machinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talented
followers of the muse of strumming, scraping, screeching, and
blatting. This is because the soul of music is not in them. And in
striving to reproduce its body, they perceive how hopeless it is to
compete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product. In
like manner, the invention of canned meats doubtless discouraged many
minor cooks from further struggles with their craft. But these
losses, I, for one, cannot bring myself to mourn.
What seems a sounder complaint is that the phonograph, because it
reproduces with equal readiness music and the spoken word, may become
an effective instrument of satire in the hands of the clever
philistine. Let me illustrate. To the Jones collection of records,
shortly after "Tannhäuser" began to win its way, there was added a
reactionary "comic" record entitled "Maggie Clancy's New Piano." In
the record Maggie begins playing "Tannhäuser" very creditably on her
new instrument. Presently the voice of old Clancy is heard from
another room calling, "Maggie!" The music goes on. There is a
_crescendo_ series of calls. The piano stops.
"Yes, Father?"
"Maggie, is the new pianny broke?"
"No, Father; I was merely playing Wagner."
Old Clancy meditates a moment; then, with a gentleness of touch that
might turn a New York music critic green with envy, he replies: "Oh,
I thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the parlor stove."
Records like these have power to retard and roughen the otherwise
smooth course of a family's musical evolution; but they are usually
unable to arrest it. In general I think that such satires may fortify
the elder generation in its conservative mistrust of classical music.
But if they are only heard often enough by the young, I believe that
the sympathies of the latter will end in chiming with the taste of the
enlightened Maggie rather than with that of her father.
Until recently a graver charge against the phonograph has been that it
was so much better adapted for reproducing song than pure instrumental
music that it was tending to identify the art of music in the minds of
most men with song alone. This tendency was dangerous. For song is not
all of music, nor even its most important part. The voice is naturally
more limited in range, technic, and variety of color than many
another instrument. And it is artificially handicapped by the rather
absurd custom which forces the singer to drag in poetry (much to the
latter's disadvantage), and therewith distract his own attention and
that of his audience from the music.
The fact remains that one art at a time is none too easy for even the
most perfect medium of expression to cope with. To make a somewhat
less than perfect instrument like the human voice, cope always with
two simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music has
not yet emerged from its teens. This is one reason why most song is as
yet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach is, as a rule, forced to
exceed its grasp. Also the accident of having a fine voice usually
determines a singer's career, though a perfect vocal organ does not
necessarily imply a musical nature. The best voices, in fact, often
belong, by some contrariety of fate, to the worst musicians. For these
and other reasons, there is less of the true spirit of music to be
heard from vocal cords than from the cords and reeds and brazen tubes
of piano, organ, string quartet, and orchestra. Thus, when the
phonograph threatened to identify song with music in general, it
threatened to give the art a setback and make the singer the
arch-enemy of the wider musical culture. Fortunately the phonograph
now gives promise of averting this peril by bringing up its
reproduction of absolute music near to its vocal standard.
Another charge against most machine-made music is its unhuman
accuracy. The phonograph companies seldom give out a record which is
not practically perfect in technic and intonation. As for the
mechanical piano, there is no escape from the certainty of just what
notes are coming next--that is, if little Johnnie has not been editing
the paper record with his father's leather-punch. Therefore one grows
after a while to long for a few of those deviations from mathematical
precision which imply human frailty and lovableness. One reason why
the future is veiled from us is that it is so painful to be certain
that one's every prediction is coming true.
A worse trouble with the phonograph is that it seems to leave out of
account that essential part of every true musical performance, the
creative listener. A great many phonograph records sound as though the
recorder had been performing to an audience no more spiritually
resonant than the four walls of a factory. I think that the makers of
another kind of mechanical instrument must have realized this
oversight on the part of the phonograph manufacturer. I mean the sort
of electric piano which faithfully reproduces every _nuance_ of the
master pianists. Many of the records of this marvelous instrument
sound as though the recording-room of the factory had been "papered"
with creative listeners who coöperated mightily with the master on the
stage. Would that the phonographers might take the hint!
But no matter how effectively the creative listener originally
coöperates with the maker of this kind of record, the electric piano
does not appeal as strongly to the creative listener in his home as
does the less perfect but more impressionable piano-player, which
responds like a cycle to pedal and brake. For the records of the
phonograph and of the electric piano, once they are made, are made.
Thereafter they are as insensible to influence as the laws of the
Medes and Persians. They do not admit the audience to an active,
influential part in the performance. But such a part in the
performance is exactly what the true listener demands as his
democratic right. And rather than be balked of it, he turns to the
less sophisticated mechanism of the piano-player. This, at least,
responds to his control.
Undeniably, though, even the warmest enthusiasts for the piano-player
come in time to realize that their machine has distinct limitations;
that it is better suited to certain pieces than to others. They find
that music may be performed on it with the more triumphant success
the less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of an
arabesque. The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops or switching
levers, cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life.
The disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands to
be filled with soul, the thinner and more ghost-like it comes forth.
The less intimately human the music, the more satisfactorily it
emerges. For example, the performer is stirred by the "Tannhäuser
March," as rendered by himself, with its flourish of trumpets and its
general hurrah-boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the
"Evening Star" from the same opera. For this, in passing through the
piano-player, is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis. The
singer is no longer Scotti or Bispham, but Herschel or Laplace. The
operator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart--but if he has
any real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack
in this sort of music. So for the present, while confidently awaiting
the invention of an improved piano-player, which shall give equally
free expression to every mood and tense of the human spirit--the
operator learns to avoid the very soulful things as much as is
practicable.
At this stage of his development he usually begins to crave that
supreme kind of music which demands a perfect balance of the
intellectual, the sensuous, and the emotional. So he goes more often
to concerts where such music is given. Saturated with it, he returns
to his piano-player and plays the concert all over again. And his
imagination is now so full of the emotional side of what he has just
heard and is re-hearing, that he easily discounts the obvious
shortcomings of the mechanical instrument. This is an excellent way of
getting the most from music. One should not, as many do, take it from
the piano-player before the concert and then go with its somewhat
stereotyped accents so fixed in the mind as to obscure the heart of
the performance. Rather, in preparation, let the score be silently
glanced through. Leave wide the doors of the soul for the precious
spiritual part of the music to enter in and take possession. After
this happens, use mechanical music to renew your memories of the
concert, just as you would use a catalogue illustrated with etchings
in black and white, to renew your memory of an exhibition of
paintings.
* * * * *
The supreme mission of mechanical music is its direct educational
mission. By this I mean something more than its educational mission to
the many thousands of grown men and women whose latent interest in
music it is suddenly awakening. I have in mind the girls and boys of
the rising generation. If people can only hear enough good music when
they are young, without having it forcibly fed to them, they are
almost sure to care for it when they come to years of discretion. The
reason why America is not more musical is that we men and women of
to-day did not yesterday, as children, hear enough good music. Our
parents probably could not afford it. It was then a luxury, implying
expensive concert tickets or an elaborate musical training for someone
in the family.
The invention of mechanical instruments ended this state of affairs
forever by suddenly making the best music as inexpensive as the worst.
There exists no longer any financial reason why most children should
not grow up in an atmosphere of the best music. And I believe that so
soon as parents learn how to educate their children through the
phonograph or the mechanical piano, the world will realize with a
start that the invention of these things is doing more for musical
culture than the invention of printing did for literary culture.
We must bear in mind, however, that the invention of mechanical
instruments has come far earlier in the history of music than the
invention of printing came in the history of literature. Music is the
youngest of the fine arts. It is in somewhat the same stage of
development to-day that literature was in the time of Homer. It is in
the age of oral--and aural--tradition. Most people still take in music
through their ears alone. For all that the invention of note-printing
means to them as enjoyers of music, they might almost as well be
living æons before Gutenberg. Musically speaking, they belong to the
Homeric age.
Now the entrance of mechanical music upon the scene is making men
depend on their ears more than ever. It is intensifying and speeding
up this age of oral tradition. But in so doing, I believe that it is
bound to shorten this age also, on the principle that the faster you
go the sooner you arrive. Thus, machinery is hastening us toward the
time when the person of ordinary culture will no more depend on his
ears alone for the enjoyment of music than he now depends on his ears
alone for the enjoyment of Shakespeare.
Thanks to machine-made music, the day is coming the sooner when we
shall behold, as neighbors in the ordinary bookcase, such pairs of
counterparts as Milton and Bach, Beethoven and Shakespeare, Loeffler
and Maeterlinck, Byron and Tschaikowsky, Mendelssohn and Longfellow,
Nietzsche and Richard Strauss. Browning will stand up cheek by jowl
with his one true affinity, Brahms. And the owner will sit by the
quiet hearth reading to himself with equal fluency and joy from
Schubert and Keats.
X
MASTERS BY PROXY
_It is only in a surrounding of personalities that
personalities can as such make themselves seen and heard._
HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.
Between many of my readers and the joyful heart there seems to stand
but a single obstacle--their lack of creativeness. They feel that they
could live and die happy if only they might become responsible for the
creation of something which would remain to bless mankind after they
are gone. But as it is, how can they have the joyful heart when they
are continually being tortured by regret because God did not make
masters of them?
One is sad because he is not a master of poetry. He never sees A, his
golden-tongued friend, without a pang very like the envy of a
childless man for a happy father. But he has no suspicion that he is
partly responsible for A's poetic excellence. Another thinks her life
a mistake because the Master of all good workmen did not make her a
sculptor. Yet all the while she is lavishing unawares upon her brother
or son or husband the very stuff that art is made of. Others are
inconsolable because no fairy wand at their birth destined them for
men of original action, for discoverers in science, pianists,
statesmen, or actors; for painters, philosophers, inventors, or
architects of temples or of religions.
Now my task in this last chapter is a more delightful one than if I
were the usual solicitor of fiction, come to inform the
poor-but-honest newsboy that he is a royal duke. It is my privilege to
comfort many of the comfortless by revealing to them how and why they
are--or may be--masters of an art as indispensable as the arts which
they now regard so wistfully. I mean the art of master-making--the art
of being a master by proxy.
To be specific, let us single out one of the arts and see what it
means to master it by proxy. Suppose we consider the simple case of
executive music. In a book called "The Musical Amateur" I have tried
to prove (more fully than is here possible) that the reproduction of
music is a social act. It needs two: one to perform, one to
appreciate. Both are almost equally essential to a good performance.
The man who appreciates a musical phrase unconsciously imitates it
with almost imperceptible contractions of throat or lips. These
contractions represent an incipient singing or whistling. Motions
similar to these, and probably more fully developed, are made at the
same time by his mind and his spirit. The whole man actually feels his
way, physically and psychically, into the heart of the music. He is
turned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contribution
of emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy to
the performer. When a violinist and a listener of the right sort meet
for musical purposes, this is what happens. The violinist happens to
be in the mood for playing. This means that he has feelings which
demand expression. These his bow releases. The music strikes the
listener, sets him in vibration as if he were a sounding-board, and
rouses in him feelings similar to those of the violinist. Enriched by
this new contribution, the emotional complex resounds back to the
violinist, intensifying his original "feeling-state." In its
heightened form it then recoils back to the appreciator, "and so on,
back and forth, growing in stimulating power at each recoil. The whole
process is something like a hot 'rally' in tennis, with the opponents
closing in on each other and the ball shuttling across the net faster
with every stroke as the point gains in excitement and pleasure.
'Social resonance' might be a good way of describing the thing." This,
briefly told, is what passes between the player of music and his
creative listener.
In application this principle does not by any means stop with
performing or composing music or with the fine arts. It goes on to
embrace more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the
fiddler's or in any other artist's philosophy. Perhaps it is not too
much to say that no great passion or action has ever had itself
adequately expressed without the coöperation of this social resonance,
without the help of at least one of those modest, unrecognized
partners of genius, the social resonators, the masters by proxy.
Thanks, dear master-makers unawares! The gratitude of the few who
understand you is no less sincere because you do not yet realize your
own thankworthiness. Our children shall rise up and call you blessed.
For in your quiet way, you have helped to create the world's
creators--the preachers, prophets, captains, artists, discoverers, and
seers of the ages. To these, you, unrecognized and unawares, have been
providing the very sinews of peace, vision, war, beauty, originality,
and insight.
What made the game of art so brilliant in the age of Pericles? It was
not star playing by individuals. It was steady, consistent team-work
by the many. Almost every one of the Athenians who were not masters
were masters by proxy. In "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"
Chamberlain holds that Greek culture derived its incomparable charm
from "a peculiar harmony of greatness"; and that "if our poets are not
in every respect equal to the greatest poets of Athens, that is not
the fault of their talent, but of those who surround them." Only
imagine the joyful ease of being a poet in the Periclean atmosphere!
It must have been as exhilarating as coasting down into the Yosemite
Valley with John Muir on an avalanche of snow.
But even in that enlightened age the master received all the credit
for every achievement, and his creative appreciator none at all. And
so it has been ever since that particular amoeba which was destined
for manhood had a purse made up for him and was helped upon the train
of evolution by his less fortunate and more self-effacing friends who
were destined to remain amoebæ; because the master by proxy is such
a retiring, unspectacular sort of person that he has never caught the
popular imagination or found any one to sing his praises. But if he
should ever resent this neglect and go on strike, we should realize
that without him progress is impossible. For the real lords of
creation are not always the apparent lords. We should bear in mind
that the most important part of many a throne is not the red velvet
seat, the back of cloth of gold, or the onyx arms that so sumptuously
accommodate the awe and majesty of acknowledged kings. Neither is it
the seed-pearl canopy that intercepts a too searching light from
majesty's complexion. It is a certain little filigreed hole in the
throne-back which falls conveniently close to the sovereign's ear when
he leans back between the periods of the wise, beauteous, and
thrilling address to his subjects.
For doubled up in a dark, close box behind the chair of state is a
humble, drab individual who, from time to time, applies his mouth to
the wrong side of the filigreed hole and whispers things. If he were
visible at all, he would look like the absurd prompter under the hood
at the opera. He is not a famous person. Most people are so ignorant
of his very existence that he might be pardoned for being an agnostic
about it himself. The few others know little and care less. Only two
or three of the royal family are aware of his name and real function.
They refer to him as M. Power-Behind-the-Throne, Master-by-Proxy of
State.
There is one sign by which masters by proxy may be detected wherever
met. They are people whose presence is instantly invigorating. Before
you can make out the color of their eyes you begin to feel that you
are greater than you know. It is as if they wore diffused about them
auras so extensive and powerful that entering these auras was
equivalent to giving your soul electric massage. You do not have to
touch the hem of their garments nor even see them. The auras penetrate
a brick wall as a razor penetrates Swiss cheese. And if you are
fortunate enough to be on the other side of the partition, you become
aware with a thrill that "virtue," in the beautiful, Biblical sense of
the word, has gone out of somebody and into you.
If ever I return to live in a city apartment (which may the gods
forfend!) I shall this time select the apartment with almost sole
reference to what comes through the walls. I shall enter one of those
typical New York piles which O. Henry described as "paved with Parian
marble in the entrance-hall, and cobblestones above the first floor,"
and my inquiry will be focused on things far other than Parian marble
and cobblestones. I shall walk about the rooms and up and down the
bowling-alleys of halls trying to make myself as sensitive to
impressions as are the arms of the divining-rod man during his solemn
parade with the wand of witch-hazel. And when I feel "virtue" from the
next apartment streaming through the partition, there will I instantly
give battle to the agent and take up my abode. And this though it be
up six flights of cobblestones, without elevator, without closet-room,
with a paranoiac for janitor, and radiators whose musical performance
all the day long would make a Cleveland boiler factory pale with envy.
For none of these things would begin to offset the privilege of living
beside a red-letter wall whose influence should be as benignly
constructive as Richard Washburn Child's "Blue Wall" was malignly
destructive.
To-day I should undoubtedly be much more of a person if I had once had
the pleasure of living a wall away from Richard Watson Gilder. He was
a true master by proxy. For he was a vastly more creative person than
his published writings will ever accredit him with being. Not only
with his pen, but also with his whole self he went about doing good.
"Virtue" fairly streamed from him all the time. Those bowed shoulders
and deep-set, kindly eyes would emerge from the inner sanctum of the
"Century" office. In three short sentences he would reject the story
which had cost you two years of labor and travail. But all the time
the fatal words were getting themselves uttered, so much "virtue" was
passing from him into you that you would turn from his presence
exhilarated, uplifted, and while treading higher levels for the next
week, would produce a check-bearing tale. The check, however, would
not bring you a tithe of the "virtue" that the great editor's personal
rebuff had brought.
But more than to any editor, writers look to their readers for
support, especially to their unknown correspondents--postal and
psychic. Leonard Merrick has so finely expressed the attitude of many
writers that I cannot forbear giving his words to his "public":
I have thought of you so often and wanted to win a smile
from you; you don't realize how I have longed to meet
you--to listen to you, to have you lift the veil that hides
your mind from me. Sometimes in a crowd I have fancied I
caught a glimpse of you; I can't explain--the poise of the
head, a look in the eyes, there was something that hinted it
was You. And in a whirlwind of an instant it almost seemed
that you would recognize me; but you said no word--you
passed, a secret from me still. To yourself where you are
sitting you are just a charming woman with "a local
habitation and a name"; but to me you are not Miss or Madam,
not M. or N.--you are a Power, and I have sought you by a
name you have not heard--you are my Public. And O my Lady, I
am speaking to you! I feel your presence in my senses,
though you are far away and I can't hear your answer.... It
is as if I had touched your hand across the page.
There are probably more masters by proxy to be found among the world's
mothers than in any other class. The profession of motherhood is such
a creative one, and demands so constant an outgo of unselfish
sympathy, that a mother's technic as silent partner is usually kept in
a highly efficient state. And occasionally a mother of a genius
deserves as much credit for him spiritually as physically. Think of
Frau Goethe, for example.