of sincerity: among the genuine conservatives also we can find, I think,
signs of the correlation of musical with religious development. We have
had, during the last generation, many works that are in the legitimate
line of descent from the great classical settings of ritual words or (as
with the Passions and Cantatas of Bach) words that are intended anyhow
to appeal not as literature but as dogma. When Elgar prints on the
title-pages of his oratorios the letters A.M.D.G.--_ad majorem Dei
gloriam_--the personal note is, in these days, obvious. His own libretti
to _The Apostles_ and its sequel _The Kingdom_ (and to the further
sequels which had been sketched out twelve years ago, though none has as
yet seen the light) resemble those of the older type of oratorio in so
far as they include narrative and dramatic incident and religious
moralizing; but there is not a trace of the old lethargic taking things
for granted, it is all a ringing sacramental challenge to the individual
soul. Elgar's work is indeed the typical musical expression of recent
Roman Catholic developments; but there are others also. There was
Perosi, the Benedictine priest, whose oratorios, tentative, childishly
sincere mixtures of Palestrina and Wagner, were forced upon Europe in
the late 'nineties with the full driving power of his Church, and who,
when his musical insufficiency became palpable, was dropped in favour of
Elgar himself, whose sudden rise into deserved fame coincides in time.
There was again the allocution of Pius X, known as the _Motu proprio_,
which sought to reform ecclesiastical music and has, however fruitless
it may have been elsewhere, made the services in Westminster Cathedral,
under Dr. Terry's direction, a Mecca for musicians of all faiths who are
interested in the great sixteenth-century masterpieces. There are also
the aristocratically Catholic composers of latter-day France, centring
round Vincent d'Indy and the _Schola Cantorum_ and looking back for
inspiration to César Franck. And again, in the English communion, there
is the marked High-Church movement for the encouragement of dignified
music, a movement that has had great influence in the purification of
popular taste. And the pivot round which all this turns is the dogmatic
faith that definitely Christian expression in music is the property,
the exclusive property, of those who by temperament and conviction are
Christians. The attitude, like the conditions which have brought it
about, is, I think, new: but some of its adherents go surely too far
when they urge that those whose minds work otherwise cannot really
appreciate this music at its due worth. César Franck, that simple-minded
childlike genius, once pronounced Kant's _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_
'very amusing'--a surely unique criticism--simply, it would seem,
because it was eccentric enough not to take Catholicism as a primary
postulate: I do not myself happen to have any information about Kant's
musicianship--perhaps, like too many great thinkers, he knew little
about music and cared less--but I think we may venture to say, in the
abstract, that his philosophy would have made him fairer to Franck than
Franck was to him.
And thus perhaps we may conclude that recent musical development has
kept pace with religious development in concentrating more and more on
individual sincerity, whether on the one side or the other, and
abandoning the old easy-going haphazard routine. But, in reaction from
the extreme right and the extreme left of the movement, we have also the
sincere dislikers of stark thinking, whom their opponents call by
dignified names of abuse, such as pragmatists or undenominationalists:
and here again music keeps pace with religion. It is not the old routine
again (though perhaps in practice it may at times come rather perilously
near it); it is the more or less conscious adoption of a compromise. We
can see its musical working best of all in the recent history of church
music in England; it is true that the great mass of the younger
musicians, here as in all other countries, stand outside these
developments, and look both for ideals and practice elsewhere, but the
developments have none the less been very significant. There have been
three stages. A couple of generations ago there was no conflict and no
call for compromise. The ecclesiastical musician of the time was
expected, whether as composer, as organist, or as administrator, to do
his best according to his lights: it was his accepted business, as
presumably knowing more about the matter than the artistic laity, to
lead their taste, not to follow. Then came the reign of men like Dykes
and Stainer and Gounod, whose normal attitude involved the sacrifice by
the musician of some of his musicianship in the supposed interests of
religion. The supposed interests, I say; for the whole point of the
third stage of development, the conflict in which English church music
is now involved, is the denial by one of the opposing parties that the
interests of religion are in any way served by such a sacrifice. It is a
very keen conflict, in which the sympathies of the musician _qua_
musician naturally lean towards those who uphold the inalienable dignity
of his art: and even if he feels that ecclesiastical music, _qua_
ecclesiastical, is outside his personal concern, influences from it are
bound to radiate into the secular departments. But what I would more
especially point out is that the religious and the musical developments
proceed side by side. Just as the stricter purists in the one field are,
in the other, generally inclined, even if themselves unmusical, to
uphold plain-song and the Elizabethans and only such modern work as is
inspired by something like a similar spirit, aloof and strong, so those
whose religious mentality is of a more pliable type are, if musically
indifferent, generally inclined to uphold the practical accommodation
afforded by the inclusion of at any rate a certain quantity of music
that is consciously adapted to the more immediately obvious emotions of
the average worshipper.
And, even if there is no question of a lowered artistic standard, we
see, I think, the same spirit of compromise, of ready acceptance of the
more immediately obvious as the average and proper norm for all people,
elsewhere on the boundaries of musical and religious life. It is so easy
to turn a blind eye to logic and minorities, or even to majorities if
they have little pressure, social or other, to back them up. To
illustrate from one or two English examples, the transformations of
cathedrals into secular concert-rooms are as open to blame from the one
side as are, from the other, such assumptions as that of the 'Union of
Graduates in Music' to take rank as a definitely ecclesiastical, indeed
an Anglican society. Again, it so happens that a somewhat exceptional
proportion of English musicians hold, or have held, as conditions of
livelihood, posts to which not all of them would have aspired had other
channels, open to their foreign fellow-artists, been open to them also;
and, as a necessary consequence, there is more probability here than
elsewhere of the musical profession presenting practical problems for
the intellectual conscience to solve. So far as the musician is a
personal non-conformer and also a teacher (even if not a church
organist), he is often compelled into a tacit agreement with the
Cowper-Temple clause, at the least: and so far as he is a convinced
conformer, he is often compelled to strain, far beyond the meaning of
the parable, the principle of letting the wheat and the tares grow
together. This is called a practical age: and the compromisers, in
religion and in religious music, are a powerful force. But I would
venture to think that the future lies, in the long run, in other hands
than theirs.
To the mediaeval musician, religion and science were the twin
foundations of his art. But while the influence of religious development
can without difficulty be traced in musical history, the influence of
scientific development is much more contestable. It may indeed, I
think, be said that post-mediaeval music has gone its own way without
considering science at all. Theorists of course there have been, and
still are, who try to discover scientific foundations for the art of
music as we moderns know it: they do their best to correlate
mathematical physics with practical composition. But during the past
generation these attempts, never very hopeful, have become much less so.
It is only too easy to play scientific havoc with the foundations of
modern music: but, arbitrary and scientifically indefensible though they
may be, they are our inheritance. Music has come to be what it is by
methods that will not bear accurate investigation: our tonal systems are
mere makeshifts, and no composer can completely express his thoughts in
our clumsy notation. I doubt if, throughout all this last generation
that has seen such overwhelming scientific advance, music has really
been scientifically affected (in the strict sense of the word) in the
slightest degree, if we exclude some interesting experiments in
sympathetic resonances, primary and secondary, at which some recent
composers for the piano have, at present rather tentatively, tried their
hands. And whole-tone and duodecuple scales and modern harmony in
general are taking us farther and farther away from those natural laws
of the vibrating string upon which arm-chair theorists have sought to
build a very top-heavy edifice. Of course, the vibrating string
ultimately gives--mostly out of tune--all the notes of the chromatic
scale, but composers employ them on principles the reverse of
mathematical.
The growth of music has not been scientific; but growth of some kind is
evident enough, though it is none too easy to define it at all
adequately. Some might say, with Romain Rolland in his _Musiciens
d'autrefois_, that 'the efforts of the centuries have not advanced us a
step nearer beauty since the days of St. Gregory and Palestrina'; but
this is surely a narrow outlook. Beauty combines the many with the one:
and plain-song and the _Missa Papae Marcelli_ show us only a few, a very
few, of its manifestations. But artistic progress is, anyhow, very
subtle and evasive; and musical progress, in particular, is hardly
correctable with any other. Above all, we must recollect that, to us
Europeans, music--which, in the only sense worth our present
consideration, is an exclusively European product--is incalculably the
youngest of the great arts; if we exclude some monophonic conceptions
that have still their value for us, it is barely five hundred years old
at the most.
During the last generation an advance in material complexity is obvious,
even though the complexity may often enough be one of accidentals rather
than essentials. An orchestral score of Wagner is relatively simple in
comparison with one of Delius or Ravel or Scriabin or Stravinsky or
Schönberg; and the demands on performers' technique and also on their
intelligence have steadily increased to heights altogether unknown
before. The composer has at his present disposal a vastly enlarged
medium; the possibilities of sound have developed incalculably more than
those of paint or stone or marble. Pheidias could, we may imagine, have
appreciated Rodin across a gulf of over two thousand years; but it is
difficult to see the points of contact, after little over three hundred
years, between Palestrina and any twentieth-century work that would
claim to be 'in the movement'. And it is not only in complexity that we
have advanced. We have extended the limits of musical style. We have
adopted in sober earnest methods forecasted at rare intervals in the
past by adventurous explorers, and employ musical notes not as elements
in any harmonic scheme but purely as points of colour, exactly as if
the definite notes were mere clangs of indefinite instruments like
cymbals or triangles. Wordless vocal tone, moreover, of several
different types, is pressed into the same service. Varied tonal and
harmonic colour, and structural freedom: those are the two battle-cries
of the young generation. Little by little the old tonalities, based as
they were on fixed centres, are slipping away; all the notes of the
chromatic scale are acquiring even status; the principles of structure
are newborn with every new work. And advance of this kind has been
extraordinarily accelerated during the last twenty years. At no time in
musical history have there been such express-speed modifications of
manner as those which divide, let us say, the latest piano pieces of
Brahms (1893) and the latest of Scriabin (1914). It is possible, indeed,
that our standard system of keyboard tuning may require modification in
the not very distant future. Once again, as three hundred years ago,
music seems to be in the throes of a new birth. On the former occasion,
the process of convalescence lasted rather more than a century, from
Monteverde through Carissimi and Schütz and Purcell to Bach; and it may
perhaps take as long now.
But it is plain enough that mere novelty does not involve progress; if
it were so, the music of the casually strumming baby would demand high
recognition. Nor is progress to be found in merely quantitative,
Brobdingnagian expansion. And when we have taken our stand on what seems
a sufficiently sound definition of musical progress in its material
aspect--the combination of novelty with expansion, the new thought with
its appropriately enlarged medium--we have yet to remember that many
very fine composers still can, and do, express their natural and full
selves in older idioms, and that progress of this kind, however
widespread it may become, is not necessarily advance in the scale of
values. There is, somewhere or other, a limit to the cubic capacity of
things: they cannot increase indefinitely in depth and breadth at once.
We may confidently hope that we have not yet musically come within
hailing distance of the limit: but nevertheless it is becoming more and
more difficult to see music steadily and see it whole, and it is useful
to take stock of our position. Our musical minds are very much broader
than they were: in that sense we can well, like the heroes of Homer,
boast that we are much better than our fathers. But are they also
deeper? We have gained access to many new rooms in the house of art,
rooms full of strange and beautiful things, for the knowledge of which
we must needs be profoundly and lastingly grateful; but some of the
rooms seem rather small and their windows do not seem to have been
opened very often, while others seem liable to be swept by hurricanes
which upset the furniture right and left. Veterans there are, musicians
not to be named except with high honour, who fall back for nutriment on
the great classics and pessimism; but our notions of beauty cannot stand
still, and in all ages of music one of the most vital tasks of criticism
has been to distinguish between the relatively non-beautiful which has
character and truth and its superficial imitation which has neither. All
musicians very well recollect their first bewilderment at what has
afterwards become as clear as daylight. But we must retain our standards
of judgement. We have no right to criticize without familiarity, but we
must remember that over-familiarity, mere dulled habitual acceptance,
means equal incapacity for criticism. If, after trying our utmost, we
still cannot see any sense in some of these modernist pages, there is no
reason why we should not say so; it is quite possible that there really
is no sense in them, and that the composer is perfectly aware of the
fact. Odd stories float about the artistic world. And if the anarchists
call us philistines and the philistines call us anarchists, it is fairly
likely that we are seeing things pretty much as they are.
Moreover, it is worth remembering that a good deal of what is loosely
called modernism is in reality very much the reverse. There is nothing
progressive in the confusion of processes with principles, in the
breathless disregard of the larger issues. Take the ideal of 'direct
expression of emotion', the attempt to give, as Pater said half a
century ago, 'the highest quality to our moments as they pass and simply
for those moments' sake'. Musically, it is a return to the childhood of
our race, to the natural savage. If a musical composition is to consist
of anything more than one isolated noise, it must inevitably have a form
of some kind, its component parts must look backward and forward. The
latter-day composers who speak of Form as a kind of bogey that they have
at last exorcized remind us of those latter-day thinkers who boast that
they have abolished metaphysics. We cannot leap off our shadows; if we
try, we shall only find that we are left with a residuum of bad
metaphysics or bad musical form--as thoroughly bad as the metaphysics
and the musical form that have resulted from the confusion of the one
with empty word-spinning and of the other with hide-bound pedantry.
Again, much of the modern rhythmical complexity strongly resembles, in
essence, the machine-made experiments of mediaeval times; and the
peculiarly fashionable trick of shifting identical chords up and down
the scale--the clothes'-peg conception of harmony, so to speak--is a
mere throw-back still farther, to Hucbald and the diaphony of a thousand
years ago. And the insistence, now so common, on the decorative side of
music, the conscious preference of the sensuous to the intellectual or
emotional elements, brings us back to our own infancy, with its
unreflecting delight in things that sparkle prettily or are soft to the
touch or sweet to the taste. It is a reaction from sentimentality, no
doubt, but is a reaction to an equal extreme, a perversion of the truth
that great art never wholly gives itself away. As Vincent d'Indy has
justly pointed out, the 'sensualist formula'--'all for and by
harmony'--is as much an aberration of good sense as the parallel formula
of the ultra-melodic schools of Rossini and Donizetti: in either case it
means the sacrifice of spaciousness to immediate effect, the supremacy
of sensation over the equilibrium of the heart and the intelligence. Not
of course that any music lacks the sensuous element; but it is a matter
of proportion. And very distinguished as are many of the modern
exponents of this side of things, history tells us, I think, that they
are working in a blind alley. They have their supporters, no doubt. M.
Jean-Aubry, in his very suggestive and valuable book on modern French
musicians, has used a phrase that seems to me worth remembering; he
speaks of the 'obsession of intellectual chastity' which, to his mind,
disfigures the work of César Franck and other great composers whom he
therefore rejects from his latter-day Pantheon. I am glad to think that
Franck would have gloried in this shame. He, and a very goodly company
with him, knew that music was, at its highest, something better than an
entertainment, however thrilling or however refined.
But, whatever critics and composers may feel about musical progress, it
is, as Wagner said, in the home of the amateur that music is really kept
alive, and the amateur's music depends very largely on the schools. A
generation ago music was certainly sociologically selfish. Musicians had
not realized that all classes of the community were open to the
influences of fine music, if only they had the opportunities for
knowing it. But since then there have been very great advances, both
quantitative and qualitative, in musical education. We have spread it
broadcast, in the increasing faith that appreciation depends, not on
technical knowledge or executive skill, but on the responsive
temperament and the will to understand. Familiarity, familiarity at home
if possible, is the key to this understanding; and in this connexion
there is, I believe, an enormous educational future before pianolas and
gramophones, if only the preparation of their records can be taken in
hand on artistic rather than narrowly commercial lines. And our
standards of judgement have risen: we do not worship quite so blindly
mere names, whether of the past or of the present, nor exalt the
performer quite so dizzily above what is performed. Nor do we quite so
glibly disguise our indifference to vital distinctions by talking about
differences of taste: we know that, however catholic we may rightly be
within the limits of the good, whether grave or gay, there comes sooner
or later, in our judgement of musical as of all other spiritual values,
a point where we must put our foot down. We are going on, and our
theories are sound enough: but the path of a democratically widened, and
rightly so widened, art is by no means easy. The principle of levelling
up slides so readily into the practice of levelling down: and the book
of music is closed once for all if we are to accept the plenary
inspiration of majorities.
But here in England the greatest danger to musical progress is, I
venture to think, the self-styled practical Englishman--fortified as he
is by the consciousness that, for at any rate a couple of centuries or
more, we have as a nation taken a low view of the arts and have been
rather proud of it than otherwise. It is so obvious that no profession
is economically more unsound than that of the serious composer: it is
not so obvious that we owe all the great things of the spirit by which
we chiefly live to those whom the world calls dreamers, among whom the
great musicians have had, and, I hope and believe, will always have, no
mean place. Against the 'practical Englishman', and all that his
attitude to music involves, we can all of us fight in our respective
spheres: and I would commend to you for useful weapons three very
different books by very different men--Sir Hubert Parry's great book on
_Style in Musical Art_, Mr. C.T. Smith's account of his artistic work in
an elementary school in the East End of London which he calls _The Music
of Life_, and a pamphlet _Starved Arts mean Low Pleasures_ recently
written by Mr. Bernard Shaw for the British Music Society. And one
particular line of indirect attack, easily open to all of us, is, I am
inclined to think, specially promising. In the third and fourth verses
of the thirty-fifth chapter of the book of Ecclesiasticus we shall find
these injunctions, which I translate as literally as Greek epigrams can
be translated: 'Do not hinder music: do not pour out chatter during any
artistic performance: and do not argue unseasonably.' In other words,
conversation, however valuable, prevents complete listening to music;
and music that is not meant to be listened to in its completeness is not
worth calling music, and had much better not be there at all. Musical
progress will be spiritually well on its way when we all realize this
axiomatic truth as firmly as this Hebrew sage of two thousand years and
more ago.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 71: _The Times_, April 17, 1919.]
XII
THE MODERN RENASCENCE
F. MELIAN STAWELL
To understand in any degree the modern outlook on life it seems
necessary to go back to the time of the French Revolution. For at that
stirring epoch there flamed up in the minds of enthusiasts an ideal of
man's life larger than had ever yet been known, and one that has
dominated us all ever since. If we give, as I think we should give, a
wide sense to the word 'Liberty' and make it mean all that stands for
self-development, then one may say that this ideal was fairly well
summed-up in the famous Revolutionary watchword, 'Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity'. It is impossible at any rate to read the idealists of that
time and its sequel--say from 1793 to 1848--whether in France, Germany,
England, or Italy, whether inside or outside the Revolutionary ranks,
without feeling their buoyant hope that a fresh era was opening in which
man, casting aside old shackles and prejudices, could advance at once
towards knowledge, joy, splendour, both for himself and all his fellows.
Shelley, perhaps, is most typical of what I mean. Hogg laughed at him
for his belief in the 'perfectibility' of the race, but Hogg knew the
belief was vital to the poet. To Shelley it was a damnable doctrine that
the many should ever be sacrificed to the few: yet neither was the
ultimate vision that inspired him the vision of the few being sacrificed
for the many. He was anything but an ascetic seeking martyrdom. The
martyrdom of his Prometheus is a prelude to the Unbinding when
happiness shall flood the world:--