does he wish to address us? To answer this, we must consider our own
experience, not merely as an audience but also as artists, for we are,
as Croce insists, all of us to some extent artists. You have all no
doubt been aware of some failure and dissatisfaction in those of your
experiences which seem to you the highest. Suppose, for instance, you
see some extreme beauty, as of a sunset. It leaves you sad with a
feeling of your own inadequacy. You have not been equal to it, and why?
You will say in speaking of it to others--I wish I could tell you what I
felt or what I saw, but I can't. That wish is itself natural and
instantly stirred in you by the experience of extreme beauty. The
experience seems incomplete, because you cannot tell anyone else what
you felt and saw; and you are hurt by your effort and failure to do so.
It is a fact of human nature that the experience of any beauty does
arouse in us the desire to communicate our experience; and this desire
is instinctive. It is not that we wish to do good to others by
communicating it. It is simply that we wish to communicate it. The
experience itself is incomplete for us until we communicate it. The
happiness which it gives us is frustrated by our failure to communicate
it. We should be utterly happy if we could make others see what we see
and feel what we feel, but we fail of happiness because we cannot.
Why? One can only conjecture and express conjectures in dull language.
This beauty is itself a universal quality or virtue which makes
particular things more real when they have it. It speaks to the
universal in us, to the everyman in us, and, speaking so, it makes us
aware of the universal in all men. We too wish to speak to that
universal, we wish to find it and the more intense reality which is to
be seen only where it is seen, we wish ourselves to be a part of it; and
we can do that only when all other men also are a part of it. Beauty
seems to speak not merely to us but to the whole listening earth, and we
would be assured that all the earth is listening to it, not to us.
But we ourselves have to play our part in the realizing of this
universal; the sense of it comes and goes; for the most part we
ourselves are not aware of it. We are merely particulars, like other
men, and separated from them by the fact that we are all particulars.
Only, when for a moment we are aware of it, then we are filled with a
passion to make it real and permanent; and it is this passion which
causes art and the blind instinctive effort at art, at communication, at
expression, which we have all experienced.
But it follows from this that the audience to which the artist addresses
himself is not any particular men and women: it is mankind. The moment
he addresses himself to any particular men and women and considers their
particular wants and desires, he is giving up that very sense of the
universal that impelled him to expression; he is ceasing to be an artist
and becoming something else, a tradesman, a philanthropist, a
politician. The artist as artist speaks to mankind, not to any
particular set of men; and he speaks not of himself but of that
universal which he has experienced. His effort is to establish that
universal relation which he has seen, a universal relation of feeling.
And to him, in his effort, there is neither time nor space. Mankind are
not here or there or of this moment or of that; they are everywhere and
for ever. The voice in Mozart's music is itself a universal voice
speaking to the universe of universal things. And all art is an acting
of the beauty that has been experienced, a perpetuation of it so that
all men may share it for ever. The artist's effort is to be the sunset
he has seen, to eternalize it in his art, but always so that he and all
men may be part of this universal by their common experience of it.
So, as I say, the artist must not speak to any particular audience with
the aim of pleasing them--there is that amount of truth in Whistler's
doctrine; and he does fail if he does not communicate, since his aim is
communication--there is that amount of truth in Tolstoy's doctrine.
But the next question that arises is the attitude of ourselves to the
artist.
We have to remember that he is speaking not to us in particular, but to
all mankind, and that he speaks, not to please us or to satisfy any
particular demand of ours, but to communicate to us that universal he
has experienced so that we with him may become part of it.
It follows then that we must not make any particular demands upon him.
We must not come with our own ideas of what he ought to give us. If we
do, we shall be an obstruction between him and that ideal universal
audience to which he would address himself. We shall be tempting him,
with our egotistical demands, to comply with them. But these demands we
are always making; and that is why the relation between the artist and
any actual public is usually nowadays wrong. I was once looking at
Tintoret's 'Crucifixion' in the Scuola di San Rocco with a lady, and she
said to me--'That isn't my idea of a horse.' 'No'--I answered--'it's
Tintoret's. If it were your idea of a horse, why should you look at it?
You look at a picture to get the artist's idea.' But that isn't the
truth about art either. The artist doesn't try to substitute his own
particular for yours. He tries to communicate to you that universal
which he has experienced, because it is to him a universal, not his own,
but all men's, and he wishes to realize it by sharing it with all men.
His faith, though he may never have consciously expressed it to himself,
is in this universal which, because it is a universal, can be
communicated to all men. His effort is based on that faith. He speaks
because he believes all men can hear, if they will.
So the effort of the audience must be to hear and not to distract him
with their particular demands. They must not, for instance, demand that
he shall remind them of what they have found pleasant in actual life.
They must not complain of him that he does not paint pretty women for
them, or compose bright cheerful tunes. They are not to him particular
persons to be tickled according to their particular tastes, but mankind
to whom he wishes to communicate the universal he has experienced.
So, if there is an actual audience listening for that universal and
clearing their minds of their own egotistical demands, then art will
flourish and the artist will be encouraged to communicate that universal
which he has experienced. But if particular audiences demand this or
that and are not happy until they get it, if they say to him--Tickle my
senses--Persuade me that all is for the best in the world as I like it;
that prosperous people like myself have a right to be prosperous; that I
am a fine fellow because I once fell in love; that all who disagree with
me are wicked and absurd--then you will have the kind of art you have
now, in the theatre, in the picture gallery, in the cinema, in the
novel; yes, and in your buildings, your cups and saucers, your pots and
pans even. For in the very arts of use you demand that the craftsman
shall provide you with what you demand, and as cheap as possible;
because you do not understand that he should express himself, you do not
understand also that his expression is worth having and that he ought to
be paid for it. In the very pattern on a tea-cup, if it is worth having
at all, there is the communication of that universal which the artist
has experienced. It is there to remind you of itself whenever you drink
tea, to bring the sacrament of the universal into everything as if it
were music accompanying and heightening all our common actions; but if
you want a fashionable tea-cup cheap, you will get that, and you will
not get anything expressed or communicated with it. You will be shut up
in yourself and your own particularity and ugliness. If we want art we
must know how we should think and feel and act so as to encourage the
artist to produce it.
But why should we want art at all? I hope I have answered that question
incidentally. It is so that we may have life more abundantly; for we can
have life more abundantly only when we are in communication with each
other, mind flowing into mind, the universal expressing itself in and
through all of us. We all more or less blindly desire this
communication, but we seldom know why we desire it or even what exactly
it is we desire. We make the strangest, clumsiest efforts to communicate
with each other--I am making one now--and we are constantly inhibited by
false shame from real communication. We are afraid to be serious with
each other, afraid of beauty, of the universal, when we see it. On this
point I will tell a little story from Mr. Kirk's _Study of Silent
Minds_. At a concert behind the front, an audience of soldiers had
listened to the ordinary items, a performance, as Mr. Kirk says, 'clean,
bright, and amusing', which means of course silly and ugly. Then the
orchestra played the introduction to the _Keys of Heaven_, and a gunner
remarked--'Sounds like a bloody hymn.' That was his fear of beauty, his
false shame. But when the _Keys of Heaven_ was ended, the whole
audience, including the gunner, gave a sigh of content; and after that
they went to hear it time after time. Well, the beauty of that song, and
of all art, is the 'Key of Heaven' itself. For Heaven is a state of
being of which we all dream, however dully, in which all have the power
of communication with each other; in which all are aware of the
universal, possessed by it and a part of it, all members of one body,
all notes in one tune, and therefore all the more intensely themselves,
for a note is itself, finds itself, only in a tune; otherwise it is mere
nonsense.
Of course if you are to believe this, you must believe in the existence
of a universal, independent of yourself, yet also in you and in all men.
You must believe that beauty exists as a virtue, a quality, a relation
of things, and that it is possible for you also to produce that virtue,
to live in that relation. But no one can prove that to you. The only way
to believe it is to see beauty with intensity and to make the effort of
communication in some form or other.
Tolstoy believes that the very word beauty is a useless one because, he
says, all efforts to define beauty are vain. But that is true of the
word life, yet we have to use the word because life exists. And all
explanations of art which refuse to believe in beauty as a reality
independent of us, yet one of which we may become a part, do fall into
incredible nonsense. We are told that art is play; the only answer to
which is that it isn't. Others say that it is an expression of the
sexual instinct, which has forgotten itself. They discover that in some
savage tribe the male beats a tom-tom to attract the female; and they
conclude that Beethoven's Choral Symphony is only a more elaborate
tom-tom beaten to attract a more sophisticated female. But again the
only answer is that it isn't; and that if all our ancestors were, not
Whistler's dreamers apart, but beaters of tom-toms to attract females,
then there was something in the sound of the tom-tom that made them
forget the female. The reality of art is to be found not in its origins
but in what it is trying to be; and what it is trying to be is always a
communication between mind and mind; what we aim at in art is a
fellowship not for purposes of use but for its own sake, the fellowship
we feel when we are all together singing a great tune.
But now, since we have a hundred foolish ideas about art, its nature and
value, it is of the greatest importance that we should attain to a right
idea of it, not only as a matter of theory to be discussed, but as a
religion to be practised. And, if we can grasp this right idea of it, we
shall not think of art as consisting merely of the fine arts, painting,
poetry, music, sculpture. We shall see that it is possible for men to be
artists, to exercise this great activity of communication, in the work
by which they earn their living, and that a happy society is one in
which all men do so exercise it. We are very far from that happiness
now, and that is why Ruskin and Morris became almost desperate rebels
against our present society. What they said about art and its nature is
still the best that has been said about it, far nearer to philosophic
truth than all that the professed philosophers have said, and of the
utmost moment to us now. For if we could believe them we should change
most of our values; we should see that the ordinary man, now being
deprived of all the joy of art in his work, is living a mutilated life;
we should place art among the rights of man. Whereas Rousseau said--All
men are born free and everywhere they are in chains--we should say--All
men are born artists and everywhere they are drudges. With our curious
English originality, which hits on so many momentous truths and then
makes no use of them, it is we who have found the greatest truth about
art, but neither we nor any other people is at present making much use
of it. Because we lack art, lack the power of communication, we lack
fellowship; and as Morris said--Fellowship is life and the lack of it is
death.
FOR REFERENCE
W. Morris, _Hopes and Fears for Art_.
XI
A GENERATION OF MUSIC
DR. ERNEST WALKER
The general subject of this course is European Thought; and, to some,
music may perhaps seem in this connexion rather like an intruder.
Indeed, if the musician is, in William Morris's phrase, 'the idle singer
of an empty day', if his business is to administer alternate stimulants
and soporifics to the nerves or, at best, the surface emotions, or to
serve in Cinderella-like fashion any passing, shallow needs of either
the individual or the crowd, then, obviously, he has no place worth
self-respecting mention in the world as it exists for philosophy. But
widespread as some such conception of the function of music is, I hope
you will agree with me in throwing it aside as, at any rate for our
present purpose, no more worth the trouble of even approximately patient
argument than that other less general but more objurgated conception of
musical composition as something like a mechanically calculated spinning
of bloodless formulae. By the conditions of its being, music has to
express itself through non-intellectual channels, but may we not say
that its essence is intellectual, that it is, in Combarieu's phrase, the
art of thinking in sound--thinking in as precise a sense as the word can
bear? It does not express itself verbally: it is self-dependent, with a
language available only for the expression of its own ideas and not even
indirectly translatable by nature into a verbal medium. Yet it is
thought none the less; perhaps all the more. Words, we have often been
told, serve for the concealment of thought; but the language of music is
more subtle, more comprehensive. It has been said that where words end,
music begins; and anyhow, for musicians, there stands on record the
serenely proud claim of one of themselves. 'Only art and knowledge',
said Beethoven, 'raise man to the divine; and music is a higher
revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy.'
But I must not allow this little preliminary apology to stray into the
field of abstract aesthetics. The subject proposed to me, the
correlation of the progress of specifically musical thought during the
last generation with the progress of European thought in general, is so
extensive that I cannot within the necessary limits attempt to deal with
more than some of the most salient features, and even those I shall have
to treat in very broad outlines, with a certain disregard of detail and
nicely balancing qualifications. I shall only attempt to put before you
what seem to me the most prominent considerations, and to throw out
suggestions which I hope you may perhaps, if sufficiently interested,
develop at leisure for yourselves.
In several ways the correlation of the musician with the non-musical
world is now more intimate and conscious than ever before. Forty or
fifty years ago--in spite of brilliant individual exceptions--musicians
were, in the main, self-centred craftsmen; they were inclined to drift
into a backwater, away from the chief currents of the intellectual, or
often indeed of the general artistic life of their day, and they seem on
the whole to have been content to have it so. In England we were
somewhat behindhand, no doubt, in our participation in the gradual but
steady change. But men like Parry and Stanford brought their profession
into close touch with the general culture of their contemporaries, and
made the universities and music understand each other; Grove, the first
director of the Royal College, himself a man whose professional career
(not to mention his amateur interests) had ended in music after ranging
through civil engineering, business organization, biblical archaeology,
and the editorship of a great literary magazine, preached with
infectious enthusiasm the new doctrine of the larger outlook; and for
the last thirty years, even if our practice may have occasionally seemed
somewhat to lag behind, at any rate our theory has not looked back.
Musicians have been granted their claim to be judged by the same
intellectual and moral standards as other reasonable people; it is a
modest claim, but, especially in England, it has had to be fought for.
And the entry on this wider heritage, which English musicians, apart
from an exception or two such as Pierson and Bennett, won for the first
time a generation ago, has had in every country a definite influence on
composition, especially (as is only natural) on the composer's attitude
towards the musical setting of literature. I should be far from saying
that any modern is a greater song-writer than Schubert; but it is
obvious that the followers of Wolf and Duparc and Moussorgsky are aiming
at something different. They may not express the general mood of the
poem more faithfully, but they certainly attach more importance to its
lyrical structure and to flexibly expressive diction: they accept the
poet as an equal colleague. The serious song-writer can hardly any
longer, like Schumann in his setting of Heine's 'Das ist ein Flöten und
Geigen', afford to stultify great poetry by quoting from memory and
getting the adjectives deplorably wrong. Nor can he, like Beethoven in
'Adelaide' and the 'Entfernte Geliebte' cycle, let himself weave musical
structures many sizes too large for the proper structure of the words,
which have consequently to be repeated over and over again with very
little regard for poetical or even common sense. Schumann and Beethoven,
especially the former, were culturally very far from narrow-minded men;
but there was not in their days any general cultural pressure
sufficiently strong to influence them as composers. Now, the pressure is
so strong that few can resist. Most composers have now fully learned
their lesson of a fitting politeness towards their
poet-colleagues--learned it in the main, so far as not intuitively, from
the high examples set by Wolf and the modern French school--and have,
moreover, come to recognize the duty of setting such words as may be fit
not only to be sung but to be read, a duty shockingly neglected by many
of the greatest geniuses in musical history.
And the cultural pressure has gone farther than this. Not only has the
increasing complexity of life broadened the musician's personal outlook,
professional or unprofessional: it has also modified, whether for better
or for worse, the outlook of the music itself. We may conveniently
divide all music into two great classes: 'absolute' music, in which the
composer appeals to the listener through the direct medium of the pure
sound and that alone; and 'applied' music, in which the appeal is more
or less conditioned by words, either explicit or implicit by
association, or by bodily movement of some kind, dramatic or not, or by
any other non-musical factor that affects the nature of the composer's
thought and the method of its presentation. Up to the present
generation, instrumental music, unconnected with the stage, has been
virtually identifiable with absolute music; there are a handful of
exceptions--sporadic pieces, usually though not invariably thrown off in
composers' relatively easy-going moods, and an isolated figure or two of
serious revolt, like Berlioz and Liszt--but they only serve to prove
the rule. Now, this identification is far from holding good. More
consciously than ever before, instrumental music is straining beyond its
own special domain and asking for external spurs to creative activity.
And it asks in various quarters. It may ask merely the hint of
particular emotional moods conditioned by special circumstances; or it
may vie with the poet and the novelist in analysis of character. The
psychology, again, may pass into the illustration of incident, whether
partially realistic or purely imaginative, or into the illustration of
philosophical tenets, as in Strauss's version of Nietzsche's doctrines
in his _Also sprach Zarathustra_ or Scriabin's of theosophy in his
_Prometheus_. Or the composer may go directly to painting, whether
actual as in Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem on Böcklin's picture of 'The
island of the dead', or visionary as in Debussy's 'La cathédrale
engloutie'. There is indeed no end to such instances.
All this development of instrumental music into territories more or less
adjacent makes a very imposing show; and it is so markedly a product of
the last generation that we easily over-estimate the novelty of its
essential results. As I have said, instrumental music is more and more
asking for external spurs to creative activity; but this does not mean
that music as a whole is, so to speak, breaking loose from its moorings
and adventurously voyaging on to uncharted seas. What it means is,
simply, that, under the stress of modern culture, the barriers between
vocal and instrumental, dramatic and non-dramatic, music have been to a
great extent abolished.
We may consider music as normally involving three persons: the composer,
the performer, and the listener. Until the present generation, the role
of the listener was normally quite passive. All that he had to do was to
keep his ears open to the music, and further, when required, his ears
open to words and his eyes to dramatic presentation. The composer and
the performers did everything for him. But now they do not. The modern
composer urges that, just as vocal music demands from the listener a
separate knowledge of the words, so instrumental music may demand, as a
condition of full understanding, a separate knowledge of some verbally
expressible signification. The parallel no doubt holds well enough even
if we answer, as we certainly may, that in much vocal music the words
are so unimportant that it really does not musically matter if they are
unintelligible or inaudible. But this latter-day demand on the listener
is considerable. The listener to Strauss's _Don Quixote_, for example,
must, in order to appreciate in full measure any section of this long
work, have a fairly close acquaintance with Cervantes' book--whether
derived from an analytical programme or from personal reading: there are
neither words nor acting to give a clue, nor does the printed music
itself give the slightest assistance, except in so far that a couple of
themes are labelled with the names of the 'Knight of the sorrowful
countenance' himself and Sancho Panza. Sometimes, no doubt, a composer
helps at any rate the purchaser of his music more; but to the listener
he gives nothing, and leaves his thought, as embodied in the mere title,
to be reached as best it may. The modern composer makes these demands on
the listener continually; and he does so simply because the sphere of
the music-lover's imaginativeness and general culture has become so
greatly enlarged that he thinks he can fairly afford to take the risk.