restless anxiety to correlate itself with non-musical culture, reached
or perhaps even overstepped the limits of musical possibility. It is no
question of a composer's rights: he has a right to do anything he can,
provided that he preserves a due proportion between essentials and
unessentials. And judicious criticism will turn, if not a blind, at any
rate a short-sighted eye towards a great composer's occasional realistic
escapades, which, however irritating they may perhaps be to others, are
to him only a part of the general background of his texture; after all,
in their different media, Bach and most of the other giants have
occasionally allowed themselves similar little flings. It is a question
not of rights, but of powers. The poet and the painter and the novelist,
not to mention all the non-human agents in the universe, are bound to do
a good many things much better than the composer can; and even if he may
personally aspire to be a kind of spectator of all time and existence,
he has no means of making his listeners see eye to eye with himself. The
risk he runs may be too great. Realizing as we must that all this
ferment of suggestion-seeking has undoubtedly vivified and enriched
musical development in not a few aspects, we may nevertheless feel, and
feel profoundly, that there is a cardinal weakness inherent in it. A
composer may so easily be tempted to forget that it is after all by his
music, and by his music alone, that he stands or falls. If he asks too
much extra-musical sympathy from the listener, he defeats his own end.
The listener will inevitably concentrate on the unessentials, and will
as likely as not get them quite wrong; he may indeed indulge the habit
of realistic suspicion to such an extent as to make him become
thoughtlessly unfair and credit the composer with sins of taste, whether
babyish or pathological, of which the objurgated culprit may be
altogether innocent. If a composer plays with fire, he is fairly sure to
burn some one's fingers, even if he successfully avoids burning his own.
And anyhow it is waste of time, and worse, for us to cudgel our brains
to fits of entirely unnecessary inventiveness when the composer has
left his music unlabelled. We sometimes hear of children being
encouraged to give verbal or dramatic expression of their own to
instrumental music; that is not education--very much the reverse. It is
merely the expense of spirit in a waste of fancifulness, the wilful
murder of all feeling for music as such.
The feeling for music as such, that is still the one thing needful. And
by this canon, so it seems to me, we must judge all these alarums and
excursions of modern composers. If we hold firmly by it, we shall not be
unduly worried when we learn that the music which seems so perfectly to
realize the composer's expressed meaning has been originally designed by
him quite otherwise--as has happened oftener than is generally known;
though this fact does not excuse wilful contradictions of a composer's
definite intentions, as in the vulgar perversion of Rimsky-Korsakoff's
_Scheherezade_ popularized by the latest fashionable toy, the Russian
Ballet, which would do more musically unexceptionable service were it to
confine itself to works specially designed for it, such as the
fascinating and finely-wrought scores of Stravinsky, or concert works
like Balakireff's _Thamar_, based on programmes that can be mimetically
reproduced without unfaithfulness. And anyhow, in the midst of all these
appeals to the eye or the literary memory or what not, we may call to
mind the simple truth that music is something to be heard with either
the inward or the outward ear, and if we are too much distracted
otherwise, our hearing sense suffers. We shall pay too high a price for
our latter-day correlation of music with literature and the other arts
if the music itself has to play the part of Cinderella. 'We do it wrong,
being so majestical.'
Again, we may endeavour to correlate recent musical development with
the development of the conceptions of nationality and race. With
nationality in the strictly political sense music has, indeed, nothing
to do: there is no inborn musical expression common to all the
inhabitants of Switzerland, or the United States, or the British Empire
(or indeed the British Islands). And if we abandon political nationality
entirely and think of national music solely in terms of race, we still
have to make very large deductions. Heredity counts, it would seem, for
far less than environment in musical development--especially so in these
days of free intercourse. Nevertheless, we may to some extent isolate
the racial element; and within the last generation increasingly vigorous
efforts have been made to do so--though they have perhaps neglected
sufficiently to observe that racial ancestry is often an extremely mixed
quantity.
To the musician, this insistence on race is in the main a quite modern
thing. It is true that, as the successive waves of Italian influence
flowed northward in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, they met in England, France, and Germany, and, at the end, in
Russia, native cross-currents; and there was plenty of controversy
between the opposing parties. But this controversy was mainly concerned
with matters of technique; whereas the whole force of the modern
movement consists in its reliance on the simple folk-music which is
supposed to be characteristic of the race as a whole, and about which
hardly any composers of the past consciously troubled themselves at all.
Haydn and Beethoven, no doubt, used folk-tunes in their own works to
some extent, but the former's adaptations from the uncultivated tunes of
his own Croatian people are polished nearly out of recognition, and when
the latter commandeers from Ireland or Russia or elsewhere, nothing but
pure Beethovenishness remains after his masterful hand has done its
will. We may say, indeed, that nationality, as such, was never in their
time a conscious factor in musical composition.
The modern movement seems to owe its origin to several non-musical
causes. For example, the spread of political democracy had no little
influence in arousing interest in the music specifically characteristic
of at any rate the non-urban sections of the newly enfranchised classes.
But, in the main, it was caused by the modern rise into something like
political prominence of the smaller nations, smaller either in size or
in historical importance. The events of 1848, for example, brought
Hungarian folk-music before the world; Bohemian claims against Austria
produced the work of Smetana and Dvo[vr]ák, largely based on the general
style of their own native melodies; the Irish Question made us know the
Irish songs; and the dominating races followed those leads, at any rate
in so far as to take interest in their own traditional music, and try to
evaluate its differentiating factors. Conscious connexion between
artistic composition and folk-music has varied very much: very strong in
Russia and other Slavonic countries, it has been very weak in Italy and
France; in Germany we find all stages between the work of Brahms, where
the folk-element is very notable, and of Wolf, where it is non-existent;
in our own islands it has been very weak, but is now becoming very
strong. But, whether this connexion has been conscious or not, still,
sooner or later, all the insisters on the importance of the element of
nationality have joined hands with the enthusiasts for the folk-music of
the people. In the work of preserving the knowledge of this folk-music
England has been one of the last of all countries: even the last edition
of Grove's _Dictionary_, our standard authority, gives many pages to
Scotland and Ireland and Wales, and smuggles English folk-music into an
appendix. Only indeed in the twentieth century has anything like an
adequate study of the varied treasures of English folk-music become
possible, and we have learned enough to realize that great folk-music is
no monopoly of the races that have been either politically or socially
decentralized.
This advance of the conception of racialism has widened and intensified
music in not a few ways. It has brought to our knowledge many splendid
melodies, infinitely varied in design and emotional range, and, at their
best, inspirations that the greatest composers would have been proud to
sign. And, mixed as are the feelings with which we must contemplate the
general course of our own musical history, we can anyhow boast of some
of the finest folk-tunes in existence in these relics of the old world
on its last western fringes, in Ireland and the Hebrides. We have come
to see that this great mass of traditional music--only in part, of
course, the outpouring of sheer genius, but at its worst sincere--is,
with its appeal alike to the child and the adult, either in years or in
musical culture, the most perfect educational weapon yet devised with
which to combat all the forces that make for musical degradation. And,
apart from all this half-unconsciously wrought music, we have been shown
the value of the bypaths in art, of the work of the great men of the
younger races like the Scandinavians and the Czechs and most of all the
Russians, who do not speak the older classical tongues but have, all the
same, abundance to say that is well worth the whole world's hearing. It
is to our immense gain that we have now come, far more than ever before,
to realize that in the house of music there are many mansions. And, once
again, we have been taught the duty of being fair to the men of our own
blood, past and present. Particularly in our own artistic history there
has been visible a strongly marked tendency, such as no other nation
has shown in equal measure, to neglect and depreciate native work in
comparison with foreign, even when the latter might perhaps be worse.
But I think we may say, without self-laudation, that British composition
is now worth some considerable attention from ourselves and others; it
was, not unnaturally, wellnigh forgotten during its sleep from the death
of Purcell till the rise of Parry--a fairly sound sleep, during which it
occasionally half-opened its eyes for a moment or two--but it is wide
awake now. We are still slow to learn the lesson; but we have come to
realize, at any rate theoretically, the duty of doing what we can, in
the spirit not of favouritism but of justice and knowledge, to disprove
the proverb that a prophet (and an artist also) has no honour in his own
country and in his father's house.
So much to the good. But to-day, more than ever before, many voices are
urging us to go farther--and, I think, to fare worse. Artistic racialism
has always been spontaneous, so far as the art is great. No composer who
is worth anything can be dragooned into being patriotic: he will go his
own way. Some are attracted more than others by the general types of
phrase or the general emotional moods exemplified in the folk-music of
their own race; but that is a matter for neither credit nor discredit.
Individuality includes race as the greater includes the less. The only
vital consideration is the value of the output in the general terms of
all races; and indeed all great folk-music, like any other kind, speaks,
for those who have ears to hear, a world-language and not a dialect. And
there is still more at stake in this issue. Those who, as I do, hold
that the best chance for the political future of the world lies in the
weakening of national and racial as well as class consciousness, must
needs regard very suspiciously any of these modern attempts to force
music into channels which are deliberately designed for it by
non-musical considerations: the fettering, by set purpose, of art is a
very considerable step towards the fettering of life itself. England may
sometimes have failed in kindness to her own artistic children, living
and dead; but at any rate we have been free from the curse of a narrow
jealousy and have steadfastly held to the proud faith of the open door
and the open mind. The ideal--so violently dinned into our ears
nowadays--of a national school of composers may very easily mean a
wilful narrowing of our artistic heritage. If an English composer with
nothing to say for himself imitates Brahms or Debussy, it is obviously
regrettable; but he will not mend matters by imitating Purcell. And,
after all, the musician who (save occasionally when seeking texts for
his own individual discourses) borrows his material from his native
folk-music stamps himself, just as much as if he borrowed from any other
quarter, as a common plagiarist incapable of inventing material of his
own. If we may adapt for the purpose Johnson's famous aphorism about
patriotism and scoundrels, we may say that racial parochialism is the
last refuge of composers who cannot compose. Let us assert once more the
supreme beauty of folk-music at its best; but it is often childish, and,
anyhow, childish or not, it is after all the work of children. And any
of the world's activities would come to a strange pass if children--or
any races or classes which, through lost opportunities or the oppression
of others, are still virtually children--were to dictate principles of
intolerance to those who, by no merit of their own but as a plain matter
of fact, can possess the wider vision. Let a composer steep himself as
much as he can in his native folk-music, as in all other great music,
and then write in sincerity whatever is in his own marrow; but anything
approximately like a chauvinistic attitude towards music, as towards
any other of the things of the spirit, means either insensibility to
spiritual ideals or unfaithfulness to them. Let me take an analogy. I
have always felt that a philosophical and historical study of the idea
of honour would throw more light than anything else on many great
problems, notably the problem of war, and that in this investigation the
conception of the duel would have a very prominent place. May we not say
that, just as the individual honour of each of us, unless we are members
of the self-styled upper classes of a few countries, is now supposed to
be able to take care of itself, so the blood in a composer's veins will,
if his music is worth anything, be able to take care of itself also?
Neither honour nor artistic personality is affectable by external
considerations which are on a different plane of value. And music indeed
is the most specifically international, or supernational, of all the
arts; it has not, like literature, any barriers of language, nor, like
painting or sculpture or architecture, any local habitation. Musical
separatism is not a natural quality; it needs careful and continuous
fostering. And I know from personal experience that, all through the
war, there was no difficulty at all in carrying on concerts in the
programmes of which works by living German composers, and songs in the
German language, were included in their due proportions just as before.
Another great factor in modern European thought with which I would
attempt to correlate music is the factor of religion. No one will deny
that the last generation has seen profoundly important changes in
religious thought: whatever may have been the eddies and backwaters, the
main stream has run, and still runs, like a cataract. These changes may
be very differently judged by different types of men, all of them
equally firm believers in the supremacy of spiritual ideals: some may
definitely regret, some may, with the help of such conceptions as that
of progressive revelation, steer a middle course, some (among whom I
would number myself) may definitely welcome. But in whatever light we
may regard these radical refusals of the old allegiances, we shall
naturally expect to find their influence in music, which has had in many
ways so intimate a connexion with religion. Indeed, the conception of
music as in some special way the handmaid of religion dies very hard. It
is still possible, in April 1919, for distinguished musicians, when
appealing for funds for the foundation of a professorship of
ecclesiastical music, to put their names to the statement that 'the
church will always be the chief home and school of music for the
people'[71]: and this when the facts about attendances at places of
worship have long been familiar. We must rate the influence of church
music more modestly; it has a great influence in its own sphere, but its
sphere is only one among many.
We may, I think, envisage this religious development on its practical
side as a process of differentiation by which the sincere standers in
the old and the middle and the new paths have little by little drawn
apart intellectually--but not, in societies that are happily able to
take broad views of human nature, otherwise than intellectually--not
only from each other but still more from those who, whatever their
ostensible labels, are in reality followers of Gallio and routine. And
something like the same process is observable in the religious music of
the past generation. Many of its old conventions have silently dropped
away, unregarded and unregretted: whatever the outlooks, and they are
many and various, they are more clear-sighted, more sincere. Here in
England we have somewhat lagged behind: we have had, not perhaps
altogether fairly but indubitably, a reputation for national hypocrisy
to sustain, and our religious music has only with difficulty shaken
itself loose. Not very long ago, Saint-Saëns's _Samson and Delilah_, now
one of the most popular of operas, could only be performed as an
oratorio: it dealt with biblical incidents and characters, therefore it
was religious music, therefore it could not be given stage presentation.
Of course this kind of attitude is never logical: for a long time we
closed Covent Garden to Strauss's _Salome_ for the same reason, but no
one, so far as I know, ever proposed to endow it with a religious halo.
Now, when Sunday secular music is everywhere, its origins seem lost in
antiquity; but the chamber-music concerts at South Place in London and
Balliol College in Oxford, which are, I think I am right in saying, the
twin pioneers, are both little over thirty years old. In most other
countries, however, music has suffered far fewer checks of this kind;
and it is of more importance to correlate musical and religious
development on more general lines. Particularly interesting, I think, is
the history of the decline of the oratorio, which I should myself be
inclined to date from the production of the German Requiem of Brahms
about half a century ago, though the real impetus has become apparent
only during the last generation.
Brahms's Requiem was indeed something of a portent: it was a definite
herald of revolt. The mere title, 'A German Requiem', involving the
commandeering of the name hitherto associated exclusively with the
ritual of the Roman Church and the practice of prayers for the dead, and
its adaptation to entirely different words, was in itself of the utmost
significance; and the significance was enhanced by the character of the
words themselves. In the first place, they were self-selected on purely
personal lines; in the second place, they were, theologically, hardly so
much as Unitarian. Brahms claimed the right to express his own
individual view of the problem, and at a length which involved the
corollary that the problem was regarded in its completeness. The 'German
Requiem' cannot be considered, as an anthem might be, as an expression
of a mere portion of a complete conception of the particular religious
problem: in an organic work of this length, what it does not assert it
implicitly denies or at any rate disregards. And this was at once
recognized, both by Brahms's opponents and by himself: he categorically
refused to add any dogmatically Christian element to his scheme.
Similarly with his _Ernste Gesänge_, written some thirty years later, at
the end of his life: he balances the reflections on death taken from
Ecclesiastes and similar sources with the Pauline chapter on faith,
hope, and charity--not with any more definite consolation. And again,
with the choral works, the settings of Hölderlin's _Schicksalslied_,
Schiller's _Nänie_, Goethe's _Gesang der Parzen_ (the first-fruits of
the essentially modern spirit which has impelled so many composers to
choral settings of great poetry)--they deal with the ultimate things,
but the expression is never, so to speak, orthodox: it is imaginative,
sometimes perhaps ironical, but never anything but intensely
non-ecclesiastical.
Brahms's Requiem represents, as I have said, the beginning of the change
in the conception of concert-room religious music, of the abandonment of
the old type of oratorio in favour of something much more conscious and
individual; and in refusing to take things for granted, religious music
has been altogether in line with general religious development. The
change can perhaps be observed in English music more markedly than
elsewhere. Oratorio, in the sense in which we ordinarily use the term,
is to all intents and purposes an invention of the genius of Handel
reacting on his English environment: the form was of course older, but
he gave it a specific shape that set the fashion for future times. It
had its birth in a business speculation; it was a novelty designed to
occupy the Lenten season when the theatres were not available for opera.
Like the opera, it supplied narrative and incident and characterization
though without scenery or action, and it dealt with biblical history.
The history of the oratorio is the history of this loose compromise; it
has afforded an attractive flavour of the theatre even to those to whom
drama may in itself have seemed disreputable, and it has had the
advantage of possessing subjects which combined unquestioningly accepted
literal truth with unlimited possibilities for wholesale edification,
and at the same time made no intimately personal claims. The libretto of
Mendelssohn's _Elijah_ is perhaps at once the most familiar and the most
skilfully compiled example of the type; but it is now, so far as great
music is concerned, extinct. Here in England--where, for something like
a century and a half, the demand was so large that composers, when tired
of writing oratorios themselves, still went on producing them out of the
mangled fragments of other music--Parry's _Judith_ of 1888 is the last
of the old type from the pen of a great composer; and his subsequent
works show, in striking fashion, the direction of the newer paths. There
is no longer the assumption that everything in the Bible or the
Apocrypha is at one and the same time literally true and somehow or
other edifying. _Job_ and _King Saul_ are great literature and vivid
drama; they stand on their own merits. And the long succession of
smaller choral works, in which Parry mingled in curious but intensely
personal fusion his own earnest but somewhat pedestrian poetry with
fragments of the Old Testament prophets, represent a still further
abandonment of the old routine; they form a connected exposition of his
philosophy of life, on the whole theistic rather than specifically
Christian, and always transparently individual. Individual--that is the
real issue. According to their differing temperaments, different
composers may swing towards either the right or the left wing of thought
in these non-ecclesiastical expressions of ultimate things: Stanford may
join with Whitman or Robert Bridges, Vaughan-Williams with Whitman or
George Herbert, Frank Bridge with Thomas à Kempis, Walford Davies with a
mediaeval morality-play, Gustav Hoist with the Rig-Veda, Bantock with
Omar Khayyam. But the essentials, for any composer worth the name, are
that his theme shall have its birth in personal vision and shall appeal
to personal intelligence. The routine oratorio fulfilled neither of
these conditions; and it is dead beyond recall. It was a curious
illustration of foreign ignorance of British musical life that
Saint-Saëns, when asked to write a choral work for the Gloucester
Festival of 1913, should have imagined that he was meeting our national
tastes with an oratorio on the most prehistoric lines. However, the
unanimous chilliness with which _The Promised Land_ was received must
have effectually disillusioned him.