There is nothing stranger in the world than music: it exists only as
sound, is born of silence and dies away into silence, issuing from
nothing and relapsing into nothing; it is our own creation, yet it is
foreign to ourselves; we draw it from out of the silent wood and the
silent metal, it lives in our own breath, yet it seems to come to us
from a distant land which we shall never see, and to tell us of things
we shall never know. It is for ever striving to tell us something, for
ever imploring us to listen and to understand; we listen, we strain, we
try to take in its vague meaning; it is telling us sweet and mighty
secrets, letting drop precious talismanic words; we guess, but do not
understand. And shall we never understand? May we never know wherefore
the joy, wherefore the sadness? Can we not subtilise our minds, go
forth with our heart and fancy as interpreters, and distinguish in
the wreathing melodies and entangled chords some words of superhuman
emotion, even as the men of other ages distinguished in the sighing oak
woods and the rustling reeds the words of the great gods of nature?
To us music is no longer what it was to our grandfathers, a mere
pleasing woof of meaningless pattern; we have left those times far
behind, times whose great masters were prophets uttering mere empty
sounds to their contemporaries; we have shaken off the dust of the
schools of counterpoint, we have thrown aside the mechanical teachings
of the art; for us music has become an audible, quivering fata morgana
of life, the embodiment of the intangible, the expression of the
inexplicable, the realisation of the impossible. And it has become a
riddle, a something we would fain understand but cannot, a spell of our
own devising which we cannot decipher; we sit listening to it as we sit
looking into the deep, dreamy eyes of an animal, full of some mute
language, which we vainly strive to comprehend.
The animal seems as though it could say much if only it could speak; so
also music would seem to contain far deeper meanings than any spoken
word, to be fraught with emotion deeper than we can feel: it could
confide so much if we could understand. Yet the animal is but an animal,
with some of our virtues and some of our vices, infinitely more ignorant
than we are; dumb, not because we cannot understand, but because he
cannot speak. And may it not be the same with music? May not music be
intellectually inscrutable because it is intellectually meaningless?
The idea is one from which we shrink; but are we right in shrinking from
it? Cannot music be noble in itself apart from any meaning it conveys?
Cannot we be satisfied with what it certainly is, without thinking of
what it may be? It would seem to be so; it is the spirit of our culture
to strain restlessly after the unknown, for ever to seek after the
hidden, to reject the visible and tangible. We yearn to penetrate
through the blue of the summer evening, to thread our way among the
sun-gilded clouds; yet the blue heaven, if we rise into it, is mere
tintless air; the clouds, if we can touch them, are mere dull vapour.
And so also we would fain seek a meaning in those fair sounds which are
fairer than any meaning they could contain; we would break down in rude
analysis the splendours of _Don Giovanni_ only to discover beneath them
the story of a punished Lovelace; we would tear to shreds a glorious
fugue of Bach for the satisfaction of hearing the Jews yelling for
Barabbas.
This is our tendency, this our way of enjoying the great art of other
days: to care not for itself, but for what it suggests, nay, most often
for the suggestion of the mere name of the work of art, for there is no
punished Lovelace in Mozart's melodies, no Barabbas in Bach's fugues,
there is nothing but beautiful forms made out of sounds. The old prosaic
masters of the past, who worked at a picture or a statue or an opera as
a cobbler works at a pair of shoes, never thought of suggesting anything
to us: they gave something substantial, something intrinsically
valuable, a well-shaped figure, a richly tinted canvas, a boldly
modulated piece of music; to produce that and no more had been their
object, it was all they could give, and their contemporaries were
satisfied with it. Their art was their trade, pursued conscientiously,
diligently, intelligently, sometimes with that superior degree of
intelligence we call genius, but it was their trade and no more. They
themselves were as prosaic as any artisan, and no more saw vague poetry
in their works, though these were the _Olympic Jove_, the _School of
Athens_, or the _Messiah_, than does the potter in his pot or the smith
in his iron; all they saw was that their works were beautiful, as the
potter sees that his pot is round and smooth, and the smith that his
blade is bright and sharp. For the rest they were terribly prosaic,
terribly given up to the mechanical interests of their art and the
material interests of their lives, as you may see them in Vasari, in
the lives of Handel, of Bach, of Haydn, of Mozart, of the last of true,
unpoetic musicians, Rossini, and as you would doubtless see the unknown
sculptors of antiquity if you could see them at all.
But the time came when the world, which had lived off prose most
heartily ever since the Middle Ages, grew sick of such coarse mental
food, and longed for unsubstantial poetic ambrosia; the fact is, it was
morally sick, and took its strong intellectual food in disgust, and
fancied and yearned for impossible things, as sick men do. And in its
loathing for the common, the simple, the healthy, the world took to
eating the intellectual opium of romanticism; it enjoyed and was plunged
for awhile in ineffable delights, such as only weakness can feel and
poison afford; the universe seemed to expand, the imagination to grow
colossal, the feelings to become supernaturally subtle; all limits were
removed, all impossibilities became possibilities; the fancy roamed over
endless and ever varying tracts, and soared up into the clouds of the
unintelligible, and dived into the bottomless abyss of chaos: all things
quivered with a strange new life, with a life in other lives, with an
unceasing, ever changing life; everything was not only itself but
something else: all was greater, higher, deeper, brighter, darker,
sweeter, bitterer, more ineffable than itself; it was a paradise
of Mahomet, of Buddha, of Dante; it was enjoyment keen, subtle,
intoxicating, which made the fancy swim, the senses ache, and the
soul faint. Then came the reaction, the inevitable after-effect of the
drug--depression, langour, palsy, convulsion.
About seventy years ago a great humourist, who frittered away a quaint
and fantastic genius in etching grimacing caricatures, and scribbling
gaunt ghost stories, the once popular, now almost forgotten, Hoffmann,
looked on at this crisis in musical history, at this first intoxication
of romanticism; sympathised with its poetry, its ludicrousness, and
its sadness; embodied them all in one grotesque, pathetic figure,
and for the first and last time in his life produced a masterpiece.
The masterpiece is his poor, half-mad musician, Johannes Kreisler,
"chapelmaster and cracked _musicus_ par excellence," as he signs his
letters, the artist of incomplete genius, of broken career, of poetic
dreams and crazy fancies, who used to go about dressed in a coat the
colour of C sharp minor, with an E major coloured collar. And of all
the glimpses Hoffmann has given us of Chapelmaster Kreisler, none is so
weirdly suggestive as that in which we see him improvising on the piano
at his club of friends. The friends had met one evening expressly to
hear Kreisler's extemporary performance, and he was just on the point of
sitting down to the instrument, when one of the company recollected that
a lever had on a previous occasion refused to do its duty. He took up a
light, and began his search for the refractory lever; when suddenly, as
he leaned over the interior of the piano a heavy pair of brass snuffers
crashed down from the candlestick on to the strings, of which half a
dozen instantly snapped. The company began to exclaim at this unlucky
accident, which would deprive them of the promised performance; but
Chapelmaster Kreisler bade them be of good cheer, for they should still
hear what was in his mind, as the bass strings remained intact.
Kreisler put on his little red skull cap and his Chinese
dressing-gown, and sat down to the piano, while a trusty friend
extinguished all the lights, so that the room remained in utter
darkness. Then, with the muffling pedal down, Kreisler struck the
full chord of A flat major, and spoke:
"What is it that murmurs so strangely, so sweetly, around me?
Invisible wings seem to be heaving up and down. I am swimming
in perfume laden air. But the perfume shines forth in flaming,
mysteriously linked circles. Lovely spirits are moving their golden
pinions in ineffably splendid sounds and harmonies."
_Chord of A flat minor (mezzo forte)._ "Ah, they are bearing me off
into the land of eternal desire, but even as they carry me, pain
awakes in my heart, and tries to escape, tearing my bosom with
violence."
_Chord of E major (third), forte._ "They have given me a splendid
crown, but that which sparkles and lightens in its diamonds are the
thousand tears which I shed; and in the gold shine the flames which
are devouring me. Valour and power, strength and faith, for him who
is called on to reign in the kingdom of spirits."
* * * * *
_B major (accentuato)._ "What a gay life in field and woodland in
the sweet springtide! All the flutes and pipes, which have lain
frozen to death in dusty corners throughout the winter, have now
awakened and remembered their best beloved melodies, which they
trill cheerfully like the birds in the air."
_B major with the diminished seventh (smanioso)._ "A warm west wind
comes sullenly complaining, like some mysterious secret, through
the wood, and wherever it brushes past, the fir trees murmur, the
beeches murmur to each other: 'Wherefore has our friend grown so
sad?'"
_E flat major (forte)._ "Follow him, follow him! His dress is green
like the dark wood--sweet sounds of horns are his sighing words.
Hearest him murmuring behind the bushes? Hearest thou the sound?
The sound of horns, full of delight and sadness? 'Tis he! up and
meet him."
_D third, fourth, sixth, chord (piano)._ "Life plays its mocking
game in all manner of fashions. Wherefore desire? Wherefore hope?
Wherefore demand?"
_C major (third) chord (fortissimo)._ "Let us rather dance over the
open graves in wild rejoicing. Let us shout for joy, those beneath
cannot hear it. Hurrah, hurrah! Dance and jollity; the devil is
riding in with drums and trumpets."
_C minor chords (ff. in rapid succession)._ "Knowest thou him not?
Knowest thou him not? See, he stretches forth his burning claw to my
heart! He masks himself in all sorts of absurd grimaces--as a free
huntsman, as a concert director, tapeworm doctor, _ricco mercante_;
he pitches snuffers into the strings to prevent my playing! Kreisler,
Kreisler, shake thyself up? Seest thou it hiding, the pale ghost
with the red burning eyes, stretching out its clawy, bony hand
from beneath its torn mantle--shaking the crown of straw on its
smooth bald skull? It is Madness! Johannes, be brave! Mad, mad,
witch-revelry of life, wherefore shakest thou me so in thy whirling
dance? Can I not escape? Is there no grain of dust in the universe on
which, diminished to a fly, I can save myself from thee, horrible
torturing phantom? Desist, Desist! I will behave. My manners shall be
the very best. _Hony soit qui mal y pense._ Only let me believe the
devil to be a _galantuomo_! I curse song and music; I lick thy feet
like the drunken Caliban; free me only from my torments! Ai! Ai!
abominable one! Thou hast trodden down all my flowers: not a blade of
grass still greens in the terrible desert--