wrongly. God does not interfere to afflict the wilful man with madness,
but he has never thrown himself open to the wisdom of God. His mind is
like a machine that acts with increasing speed and fury because there is
less and less material for it to act upon. One act leads to another in a
blind chain of cause and effect; he does this merely because he has done
that, and seems to be driven by fate on and on to his own ruin. So it
was with Napoleon in his later years. He had lost the sense of any
reality whatever except his own action; he saw the world as a passive
object to be acted upon by himself. And that is how the Germans saw it
two years ago. They could not understand that it was possible for the
world to react against them. It was merely something that they were
going to remake, to work their will upon. The war, at its beginning, was
not to them a conflict between human beings; it was a process by which
they would make of things what they willed. There was no reality except
in themselves and their own will; for, in their worship of action, they
had lost the sense of external reality, they had come to believe that
there was nothing to learn from it except what a craftsman learns from
his material by working in it. It is by making that he learns; and they
thought that there was no learning except by making.
But that is the mistake of the whole Western world, though we have none
of us carried it so far as Germany. Other men are to us still men, they
still have some reality to us; but we see external reality as a material
for us to work in; we are to ourselves entirely active and not at all
passive beings. Even among all the evil and sorrow of the war we still
took a pride in the enormous power of our instruments of destruction, as
if we were children playing with big, dangerous toys. But these toys are
themselves the product of a society that must always be making and never
thinking or feeling. They express the will for action that has ousted
the will to experience; and all the changes which we work on the face of
the earth express that will too. We could not live in the cities we have
made for ourselves if we thought that we had anything to learn from the
beauty of the earth. They are for us merely places in which we learn to
act, in which no one could learn to think or feel. Passive experience is
impossible in them and they do not consider the possibility of it. So
they express in every building, in every object, in the very clothes of
their inhabitants, an utter poverty of passive experience. In what we
make we give out no stored riches of the mind; we make only so that we
may act, never so that we may express ourselves; and we have little art
because our making is entirely wilful. Our attempts at art are
themselves entirely wilful. We will have art, we say; and so we plaster
our utilities with the ornaments of the past, as if we could get the
richness of experience secondhand from our ancestors. And in the same
way we are always finding for our blind activities moral motives, those
motives which are real only when they spring out of right experience. We
rationalize all that we do, but the rationalizing is secondhand ornament
to blind impulse; it is an attempt to persuade ourselves that our
actions spring out of the experience which we lack. There is among us an
incessant activity both of thought and of art; but much of it is
entirely wilful. The thinker makes theories to justify what is done; he,
too, sees all life in terms of action, he is the parasite of action. For
a German professor the whole process of history was but a prelude to the
wilfulness of Germany; he could not experience the past except in terms
of what Germany willed to do; and the aim of his theorizing was to
remove all scrupulous impediments to the action of Germany which she may
have inherited from the past. Think so that you may be stronger to do
what you wish to do; that is the modern notion of thought, and that is
the reason why we throw up theories so easily; for thinking of this kind
needs no experience, it needs merely an activity of the mind, the
activity which collects facts and does with them what it will. And these
theories are eagerly accepted so long as the impulse lasts which they
justify. When that is spent they are forgotten, and new theories take
their place to justify fresh impulses. And so it is with the incessant
new movements in art. Art now is conceived entirely as action. The
artist is as wilful as the Germanic hero; the will to make excludes in
him the will to experience. The painter cannot look at the visible world
without considering at once what kind of picture he will make of it. It
is to him mere passive material for his artistic will, not an
independent reality to enrich his mind so that it will give out its
riches in the form of art. And as he is always willing to make pictures
so he must will the kind of pictures he will make, as the Germans willed
the kind of world they would make. But this willing of his is a kind of
theorizing to justify his own action; and it changes incessantly because
he never can be satisfied with his own poverty of experience. But still
he will do anything rather than try to enrich that poverty.
And that is the secret of all our restlessness, the restlessness that
forced the Germans into the folly and crime of war. We are always
dissatisfied with our poverty of experience; and we try to get rid of
our dissatisfaction in more blind activity, throwing up new theories all
the while as reasons why we should act. We fidget about the earth as if
we were children, that could not read, left in a library; and, like
them, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that have
not learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and all
that we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them and
scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with our
meaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means something
because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that there
is no meaning in anything, no more in the books than in our scribble.
The only remedy is that we should learn to read; and for this we need
above all things humility; not merely the personal humility of a man who
knows that other men excel him, but a generic humility which
acknowledges in the universe a greater wisdom, power, righteousness than
his own. That is formally acknowledged by our religion, but it is not
practically acknowledged in our way of life, in our conduct or our
thought. We think and feel and behave as if we were the best and wisest
creatures in the universe, as if it existed only for us to make use of
it; and in so far as we learn from it at all, we learn only to make use
of it. That is our idea of knowledge and wisdom; more and more it is our
idea of science; and as for philosophy, we pay no heed to it because, in
its nature, it is not concerned with making use of things. In every way
we betray the fact that we cannot listen humbly, because we do not
believe there is anything to listen to. For a few of the devout God
spoke long ago, but He is not speaking now. "The kings of modern thought
are dumb," said Matthew Arnold; but that is because everything outside
the mind of man is dumb; all must be dumb to those who will not listen.
If we assume that there, is no intelligence anywhere but in ourselves,
we shall find none anywhere else. There will be no meaning for us in
anything but our own actions; and they will become more and more
meaningless to us as they become more and more wilful, until at last we
shall be to ourselves like squirrels in a cage, or prisoners on a
universal treadmill. Years ago the war must have seemed a meaningless
treadmill to the Germans, but they cannot escape from its consequences;
they have done and they must suffer. But will they learn from their
sufferings, shall we all learn, that doing is not everything? Are we
humbled enough to listen to the wisdom of the ages, which tells us that
we can be wise only if we listen for a wisdom that is not ours?
"The Magic Flute"
When _The Magic Flute_ was produced by the already dying Mozart it had
little success. At the first performance, it is said, when the applause
was faint, the leader of the orchestra stole up to Mozart, who was
conducting, and kissed his hand; and Mozart stroked him on the head. We
may guess that the leader knew what the music meant and that Mozart knew
that he knew. Neither could put it into words and it is not put into
words in the libretto. But the libretto need not be an obstruction to
the meaning of the music if only the audience will not ask themselves
what the libretto means. After Mozart's death the opera was successful,
no doubt because the audience had given up asking what the libretto
meant and had learnt something of the meaning of the music.
There are worse librettos--librettos which have some clear unmusical
meaning of their own beyond which the audience cannot penetrate to the
meaning of the music, if it has any. This libretto, apart from the
music, is so nearly meaningless, it has so little coherence, that one
can easily pass through it to the music. The author, Schickaneder, was
Mozart's friend, and he had wit enough to understand the mood of Mozart.
That mood does express itself in the plot and the incidents of the
libretto, although in them it is empty of value or passion.
Schickaneder, in fact, constructed a mere diagram to which Mozart gave
life. The life is all in the music, but the diagram has its use, in that
it supplies a shape, which we recognize, to the life of the music. The
characters live in the music, but in the words they tell us something
about themselves which enables us to understand their musical speech
better. Papageno tells us that he is a bird-catcher and a child of
nature. The words are labels, but through them we pass more quickly to
an understanding of his song. Only we shall miss that understanding if
we try to reach it through the words, if we look for the story of the
opera in them. In the words the events of the opera have no connexion
with each other. There is no reason why one should follow another. The
logic of it is all in the music, for the music creates a world in which
events happen naturally, in which one tune springs out of another, or
conflicts with it, like the forces of nature or the thoughts and actions
of man. This world is the universe as Mozart sees it; and the whole
opera is an expression of his peculiar faith. It is therefore a
religious work, though free from that meaningless and timid solemnity
which we associate with religion. Mozart, in this world, was like an
angel who could not but laugh, though without any malice, at all the
bitter earnestness of mankind. Even the wicked were only absurd to him;
they were naughty children whom, if one had the spell, one could enchant
into goodness. And in _The Magic Flute_ the spell works. It works in the
flute itself and in Papageno's lyre when the wicked negro Monostatos
threatens him and Tamino with his ugly attendants. Papageno has only to
play a beautiful childish tune on his lyre and the attendants all march
backwards to an absurd goose-step in time with it. They are played off
the stage; and the music convinces one that they must yield to it. So,
we feel if we had had the music, we could have made the Prussians march
their goose-step back to Potsdam; so we could play all solemn perversity
off the stage of life. If we had the music--but there is solemn
perversity in us too; by reason of which we can hardly listen to the
music, much less play it, hardly listen to it or understand it even
when Mozart makes it for us. For he had the secret of it; he was a
philosopher who spoke in music and so simply that the world missed his
wisdom and thought that he was just a beggar playing tunes in the
street. A generation ago he was commonly said to be too tuney, as you
might say that a flower was too flowery. People would no more consider
him than they would consider the lilies of the field. They preferred
Wagner in all his glory.
Even now you can enjoy _The Magic Flute_ as a more than usually absurd
musical comedy with easy, old-fashioned tunes. You can enjoy it anyway,
if you are not solemn about it, as you can enjoy _Hamlet_ for a bloody
melodrama. But, like _Hamlet_, it has depths and depths of meaning
beyond our full comprehension. Papageno is a pantomime figure, but he is
also one of the greatest figures in the drama of the world. He is
everyman, like Hamlet, if only we had the wit to recognize ourselves in
him. Or rather he is that element in us which we all like and despise in
others, but which we will never for one moment confess to in
ourselves--the coward, the boaster, the liar, but the child of nature.
He, because he knows himself for all of these, can find his home in
Sarostro's paradise. He does not want Sarostro's high wisdom; what he
does want is a Papagena, an Eve, a child of nature like himself; and she
is given to him. He has the wit to recognize his mate, almost a bird
like himself, and to them Mozart gives their bird-duet, so that, when
they sing it, we feel that we might all sing it together. It is not
above our capacity of understanding or delight. The angel has learnt our
earthly tongue, but transformed it so that he makes a heaven of the
earth, a heaven that is not too high or difficult for us, a wild-wood
heaven, half-absurd, in which we can laugh as well as sing, and in which
the angels will laugh at us and with us, laugh our silly sorrows into
joy.
There is Mozart himself in Papageno, the faun domesticated and sweetened
by centuries of Christian experience, yet still a faun and always ready
to play a trick on human solemnity; and in this paradise which Mozart
makes for us the faun has his place and a beauty not incongruous with
it, like the imps and gargoyles of a Gothic church. At any moment the
music will turn from sublimity into fun, and in a moment it can turn
back to sublimity; and always the change seems natural. It is like a
great cathedral with High Mass and children playing hide-and-seek behind
the pillars; and the Mass would not be itself without the children. That
is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because
in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of
Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything
in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but
it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with
the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems
to be not religion, but merely beauty, as real saints seem to be not
good, but merely charming. And there are people to whom his beauty does
not seem to be art, because it is just beauty; they think that he had
the trick of it and could turn it on as he chose; they prefer the
creaking of effort and egotism. His gifts are so purely gifts and so
lavish that they seem to be cheap; and _The Magic Flute_ is an absurdity
which he wrote in a hurry to please the crowd.
We can hardly expect to see a satisfying performance of it on the stage
of to-day, but we must be grateful for any performance, for the life of
the music is in it. One can see from it what _The Magic Flute_ might be.
The music is so sung, so played that it does transfigure the peculiar
theatrical hideousness of our time. Tamino and Panina may look like
figures out of an Academy picture, as heroes and heroines of opera
always do. They may wear clothes that belong to no world of reality or
art, clothes that suggest the posed and dressed-up model. But the music
mitigates even these, and it helps every one to act, or rather to forget
what they have learnt about acting. It evidently brings happiness and
concord to those who sing it, so that they seem to be taking part in a
religious act rather than in an act of the theatre. One feels this most
in the concerted music, when the same wind from paradise seems to be
blowing through all the singers and they move to it like flowers, in
spite of their absurd clothes.
But what is needed for a satisfying performance is a world congruous to
the eye as well as to the ear; and for this we need a break with all our
theatrical conventions. Sarostro, for instance, lives among Egyptian
scenery--very likely the architecture of his temple was Egyptian at the
first performance--but, for all that, this Egyptian world does not suit
the music, and to us it suggests the miracles of the Egyptian Hall. But
there is one world which would perfectly suit the music, a world in
which it could pass naturally from absurdity to beauty, and in which all
the figures could be harmonious and yet distinct, and that is the
Chinese world as we know it in Chinese art. For in that there is
something fantastic yet spiritual, something comic but beautiful, a
mixture of the childish and the sacred, which might say to the eye what
Mozart's music says to the ear. Only in Chinese art could Papageno be a
saint; only in that world, which ranges from the willow-pattern plate to
the Rishi in his mystical ecstasy in the wilderness, could the soul of
Mozart, with its laughter and its wisdom, be at home. That too is the
world in which flowers and all animals are of equal import with mankind;
it is the world of dragons in which the serpent of the first act would
not seem to be made of pasteboard, and in which all the magic would not
seem to be mere conjuring. In that world one might have beautiful
landscapes and beautiful figures to suit them. There Sarostro would not
be a stage magician, but a priest; from Papageno and the lovers to him
would be only the change from Ming to Sung, which would seem no change
at all. Chinese art, in fact, is the world of the magic flute, the world
where silver bells hang on every flowering tree and the thickets are
full of enchanted nightingales. It is the world of imps and monsters,
and yet of impassioned contemplation, where the sage sits in a moonlit
pavilion and smiles like a lover, and where the lovers smile like sages;
where everything is to the eye what the music of Mozart is to the ear.
In the Chinese world we could be rid of all the drawling erotics of the
modern theatre, we could give up the orchid for the lotus and the heavy
egotism of Europe for the self-forgetful gaiety of the East. It may be
only an ideal world, empty of the horrors of reality, but it is one
which the art of China makes real to us and with which we are familiar
in that art; and there is a smiling wisdom in it, there is a gaiety
which comes from conquest rather than refusal of reality, just like the
gaiety and wisdom of Mozart's music. He knew sorrow well, but would not
luxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously than
himself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather than
of villains, and of imps and monsters that could be exorcized by music.
He was the Orpheus of the world who might tame the beast in all of us if
we would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left to
play out in the street. And yet his ultimate seriousness and the last
secret of his beauty is pity, not for himself and his own little
troubles, but for the whole bitter earnestness of mortal children. And
in this pity he seems not to weep for us, still less for himself, but to
tell us to dry our tears and be good, and listen to his magic flute.
That is what he would have told the Prussians, after he had set them
marching the goose-step backwards. Even they would not be the villains
of a tragedy for him, but only beasts to be tamed with his music until
they should be fit to sing their own bass part in the last chorus of
reconciliation. And this pity of his sounds all through _The Magic
Flute_ and gives to its beauty a thrill and a wonder far beyond what any
fleshly passion can give. Sarostro is a priest, not a magician, because
there is in him the lovely wisdom of pity, because he has a place in his
paradise for Papageno, the child of nature, where he shall be made happy
with his mate Papagena. There is a moment when Papageno is about to hang
himself because there is no one to love him; he will hang himself in
Sarostro's lonely paradise. But there is a sly laughter in the music
which tells us that he will be interrupted with the rope round his neck.
And so he is, and Papagena is given to him, and the paradise is no
longer lonely; and the two sing their part in the chorus of
reconciliation at the end. And we are sure that the Queen of Night, and
the ugly negro and all his goose-stepping attendants, are not punished.
They have been naughty for no reason that anyone can discover, just like
Prussians and other human beings; and now the magic flute triumphs over
their naughtiness, and the silver bells ring from every tree and the
enchanted nightingales sing in all the thickets, and the sages and the
lovers smile like children; and the laughter passes naturally into the
divine beauty of Mozart's religion, which is solemn because laughter and
pity are reconciled in it, not rejected as profane.
Process or Person?
Nearly all war pictures in the past have been merely pictures that
happened to represent war. Paolo Uccello's battle scenes are but
pretexts for his peculiar version of the visible world. They might as
well be still life for all the effect the subject has had upon his
treatment of it. Leonardo, in his lost battle picture, was no doubt
dramatic, and expressed in it his infinite curiosity; he has left notes
about the manner in which fighting men and horses ought to be
represented, but he had this detached curiosity about all things.
Michelangelo's battle picture, also lost, expressed his interest in the
nude in violent action, like his picture of the "Last Judgment."
Titian's "Battle of Cadore," which we know from the copy of a fragment
of it, was a landscape with figures in violent action. Tintoret's battle
scenes are parade pictures. Those of Rubens are like his hunting scenes
or his Bacchanals, expressions of his own overweening energy. In none of
these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of
war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who
take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently
because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity
because of their inhuman business. As for Meissonier, he paints a battle
scene just as if he were a second-rate Dutchman painting a _genre_
picture; and most other modern military painters make merely a patriotic
appeal. War to them also is a normal occupation; and they paint battle
pictures as they might paint sporting pictures, because there is a
public that likes them.
In Mr. Nevinson's war pictures there is expressed a modern sense of war
as an abnormal occupation; and this sense shows itself in the very
method of the artist. He was something of a Cubist before the war; but
in these pictures he has found a new reason for being one; for his
cubist method does express, in the most direct way, his sense that in
war man behaves like a machine or part of a machine, that war is a
process in which man is not treated as a human being but as an item in a
great instrument of destruction, in which he ceases to be a person and
is lost in a process. The cubist method, with its repetition and sharp
distinction of planes, expresses this sense of mechanical process better
than any other way of representation. Perhaps it came into being to
express the modern sense of process as the ultimate reality of all
things, even of life and growth. This is the age of mechanism; and
machines have affected even our view of the universe; we are overawed by
our own knowledge and inventions. Samuel Butler imagined a future in
which machines would come to life and make us their slaves; but it is
not so much that machines have come to life as that we ourselves have
lost the pride and sweetness of our humanity; not that the machines seem
more and more like us, but that we seem more and more like the machines.
Everywhere we see processes to which we are subject and of which our
humanity is the result, though in the past we have harboured the
delusion that our humanity was in some way independent of processes. Now
that delusion is fading away from us; and it fades away most of all in
war, where all humanity is evidently dominated by the struggle for life,
and is but a part of it, as raindrops are part of a storm.
It is this sense of tyrannous process that Mr. Nevinson expresses in
his battle pictures, with, we suspect, a bitter feeling of resentment
against it. His pictures look like a visible _reductio ad absurdum_ of
it all. That is how men look, he seems to say, when they are fighting in
modern war; and, being men, they ought not to look so. That, at least,
is the effect the pictures produce on us. They are a bitter satire on
all the modern power of man and the uses to which he has put it. He has
allowed it to make him its slave and to set him to a business which has
no purpose whatever, which is as blind as the process of the universe
seems to one who has no faith. This struggle for life might just as well
be called a struggle for death. It is, in fact, merely a struggle
between two machines intent on wrecking each other; and part of the
machines are the bodies of men, which behave as if there were no souls
in them, as if there were not even life, but merely energy; so that they
collide and destroy each other like masses of matter in space. Nothing
can be said of them except that they obey certain laws; we call their
obedience discipline, but it is only the discipline of things subject to
a process.