CONCLUSION
One of the most unfortunate conditions surrounding our musical life
is the small part men take in it. This is not altogether their fault.
Their business is engrossing, and concert-going is made difficult for
them. There should be some music for the business man between the time
when he leaves his office and the hour of his dinner, and it should
be so arranged as to cause him the minimum of trouble and give him
the maximum of enjoyment. This means a half-hour or forty minutes of
good music available, say, at five o’clock, and not too far away. It
means, also, that he shall be provided with a repetition of every long
or complicated composition so that he may have a chance to understand
it. The average listener hears a Brahms symphony once in, say, two or
three years, and there is little chance of his finding it intelligible.
No doubt, in course of time this will come about. No doubt, too,
workers in shops and offices will by and by be able to hear a little
really fine music at lunch time.[13] The influx of men into concert
rooms would be of great benefit to the cause of music, as well as to
the men themselves. We should, after a time, get rid of that curious
Anglo-Saxon idea that art is effeminate, and should begin to value it
for what it really is. Whenever I think of this mistaken notion the
figure of Michael Angelo rises before me. There was as heroic a man as
even the world of war ever produced; capable alike of the Herculean
task of the Sistine frescoes,--the actual physical labors of which
would kill an ordinary man (and Michael Angelo was then over sixty
years old),--of the heroic Moses, and again of that most tender and
beautiful of all sculpture, the Pietà; a stern and noble nature capable
of fighting for his principles no matter what the risk. Or I think
of Beethoven, ill, lonely, deaf, and poor, but nevertheless creating
virile music of the kind we know. Or of Bach, sturdy as an oak tree,
without recognition from the world, bringing up a large family on
almost nothing a year, wholesome, profound, and true--the equal in all
that goes to make a man of any “captain of industry,” any soldier, or
any statesman. These are the ones I should match men with. I would have
men listen to the strains of these composers, look at the works of that
colossal genius of Italy and ask themselves: Is art effeminate or am I
blind and deaf?
But men, having comparatively little leisure, cannot be expected to
waste it on sentimental music or on mere virtuosity. A violinist who
plays sweet little pieces, or who astonishes you by his technical
skill, should expect no response from human beings who are at work day
by day and hour by hour facing the hard facts of life. Men, dealing
with exact laws or under the necessities of trade and barter, are
forced to distinguish between true and false, between reality and
unreality, for their very existence depends on so doing. I do not mean
by this that these common experiences of men fit them to understand
great music, but I think men possess thereby a certain sense of values
and a certain discrimination between what is real and what is false,
and that a great piece of real music will find an answer in them. I
believe that the opera has much to do with the average man’s attitude
toward music. To spend from three to four hours in an overheated and
badly ventilated opera house after a day of business, and to listen to
the sort of hectic emotionalism which is common in opera is enough to
disgust the average business man with all music. How patient he is!
But Beethoven, who loved and hated, and suffered and triumphed, we can
all understand. When we come to listen to the opening of his violin
concerto, for example, we must all say: Here is a man. And when we
have compassed the whole of that great composition we shall learn to
say: Here is reality _turned true at last_. We shall then have learned
one of the great lessons that art teaches--namely, that there is
nothing in the world so heroic, so noble, or so profound but that its
qualities may be _increased_ by the imagination and the skill of the
great artist. For however profound a human emotion may be or however
noble a deed, it becomes more profound or more noble when it is seen in
relation to the whole of life and over a stretch of time. The artist
gives it true perspective, and enables us really so to see it. Dante
the poet is greater than Dante the lover.
But my plea that music should be made easy of access for men is
based chiefly on the fact that they need it. It is so easy for human
beings--men or women--to become completely submerged in the details
of life; and the round of daily acts and daily associations does,
in course of time, completely engulf many people, so that they only
catch glimpses of something beyond--glimpses of a promised land into
which they never enter. I can conceive almost any business as being
interesting in itself; the “game” of life has its own rewards; and
there is no trade, no profession, no business that does not offer some
play to the imagination. But every weight needs a counterbalance, and
every human being whose daily occupation is full of practical detail
must save himself or herself by some _equal force_ in the opposite
direction. The law is as old as life itself. The best preparation for
an education in engineering is a course in the classics, and the man
who grinds all things in the mill of business eventually goes into the
hopper himself.
But love of beauty is a secret and inviolate thing. Our tendency
to-day is to seek our salvation--of whatever kind--in the crowd. We
form literary and musical clubs, and drama leagues, and art circles
to accomplish what each person should do alone. This is an old human
fallacy. To attempt to be literary or artistic or socialistic or
religious by means of an organization is to waive the whole question.
There is only one way of being literary and that is to love good
literature and to read it in privacy; there is only one way to
understand the drama and that is to read by yourself the great plays
from Æschylus onward, and to see as many good plays as possible. I know
that it is impossible to hear the symphonies of Beethoven except with
some thousands of other people; nevertheless, you are yourself alone,
and, by yourself, you must solve the mystery. Never can there be a
more complete isolation of the individual than when, sitting with the
crowd, a piece of fine music begins. Never is your own individuality
so precious to you as then. Straight to your soul come these sounds,
automatically separating all the diviner part of you from the lower,
singling out what is commonly inarticulate and inchoate, and fanning
into life again that smothered spark which never wholly dies. How
impossible it is to look at pictures with other people. The mind
and the imagination demand freedom to wander at will, to ponder, to
speculate. What passes from the picture to you, and from you to the
picture, is a sort of trembling recognition, too delicate to be shared,
too intimate to be uttered. So it is with books. You need silence and
retirement so as to feel the perspective of knowledge, so that your
mind may wander through whatever courses open to it.
It has often been remarked that, in America, women have now both
leisure and independence to pursue the arts and to satisfy their desire
for what is called “culture,” and that in this respect they have taken
the place frequently occupied by men. The most characteristic element
in this situation is, however, that in the pursuit of intellectual or
artistic advancement, woman joins a club! These clubs are of very great
use to the individuals who belong to them and to the communities in
which they flourish when they undertake--as they frequently do--the
betterment of social conditions. Any one familiar with what they have
accomplished in this respect must pay them a real tribute. But in
their pursuit of “culture” they have been less successful, and for
the reasons already outlined here. They pursue too many subjects, and
they dissipate their energies. But above all, they seem unconscious
of the fundamental principle of education which is that one really
educates one’s self. For education, after all, consists in the gradual
enlargement of one’s own perceptions through coming in contact with
greater minds, and its processes are secret and intensely personal. As
you read “The Idiot,” for example, you connect Mishkin with Lohengrin,
Parsifal, the Arthurian legends, or even with Christ. The extraordinary
account of his thoughts as he falls in the epileptic fit, and his
use of the words, “And there was no more time,” bring up a whole
fascinating sequence of psychological speculations. The character of
Nastasya calls to your memory scores of other characters from Kundry
down to Sonia, and, as you read, the whole warp and woof of life, shot
through and through with its drab and scarlet, flashes before you.
Now, these contacts are as nothing if some one else makes them. The
spark must strike in your own imagination. You yourself must feel the
current of this magnetism which reaches from the earth to the stars
and makes all things akin. A good book should be a provocation to the
reader. A club for “culture” is a collection of human beings each
hoping for vicarious salvation through the other.
Women’s clubs not only waste energy in their pursuit of knowledge, but
they debilitate the intellectual strength of the individual woman.
Nothing could be worse for the mind than the peaceful acceptance of the
point of view of another without resistance and without the test of
your own thoughts and your own personality. Smatterings of knowledge
are almost useless. Nothing is yours until you make it so.
The relation between music and life is, then, an intimate and vital
relation. Any person, young or old, who does not sing and to whom music
has no meaning, is by just so much a poorer person in all that goes to
make life happy, joyous, and significant. Any community which employs
no form of musical expression is by just so much inarticulate and
disorganized as a community. Any church that buys its music and never
produces any of its own loses just so much in spiritual power.
We all need music because it is a fluent, free, and beautiful form
of expression for those deeper impulses of ours which are denied
expression by words. Our speech is too highly specialized; we
discriminate with words instead of with inflections and gestures; we
smother our natural expressiveness; we hold words to be synonyms of
thought, whereas thought is half feeling and instinct and imagination,
no one of which can really find issue in exact terms. All great
literature is inexact.
Music frees us. Not only does it let each of us say for himself what
he cannot say in words, but, at its best, it reveals to us a higher
reach of life, detached, yet a part of the inmost being of us all. When
we truly respond to it, there is set up in us a certain harmonious
vibration which tunes us to one another, to the mother earth, the
everlasting sea, and to that larger world of suns, stars, and planets
of which they are a part.
Nothing ever dies. What we call death is only a transformation from one
form of life to another. All the music that ever was still sounds; all
the music that is to be still slumbers. Life and death are one, and, in
the truest sense, the whole universe is a song.
THE END
FOOTNOTE:
[13] I do not mean a phonographic record of the tenor solo in “L’Elisir
d’Amore,” or anything of that sort. I mean something which will be more
than a casual moment’s entertainment.
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