remains wisdom. And what is wisdom? It is what Mr. Eliot
describes a liberal education to be--“a state of mind”; it is the
fusion of knowledge with experience, with feeling, and with imagination.
Now words are symbols which diminish in their efficacy as they try
to compass feeling and imagination. If the wise man is cold, he can
say, “I am cold”; but if he wishes to tell you of his idea of God,
he has no words adequate for the purpose, because he is dealing with
something which is not in the domain of knowledge alone--which he can
feel, or perhaps imagine, but cannot define. The reason alone never
even touches the far-away circle of that perfection which we believe
to exist, and the subtle inner relations between man and the visible
and invisible world refuse to be harnessed to language. For these he
finds expression in some form of beauty. “The beautiful,” says Goethe,
“is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature which, but for this
appearance, had been forever concealed from us.”
So we say that in wisdom the qualities we call insight, feeling,
and imagination must find for themselves some more plastic medium
of expression than language. And when that plastic medium, though
non-definitive, has those qualities of coherence, continuity, and
form which are essential to all intellectual expression, we are
justified in calling it “intellectual.” Let us take for our specific
illustration the first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.
It is impossible to imagine this as an expression of feeling only,
untouched by thought or by imagination. The inevitable conclusion
arrived at by any person who understands it is that the feeling is
absolutely controlled by the mind, and that it is imagination that
gives it its extraordinary effect. Compare it with the first movement
of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathétique Symphony” where emotion runs riot; the
difference is as great as that between “Victory” and “The Deemster.”
Compare it with a symphony by Mendelssohn, and the contrast is as
vivid as that between a novel by Meredith and one by Miss Braddon.
Beethoven’s music contains, in the first place, themes whose import all
completely receptive persons feel to be profound. (That these themes do
not so impress others is due either to atrophy of the musical faculty,
to mental lassitude, or to lack of experience of great music.) These
themes are presented in such design as not only to make the whole
movement entirely coherent, but to give it a sense of rushing onward to
an inevitable conclusion. So intensive is their treatment that almost
the whole five hundred or more measures grow out of the original theme
or thesis, some fifteen measures long. So imaginative is it that it
seems to gather to itself all related things in heaven and earth and
fuse them into one. In short, we must say that this music emanates
from the mind of a great man, who has subjected emotion to the control
of the will and who has exercised that highest function of the mind
that we call imagination.
May we not say, then, that this is wisdom? Shall we deny it because
it cannot be spelled out word by word? Shall we not rather say that
music is a means of expressing the deepest wisdom, that which defies
categorical expression? May we not accept Schopenhauer’s saying: “Music
is an image of the will”? Are we not justified in stating that music
is even an expression of the deepest relation with the visible and
invisible world which the soul of man is capable of experiencing, and
that these relations, inexpressible in more concrete manifestations,
are expressible in music? The pathos and resignation and courage in the
first movement of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven are not his or yours
or mine; they are the qualities themselves in their infinite being,
more true, more noble, more pure than his or yours or mine. May we not,
then, even go so far as to say that music tells us the deepest truths
of human life; that “it comes,” as Symonds says, “speaking the highest
wisdom in a language our reason does not understand because it is older
and deeper and closer than reason?”
IV. “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY”
I have already stated that the other arts have for their ideal that
fusing of subject and expression which in music is complete, and
I have further stated that the purpose or object of music is to
present emotion ordered and guided by the mind and illumined by the
imagination. In this latter respect all the arts are alike. It is in
the very nature of their being that they seek to find the heart of
the great secret. The purpose of painting and sculpture is not to
present objects as objects, but to set them forth in such harmonious
perfection of line and color and rhythm as will reveal their deepest
significance. The greatest examples of the plastic arts cannot be
understood through sense-perception of objects. Rembrandt is a greater
painter than Bougereau, not only because he has superior technique, but
because he has deeper insight. This is why the “subject” in painting is
comparatively unimportant.
It is the same with literature. In “Jane Eyre” the “subject” is more
tangible and vivid than in “Villette,” but the latter is the finer
book, because the technical skill is greater, the insight deeper.
“There are no good subjects or bad subjects,” says Hugo; “there are
only good poets and bad poets.” Any subject is interesting when a
master-mind presents it in full significance. A custom-house is
a prosaic thing, and a custom-house that has neither exports nor
imports, but only a few sleepy old pensioners dozing in the sun, might
be thought a dull subject for a writer; but Hawthorne’s imagination
and subtlety of literary expression clothe it with both beauty and
significance. Even the noblest and most tragic deeds find their best
justification in a sublime harmony of beauty. The Greeks knew this
well. Euripides, in “The Trojan Women,” puts on the lips of Hecuba
these words:--
“Had He not turned us in his hand, and thrust
Our high things low and shook our hills as dust,
We had not been this splendor, and our wrong
An everlasting music for the song
Of earth and heaven!”[3]
Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but
a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on
forever. The battle of Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of
history, the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the
words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, not because
they were wise, but because they were wise and beautiful.
There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer
has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence
depended on it. Carlyle, for example, was more caustic than usual when
he discussed poetry. His comment on Browning’s “The Ring and the Book”
ran thus: “A wonderful book, one of the most wonderful ever written.
I re-read it all through--all made out of an ‘Old Bailey’ story that
might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting.” Yet the
best part of “Sartor Resartus” is its beauty, and there are in “The
French Revolution” many passages of quite perfect poetic imagery and
characterization without which it would lose much of its value. What
we call “Carlyle” is no longer a man; nor is it a philosophy, or a
history; it is nothing but a _style_, a manner of saying things--an
individual, characteristic, and strange blend of hard and soft, of
high and low, of rugged and tender, all struggling with a Puritanical
conscience. So we say that beauty is the lodestone by which all life is
tested.
No game can be perfectly played unless the physical motions are timed
in beauty; no machine will act save in perfect synthesis; no character
is strong until it attains a harmony within itself. Beauty is the
matrix in which life shall be finally moulded.
All forms of artistic expression, then, require that we shall see
the object not as fact but as art. If it is fact--that is, merely an
isolated object or event--it remains insignificant until some artist
catches it up into the wider realm in which it belongs and sets it
forth in some form of beauty. If we accept this conception of all the
arts as seeking the inner sense of things, as portraying life in its
essence rather than in its outward manifestations, we shall be able to
understand the peculiar power of music. It becomes then, not merely
a series of sounds arranged so as to be euphonious and pleasing to
the ear, but a book of life which contains the ultimate expression of
our instinct and of our wisdom. The Third Symphony of Beethoven, for
example, gives us a more convincing presentment of heroic struggle
than is to be found in the other arts or in literature, first, because
it has the power to present it in the element of time, which is an
essential part of any heroic deed; second, because it presents it as a
quality disassociated from a particular heroism and therefore elevated
into a type and made eternal; and third, because it presents it in
conjunction with those other qualities without which there can be no
heroism at all. (For no quality in life or element in nature exists
for us save as the opposite or reverse of something else. What we call
light is comprehensible only as the opposite of darkness; love is the
opposite of hate, cold of heat, and so forth.)
Each of the other arts has one or two of these qualities; none has all
of them. The novelist, for example, can use the first and last but
not the second. Meredith’s “Vittoria” is an ideal presentment of the
struggle for Italian unity, but the heroism which constitutes the
essence of the book has to find expression through actual persons.
So the greatest virtue of music lies not alone in its peculiar
unification of matter and manner, its artistic perfection, but in the
power which that gives it to create a world not based on the outward
and the visible, but on that invisible realm of thought, feeling, and
aspiration which is our real world. For if there is any one certain
historical fact, it is that from the earliest times until now man
has continually sought some escape from reality, some building up
of a perfect world of ideal beauty which should still his eternal
dissatisfaction with the imperfections and inconsistencies of his own
life. It is in the very nature of his situation that he should seek
some perfection somewhere. So he has tried to paint this perfection on
canvas, idealizing life and nature into a satisfying form of beauty;
or he has carved a physical perfection in marble to deify himself and
give himself a place in nature; or he has built up for himself a world
of magical words in which all his noblest dreams strive for expression.
Everywhere and always he has had this dream, which has saved him when
all else failed. And the noblest of his dreamers have been those whose
imaginations have transcended the limitations of the actual and brought
it into relation with the unknown.
Music, obeying the great laws that underlie all life and to which
all the arts are subject, having for its means of expression the
most plastic of all media, depending on intuitive perception of
truth, not compelled to perpetuate objects, dealing with that larger
part of man’s being which lies hidden beneath both his acts and his
thoughts,--that which Carlyle calls “the deep fathomless domain of
the Unconscious,”--music is the one perfect medium for this dream of
humanity. In its expression of human emotions it enjoys the inestimable
advantage of entire irrelevance. It does not have to develop a
character or person, but only an attribute or quality. The “Eroica”
symphony, for example, has all the force of a mythological epic in
which the heroes are pure spirit-types of humanity, of no age or
time--gods, if you will, and above human limitations.
This is the quality of music that makes it precious to us. It builds
for us an _immaterial_ world--not made of objects, or theories, or
dogmas, or philosophies, but of pure spirit--a means of escape from the
thralldom of every day.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It may, of course, be used with molds of definite meaning; but we
are speaking of pure music.
[2] The Scherzo of Opus 59, no. 1.
[3] Gilbert Murray translation.