It is a strange and beautiful fact that whatsoever is touched by genius,
no matter how humble in itself, becomes precious and immortal. This
wrinkled old woman is merely one of thousands like herself, who have sat
and will sit by the great porcelain stove of the Dutch backshop, their
knitting or their bible on their knees. There is nothing to make her
recollected; yet we know her after two centuries, even as if we had
seen her alive, because, with a few blurred lines and shadows hastily
scratched on his etching plate, it pleased the whim of Master Rembrandt
to pourtray her. And this little commonplace Frankfurt shopkeeper's
maiden, in her stiff little cap and starched frill, who should remember
her? Yet she is familiar to us all, because she struck the boyish fancy
of Goethe. For even as the fact of its once having sparkled on the
waistcoat of Mozart makes us treasure up a tarnished brass button;
and as the notion of their having been planted by the hand of Michael
Angelo made us mourn the cutting down of a clump of sear and rusty
old cypresses, so also the fact of having been noticed, noted down by
genius, with brush, or pen, or chisel, makes into relics men and things
which would else have been forgotten; because the stroke of that pen,
or brush, or chisel removes them from the perishable world of reality
to the deathless world of fancy. Nay, even the beautiful things, the
perfect, physically or morally, of the world, those which called forth
admiration and love as long as they existed: Antinous and Monna Lisa,
Beatrice and Laura, would now be but a handful of nameless dust, were
it not for the artists and poets who have made them live again and
for ever: the deeds and sufferings of the Siegfrieds and Cids, of the
Desdemonas and Francescas, would have died away had they not been
filched out of the world of reality into the world of fiction. And
even as the perishable, the humble, the insignificant reality becomes
enduring and valuable by the touch of genius; so also in the very world
of fiction itself the intellectual creations of one man may be raised to
infinitely higher regions by the hand of another, may be transported
into the kingdom of another and nobler art, and there be seen more
universally and surrounded by a newly acquired radiance. In this manner
the tale of Romeo and Juliet, graciously and tenderly narrated by the
old Italian story-teller, was transfigured by Shakespeare and enshrined
in all the splendours of Elizabethan poetry; the figure of Psyche,
delicately graceful in the little romance of Apuleius, reappeared,
enlarged and glorified by the hand of Raphael, on the walls of the
Farnesina; and thus also our Cherubino, the fanciful and brilliant
creature of Beaumarchais, is known to most of us far less in his
original shape than in the vague form woven out of subtle melodies
to which Mozart has given the page's name. Mozart has, as it were,
taken away Cherubino from Beaumarchais; he has, for the world at
large, substituted for the page of the comedy the page of the opera.
Beaumarchais could give us clear-spoken words, dialogue and action, a
visible and tangible creature; and Mozart could give only a certain
arrangement of notes, a certain amount of rhythm and harmony, a vague,
speechless, shapeless thing; yet much more than the written words do
those notes represent to our fancy the strange and fascinating little
figure, the wayward, the amorous, the prankish, the incarnation of
childishness, of gallantry, of grace, of fun, and of mischief, the
archetype of pages--the page Cherubino. What could music do for
Cherubino? of what means could it dispose to reproduce this type, this
figure? and how did, how should music have disposed of those means?
About this fantastic and brilliant little jackanapes of a page centres a
curious question of artistic anomaly, of artistic power, and of artistic
duty.
The part of Cherubino: the waywardness, the love, the levity, the
audacity, the timidity, the maturity and immaturity of the page's
feelings, are all concentrated by the admirable ingenuity of the
Venetian D'Aponte, who arranged Beaumarchais's play for Mozart's music,
into one air, the air sung by Cherubino in that very equivocal interview
with the Countess and Susanna, so rudely to be broken by the thundering
rap of the Count at the door. The air is "Voi che sapete"--Cherubino's
description, half to the noble and sentimental lady, half to the
flippant and laughing waiting-maid, of the curious symptoms, the
mysterious hankerings, and attractions which the boy has of late begun
to experience--symptoms of which he is half ashamed, as calculated to
bring down laughter and boxes on the ear, and half proud, mischievously
conscious that they make him a personage for all this womankind. Every
one has heard "Voi che sapete" sung a hundred times by dozens of singers
in dozens of fashions, till it has become in the recollection a sort of
typical jumble of all these various readings; but we once chanced to
hear a reading of "Voi che sapete" which has remained strangely distinct
and separate in our remembrance; which made that performance of the
hackneyed piece remain isolated in our mind, almost as if the air
had never before or never since been heard by us. The scene of the
performance has remained in our memory as a whole, because the look,
the attitude, the face of the performer seemed to form a whole, a unity
of expression and character, with the inflexions of the voice and the
accentuation of the words. She was standing by the piano: a Spanish
Creole, but, instead of the precocious, overblown magnificence of
tropical natures, with a something almost childlike despite seriousness,
something inflexible, unexpanded, unripe about her; quite small,
slender, infinitely slight and delicate; standing perfectly straight
and motionless in her long, tight dress of ashy rose colour; her little
dark head with its tight coils of ebony hair perfectly erect; her great
dark violet-circled eyes, with their perfect ellipse of curved eyebrow
meeting curved eyelash, black and clear against the pale, ivory-tinted
cheek, looking straight before her; self-unconscious, concentrated,
earnest, dignified, with only a faint fluttering smile, to herself, not
to the audience, about the mouth. She sang the page's song in a strange
voice, sweet and crisp, like a Cremonese violin, with a bloom of youth,
scarcely mature yet perfect, like the honey dust of the vine-flower;
sang the piece with an unruffled serenity, with passion, no limpness or
languor, but passion restrained, or rather undeveloped; with at most a
scarcely perceptible hesitation and reticence of accent, as of budding
youthful emotion; her voice seeming in some unaccountable manner to move
in a higher, subtler stratum of atmosphere, as it dextrously marked,
rounded off, kissed away each delicate little phrase. When she had done,
she gave a slight bow with her proud little head, half modestly and half
contemptuously, as, with her rapid, quiet movement, she resumed her
seat; she probably felt that despite the applause, her performance
did not really please. No one criticised, for there was something
that forbade criticism in this solemn little creature; and every one
applauded, for every one felt that her singing had been admirable. But
there was no warmth of admiration, no complete satisfaction: she had
sung with wonderful delicacy and taste and feeling; her performance had
been exquisitely finished, perfect; but something familiar, something
essential had been missing. She had left out Cherubino: she had
completely forgotten and passed over the page.
How was it? How could it be that the something which we felt was the
nature of the page, the something which even the coarsest, poorest
performers had brought out in this piece, had completely disappeared in
this wonderfully perfect rendering by this subtle little singer? Perhaps
the rendering had been only materially perfect: perhaps it was merely
the exquisite tone of the voice, the wonderful neatness of execution
which had given it an appearance of completeness; perhaps the real
meaning of the music had escaped her; perhaps there was behind all this
perfection of execution only a stolid dulness of nature, to which the
genius of Mozart was not perceptible. None of all these possibilities
and probabilities: the chief characteristic of the performance was
exactly the sense of perfect musical intuition, of subtle appreciation
of every little intonation, the sense that this docile and exquisite
physical instrument was being played upon by a keen and unflinching
artistic intelligence. The more you thought over it, the more you
compared this performance with any other performance of the piece, the
more also did you feel convinced that this was the right, the only right
reading of the piece; that this strange, serious little dark creature
had given you the whole, the perfection of Mozart's conception; no,
there could be no doubt of it, this and this alone was Mozart's idea of
"Voi che sapete." Mozart's idea? the whole of Mozart's conception?
here, in this delicate, dignified, idyllic performance? The whole? Why
then, where, if this was the whole of Mozart's conception, where was
Cherubino, where was the page? Why, nowhere. Now that the song had been
presented to us in its untampered perfection, that the thought of
the composer was clear to us--now that we could begin to analyse the
difference between this performance and the performances of other
singers--we began to see, vaguely at first and not without doubts of our
powers of sight, but to see, and more and more distinctly the longer
we looked, that Cherubino was not in Mozart's work, but merely in
Beaumarchais. A very singular conclusion to arrive at, but one not to
be shirked: Cherubino had passed into the words of Mozart's Italian
libretto, he had passed into the dress, the face, the feature, the
action of the thousands of performers who had sung the "Marriage of
Figaro" on the stage; but he had not passed into Mozart's notes; and
because he had not entered into those notes, that subtle and serious
little Spaniard, who had seen and understood so well the meaning and
beauty of Mozart's music, had known nothing of Cherubino.
Now, after all this discussion respecting his presence and his absence,
let us stay awhile and examine into the being of this Cherubino, so
familiar and so immediately missed by us; let us look at the page, whom
the clever playwright D'Aponte transported, with extraordinary success,
out of the French comedy into the Italian opera text. Very familiar to
all of us, yet, like the things most familiar, rather vaguely; seen
often and in various lights, fluctuating consequently in our memory, as
distinguished from the distinct and steadfast image of things seen only
once and printed off at a stroke on to our mind. At the first glance,
when we see him sitting at the feet of the Countess, singing her his
love songs, he seems a delicate poetic exotic, whose presence takes us
quite aback in the midst of the rouged and pigtailed philosophy, the
stucco and tinsel sentimentality of the French eighteenth century. In
these rooms, all decorated by Boucher and Fragonard, in this society
redolent with the theories of Diderot and the jests of Voltaire, this
page, this boy who is almost a girl, with his ribbons and his ballads,
his blushes, his guitar, and his rapier, appears like a thing of
long past days, or of far distant countries; a belated brother of
Shakspeare's Cesario and Fletcher's Bellario, a straggler from the
Spain of Lope de Vega, who has followed M. Caron de Beaumarchais,
ex-watchmaker and ex-musicmaster to Mesdames the daughters of Louis
XV., from Madrid, and leaped suddenly on to the planks of the Comedie
Francaise ... a ghost of some mediaeval boy page, some little Jehan de
Saintre killed crusading with his lady's name on his lips. Or is not
Cherubino rather a solitary forerunner of romanticism, stumbled untimely
into this France of Marie Antoinette; some elder brother of Goethe's
Mignon ... nay, perhaps Mignon herself, disguised as or metamorphosed
into a boy.... But let us look well at him: let him finish his song and
raise his audacious eyes; let him rise and be pulled to and fro, bashful
with false bashfulness half covering his mischievous, monkish impudence,
while Susanna is mumming him up in petticoats and kerchiefs; let us look
at him again now, and we shall see that he is no Jehan de Saintre, no
male Mignon, no Viola in boy's clothes, no sweetly pure little romantic
figure, but an impertinent, precocious little Lovelace, a serio-comic
little jackanapes, sighing and weeping only to giggle and pirouette
on his heels the next moment. From the Countess he will run to the
gardener's daughter, from her to the waiting-maid, to the duenna, to all
womankind; he is a professed lady-killer and woman-teaser of thirteen.
There is indeed something graceful and romantic in the idea of this
pretty child consoling, with his poetical, absurd love, the poor,
neglected, ill-used lady. But then he has been smuggled in by that
dubious Abigail, Susanna; the sentimental, melancholy Countess is amused
by dressing him up in women's clothes; and when, in the midst of the
masquerade, the voice of the Count is heard without, the page is huddled
away into a closet, his presence is violently denied, and the Countess
admits her adored though fickle lord with a curious, conscious,
half-guilty embarrassment. We feel vaguely that Shakspeare would never
have introduced his boy Ganymede or his page Cesario into that
dressing-room of the Countess Almaviva; that the archly jesting Maria
would never have dreamed of amusing the Lady Olivia with such mummings;
we miss in this proudly sentimental lady, in this sly waiting-woman, in
this calf-loving dressed-up boy the frank and boisterous merriment of
Portia and Nerissa in their escapades and mystifications; there is in
all this too much locking of doors and drawing of curtains, too much
whispered giggling, too little audible laughter; there hangs an
indefinable sense of impropriety about the whole scene. No, no, this is
no delicate and gracious young creature of the stock of Elizabethan
pages, no sweet exotic in the France of 1780; this Cherubino is merely a
graceful, coquettish little Greuze figure, with an equivocal simplicity,
an ogling _naivete_, a smirking bashfulness, a hidden audacity of
corruption; a creature of Sterne or Marivaux, tricked out in imitation
Mediaeval garb, with the stolen conscious wink of the eye, the would-be
childlike smile, tinged with leer, of eighteenth century gallantry. He
is an impertinent, effeminate, fondled, cynical little jackanapes; the
youngest, childish, monkeyish example, at present merely comic and
contemptible, of the miserable type of young lovers given to France by
the eighteenth century; the _enfant du siecle_, externally a splendid,
brilliant, triumphant success, internally a miserable, broken, unmanned
failure; the child initiated into life by cynicism, the youth educated
to love by adultery; corrupt unripeness; the most miserable type of
demoralisation ever brought into literature, the type of Fortunio
and Perdican, and of their author Alfred de Musset; a type which
the Elizabethans, with their Claudios and Giovannis, could not have
conceived; which the Spaniards, with their Don Juans and Ludovic Enios,
would have despised, they who had brought on to the stage profligacy
which bearded death and hell, turning with contempt from profligacy
which could be chastised only with the birch. Cherubino is this: his
love is no poetic and silly passion for a woman much older than
himself, before whom he sinks on his knees as before a goddess; it
is the instinct of the lady-killer, the instinct of adventures, the
consciousness in this boy of thirteen that all womankind is his destined
prey, his game, his quarry. And womankind instinctively understands and
makes the Lovelace of thirteen its darling, its toy, its kitten, its pet
monkey, all whose grimacings and coaxings and impertinences may be
endured, enjoyed, encouraged. He is the graceful, brilliant, apish Ariel
or Puck of the society whose Mirandas and Titanias are Julie and Manon
Lescaut; he is the page of the French eighteenth century.
Such is, when we analyse him, the page Cherubino; looking at him
carelessly, with the carelessness of familiarity, these various
peculiarities escape our notice; they merge into each other and into the
whole figure. But although we do not perceive them consciously and in
detail, we take in, vaguely and unconsciously, their total effect: we do
not analyse Cherubino and classify his qualities, we merely take him in
as a general type. And it is this confused and familiar entity which we
call the page, and which we expect to have brought home to us as soon as
we hear the first notes, as we see the title of "Voi che sapete." It is
this entity, this character thus vaguely conceived, which forms for us
an essential part of Mozart's music; and whose absence from that music
made us feel as if, despite the greatest musical perfection, Mozart's
idea were not completely given to us. Yet, in reality, this psychological
combination called Cherubino does not exist in the work of Mozart. It
exists only by the side of it. We speak of the "Marriage of Figaro" as
Mozart's work; we are accustomed to think of the Countess, of Figaro,
of Susanna, of Cherubino as belonging to Mozart; but in reality only
one half of the thing we call the "Marriage of Figaro" belongs to
Mozart--that half which consists in melodies and harmonies; and as
it happens, it is not in that, but in the other half belonging to
Beaumarchais and D'Aponte, the half consisting of words and their
suggestions of character, of expression and of movement, that really
exists, either the Countess, or Figaro, or Susanna, or Cherubino. Those
notes, which alone are Mozart's and which are nothing more than notes,
have been heard by us in the mouths of many women dressed and acting as
Beaumarchais's characters; they have been heard by us associated to the
words of Beaumarchais; they have been heard delivered with the dramatic
inflections suggested not by themselves but by those words; and thus, by
mere force of association, of slovenly thought and active fancy, we are
accustomed to consider all these characters as existing in the music of
Mozart, as being part and parcel of Mozart's conception; and when we
are presented with those notes, which, to the musician Mozart, were
merely notes without those dramatic inflections suggested solely by
Beaumarchais's words, when we hear in "Voi che sapete" only Mozart's
half of the work, we are disappointed and indignant, and cry out that
the composer's idea has been imperfectly rendered.
Cherubino, we say, is not in Mozart's half of the work; he is in the
words, not in the music. Is this a fault or a merit? is it impotence
in the art or indifference in the artist? Could Mozart have given us
Cherubino? and if able, ought he to have given him? The question is
double; a question of artistic dynamics, and a question of artistic
ethics: the question what can art do; and the question what art ought
to do. The first has been answered by the scientific investigations
of our own scientific times; the second has been answered by the
artistic practice of the truly artistic days of music. The questions are
strangely linked together, and yet strangely separate; and woe betide us
if we receive the answer to the one question as the answer to the other;
if we let the knowledge of what things are serve us instead of the
instinct of what things should do; if we let scientific analysis step
into the place of ethical or aesthetical judgment; and if, in the domain
of art or of morals we think to substitute a system of alembics and
microscopes for that strange intangible mechanism which science tells us
does not exist, and which indeed science can never see or clutch, our
soul. For science has a singular contempt for all that is without its
domain; it seeks for truth, but when truth baffles and eludes it,
science will turn towards falsehood; it will deny what it cannot prove,
and call God himself a brain-phantom because he cannot be vivisected.
So, when logic, which can solve only logical propositions, remains
without explanation before the dicta of the moral and aesthetic parts of
us, it simply denies the existence of such dicta and replaces them by
its own formulae; if we ask for the aim of things and actions, it tells
us their origin; if we trustingly ask when we should admire beauty and
love virtue, it drops the rainbow into its crucible to discover its
chemical components, and dissects the brain of a saint to examine the
shape of its convolutions; it meets admiration and love with experiment
and analysis, and, where we are required to judge, tells us we can only
examine. Thus, as in ethics, so also in aesthetics, modern philosophy
has given us the means instead of the aim, the analysis instead of the
judgment; let us therefore ask it only how much of human character and
emotion music _can_ express; the question how much of it music _ought_
to express must be answered by something else: by that artistic instinct
whose composition and mechanism and origin scientific psychology may
perhaps some day explain, but whose unformulated, inarticulate,
half-unconscious dicta all the scientific and logical formulae in the
world can never replace. As yet, however, we have to deal only with the
question how much of human character and emotion music can express, and
by what means it does so; and here modern psychology, or rather the
genius of Herbert Spencer, is able to answer us. Why does dance music
cheer us, and military music inspirit us, and sacred music make us
solemn? A vague sense of the truth made aestheticians answer, for
well-nigh two centuries, "by the force of association." Dance music
cheers us because we are accustomed to hear it in connection with
laughing and quips and cranks; military music inspirits us because we
are accustomed to hear it in connection with martial movements and
martial sights; sacred music depresses us because we are accustomed to
hear it at moments when we are contemplating our weakness and mortality;
'tis a mere matter of association. To this easy-going way of disposing
of the problem there was an evident and irrefutable objection: but why
should we be accustomed to hear a given sort of music in connection with
these various conditions of mind? Why should dance music, and martial
music, and sacred music all have a perfectly distinct character, which
forbade, from the very first, their being exchangeable? If it is a
matter of association of ideas, tell us why such characters could have
been kept distinct before the association of ideas could have begun to
exist? To this objection there was no reply; the explanation of musical
expression by means of association of ideas seemed utterly hollow; yet
the confused idea of such an association persisted. For it was, after
all, the true explanation. If we ask modern psychology the reason of the
specific characters of the various sorts of music, we shall again be
answered: it is owing to the association of ideas. But the two answers,
though apparently identical, are in fact radically different. The habit
of association existed, according to the old theory, between various
mental conditions and various sorts of music, because the two were
usually found in connection; hence no explanation why, before habit had
created the association, there should have been any connection, and,
there being no connection, no explanation why the habit and consequently
the mental association should ever have been formed. According to the
modern theory, on the contrary, the habit of association is not between
the various mental conditions and the various styles of music; but
between specific mental conditions and specific sounds and movements,
which sounds and movements, being employed as the constituent elements
of music, give to the musical forms into which they have been
artistically arranged that inevitable suggestion of a given mental
condition which is due to memory, and become, by repetition during
thousands of years, an instinct ingrained in the race and inborn in the
individual, a recognition rapid and unconscious, that certain audible
movements are the inevitable concomitants of certain moral conditions.
The half-unconscious memory become part and parcel of the human mind,
that, just as certain mental conditions induce a movement in the muscles
which brings tears into the eye or a knot into the throat, so also
certain audible movements are due to the muscular tension resulting from
mental buoyancy, and certain others to the muscular relaxation due to
mental depression, this half-unconscious memory, this instinct, this
inevitable association of ideas, generated long before music existed
even in the most rudimentary condition, carried with the various
elements of pitch, movement, sonority, and proportion into the musical
forms constructed out of these elements, this unconscious association
of ideas, this integrated recollection of the inevitable connection
between certain sounds and certain passions is the one main cause and
explanation of the expressiveness of music. And when to it we have added
the conscious perception, due to actual comparison, of the resemblance
between certain modes of musical delivery and certain modes of ordinary
speaking accentuation, between certain musical movements and certain
movements of the body in gesticulation; when we have completed the
instinctive recognition of passion, which makes us cry or jump, we know
not why, by the rapidly reasoned recognition of resemblance between the
utterance of the art and the utterance of human life, which, when we
listen for instance to a recitative, makes us say, "This sentence is
absolutely correct in expression," or, "No human being ever said such
a thing in such a manner;" when we have the instinctive perception of
passion, and the conscious perception of imitation; and we have added to
these two the power of tone and harmony, neither of them connected in
any way with the expression of emotion, but both rendering us, by their
nervous stimulant, infinitely more sensitive to its expression; when we
have all this, we have all the elements which the musician can employ to
bring home to us a definite state of mind; all the mysterious unspoken,
unwritten words by means of which Mozart can describe to us what
Beaumarchais has described in clear, logical, spoken, written words--the
page Cherubino.
Now let us see how much of Cherubino can be shown us by these mere
musical means. Cherubino is childish, coquettish, sentimental, amorous,
timid, audacious, fickle; he is self-conscious and self-unconscious,
passionately troubled in mind, impudently cool in manner; he is brazen,
calm, shy, fluttered; all these things together. Sometimes in rapid
alternation, sometimes all together in the same moment; and in all this
he is perfectly consistent, he is always one and the same creature.
How does the playwright contrive to make us see all this? By means
of combinations of words expressing one or more of these various
characteristics, by subtle phrases woven out of different shades of
feeling, which glance in irridescent hues like a shot silk, which are
both one thing and another; by means also of various emotions cunningly
adapted to the exact situation, from the timid sentimentality before the
countess, down to the audacious love-making with the waiting-maid; by
means, in short, of a hundred tiny strokes, of words spoken by the page
and of the page, by means of dexterously combined views of the boy
himself, and of the reflection of the boy in the feelings of those who
surround him. Thus far the mere words in the book; but these words
in the book suggest a thousand little inflections of voice, looks,
gestures, movements, manners of standing and walking, flutter of lips
and sparkle of eyes, which exist clear though imaginary in the mind of
the reader, and become clearer, visible, audible in the concrete
representation of the actor.
Thus Cherubino comes to exist. A phantom of the fancy, a little figure
from out of the shadow land of imagination, but present to our mind as
is this floor upon which we tread, alive as is this pulse throbbing
within us. Ask the musician to give us all this with his mere pitch,
and rhythm and harmony and sonority; bid him describe all this in his
language. Alas! in the presence of such a piece of work the musician is
a mere dumb cripple, stammering unintelligible sounds, tottering through
abortive gestures, pointing we know not whither, asking we know not for
what. Passionate music? And is not Othello passionate? Coquettish music?
and is not Susanna coquettish? Tender music? and is not Orpheus tender?
Cool music? and is not Judas Maccabaeus cool? Impudent music? And is not
the snatch of dance tune of a Parisian grisette impudent? And which of
these sorts of music shall fit our Cherubino, be our page? Shall we
fuse, in wonderful nameless abomination of nonsense, all these different
styles, these different suggestions, or shall, as in a masquerade,
this dubious Cherubino never seen with his own face and habit, appear
successively in the musical trappings of Othello, of Orpheus, of
Susanna, of Judas Maccabaeus, and of the Grisette? Shall we, by means of
this fusion, or this succession of musical incongruities, have got one
inch nearer to Cherubino? Shall we, in listening to the mere wordless
combination of sounds, be able to say, as we should with the book or the
actors before us, this is Cherubino? What, then, can music give us, with
all its powers of suggestion and feeling, if it cannot give us this?
It can give us one thing, not another: it can give us emotion, but it
cannot give us the individual whom the emotion possesses. With its
determined relations between the audible movement and the psychical
movement, it can give us only musical gesture, but never musical
portrait; the gesture of composure or of violence, the solemn tread of
self-possessed melody, the scuffling of frantically rushing up and down,
of throbbing, quivering, gasping, passion-broken musical phrases; it can
give us the rhythm which prances and tosses in victory, and the rhythm
which droops, and languishes, and barely drags itself along for utter
despair. All this it can give us, even as the painter can give the
ecstatic bound-forwards of Signorelli's "Calling of the Blessed," or
the weary, dreary enfolding in gloomy thought of Michael Angelo's
"Jeremiah:" this much, which we can only call gesture, and which
expresses only one thing, a mood. Let the hopeful heroes of Signorelli,
stretching forth impetuous arms towards Paradise, only lose sight of the
stately viol-playing angels who guide them, let them suddenly see above
them the awful sword of the corsleted Angel of Judgment, and they will
sink, and grovel, and writhe and their now up-turned faces will be
draggled in the dust; let the trumpet of warfare and triumph shrill in
the ear of Michael Angelo's "Jeremiah," and the dreary dream will be
shaken off; he will leap up, and the compressed hand-gagged mouth will
open with the yell of battle; let only the emotion change, and the whole
gesture, the attitude, plastic or musical, must change also; the already
existing, finite, definite work will no longer suffice; we must have a
new picture, or statue, or piece of music. And in these inexplicit arts
of mere suggestion, we cannot say, as in the explicit art of poetry,
this grovelling wretch is a proud and hopeful spirit; this violent
soldier is a vague dreamer; this Othello, who springs on Desdemona
like a wild beast, loves her as tenderly as a mother does her child.
Unliterary art, plastic or musical, is inexorable: the man who grovels
is no proud man; the man who fells down to the right and left, is no
dreamer; the man whose whole soul is wrath and destruction, is no lover;
the mood is the mood; art can give only it; and the general character,
the connection between moods, the homogeneous something which pervades
every phase of passion, however various, escapes the powers of all save
the art which can speak and explain. How then obtain our Cherubino, our
shiftiest and most fickle of pages? How? Why, by selecting just one of
his very many moods, the one which is nearest allied to fickleness and
volubility; the mood which must most commonly be the underlying, the
connecting one, the mood into which all his swagger and sentiment sooner
or later resolve; the tone of voice into which his sobs will quickest be
lost, the attitude which will soonest replace the defiant strut; the
frame of mind which, though one and indivisible itself, is the nearest
to instability: levity.
Let Cherubino sing words of tenderness and passion, of audacity and
shyness, to only one sort of music, to light and careless music; let the
jackanapes be for ever before us, giggling and pirouetting in melody and
rhythm; it will not be Cherubino, the whole Cherubino; it will be only
a miserable fragmentary indication of him, but it will be the right
indication; the psychological powers of music do not go far, but thus
far they can go. Analysis of the nature of musical expression has shown
us how much it may accomplish; the choice of the artist alone can tell
us how much it should accomplish; the scientific investigation is at an
end, the artistic judgment must begin. Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, here are your means of musical expression, and here is the thing
to be expressed; on careful examination it appears distinctly that the
only way in which, with your melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, you
can give us, not a copy, but a faint indicative sketch, something
approaching the original as much as four lines traced in the alley sand
of your Schloss Mirabell Gardens at Salzburg resemble the general aspect
of the Mirabell Palace; that the only way in which you can give us such
a distantly approximative....
Signor Maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vice-Chapelmaster of His Most
Reverend Highness the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, has meanwhile sat
down at his table near his thin-legged spinet, with the bird-cage above
and the half-emptied beer-glass at his side; and his pen is going
scratch, scratch, scratch as loud as possible.
"The only way in which you can possibly give us such a distantly
approximative copy of the page Cherubino as shown" ... (Scratch,
scratch, scratch goes the pen on the rough music paper), "as shown in
the words of Beaumarchais and of your librettist D'Aponte, is to compose
music of the degree of levity required to express the temper
_jackanapes_."
The Chapelmaster Mozart's pen gives an additional triumphant creak as
its point bends in the final flourish of the word _finis_; Chapelmaster
Mozart looks up--
"What was that you were saying about jackanapes? Oh, yes, to be sure,
you were saying that literary folks who try to prescribe to musicians
are jackanapes, weren't you? Now, do me the favour, when you go out,
just take this to the theatre copyist; they are waiting in a hurry
for Cherubino's song.... Yes, that was all very interesting about the
jackanapes and all the things music can express.... Who would have
thought that musical expression is all that? Lord, Lord, what a fine
thing it is to have a reasoning head and know all about the fundamental
moods of people's characters! My dear sir, why don't you print a
treatise on the musical interpretation of the jackanapes and send it to
the University of Vienna for a prize? that would be a treatise for you!
Only do be a good creature and take this song at once to the copyist....
I assure you I consider you the finest musical philosopher in
Christendom."
The blotted, still half-wet sheet of note paper is handed across by
Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is the manuscript of "Voi che
sapete."
"But dearest Chapelmaster Mozart, the air which you have just written
appears to be not in the least degree light--it is even extremely
sentimental. How can you, with such phrases, express the Cherubino of
Beaumarchais?"
"And who, my dear Mr. Music Philosopher, who the deuce told you that I
wanted to express the Cherubino of Beaumarchais?"
Chapelmaster Mozart, rising from his table, walks up and down the room
with his hands crossed beneath his snuff-coloured coat-tails, humming to
himself--
Voi che sapete che cosa e amor,
Donne, vedete s'io l'ho nel cor,
and stops before the cage hanging in the window, and twitching the
chickweed through the wires, says--
"Twee! twee! isn't that a fine air we have just composed, little
canary-bird, eh?"
"Twee! twee!" answers the canary.
Mozart has willed it so: there is no possible appeal against his
decision; his artistic sense would not listen to our logic; our
arguments could not attain him, for he simply shook from off his feet
the dust of logic-land, and calmly laughed defiance from the region of
artistic form, where he had it all his own way, and into which we poor
wretches can never clamber. So here is the page's song irrevocably
sentimental; and Mozart has been in his grave ninety years; and we know
not why, but we do shrink from calling in Offenbach or Lecocq to rewrite
that air in true jackanapsian style. What can be done? There still
remains another hope.
For the composer, as we have seen, could give us--as could the painter
or the sculptor--only one mood at a time; for he could give us only one
homogeneous artistic form. But this artistic form exists so far only in
the abstract, in the composer's brain or on the paper. To render it
audible we require the performer; on the performer depends the real,
absolute presence of the work; or, rather, to the performer is given
the task of creating a second work, of applying on to the abstract
composition the living inflexions and accentuations of the voice. And
here, again, the powers of musical expression, of awaking association
by means of sounds or manner of giving out sounds such as we recognize,
automatically or consciously, to accompany the emotion that is to
be conveyed; here again these powers are given to the artist to do
therewith what he choose. This second artist, this performer, is not
so free indeed as the first artist, the composer; he can longer choose
among the large means of expression the forms of melody and rhythm, the
concatenation of musical phrases; but there are still left to him the
minor modes of expression, the particular manner of setting forth these
musical forms, of treating this rhythm; the notes are there, and their
general relations to one another, but on him depends the choice of the
relative stress on the notes, of the tightening or slackening of their
relations; of the degree of importance to be given to the various
phrases. The great outline cartoon is there, but the cunning lights and
shades, transitions, abrupt or insensible, from tint to tint, still
remain to be filled up. A second choice of mood is left to the singer.
And see! here arises a strange complication: the composer having in his
work chosen one mood, and the singer another, we obtain in the fusion or
juxtaposition of the two works, of the two moods, that very thing we
desired, that very shimmer and oscillation of character which the poet
could give, that dualism of nature required for Cherubino. What
is Cherubino? A sentimental jackanapes. Mozart in his notes has
given us the sentiment, and now we can get the levity from the
performer--unthought-of combination, in which the very irrational,
illogical choice made by the composer will help us. Here are Mozart's
phrases, earnest, tender, noble--Mozart's love song fit for a Bellario
or a Romeo; now let this be sung quickly, lightly, with perverse musical
head-tossing and tripping and ogling, let this passion be gabbled out
flippantly, impudently--and then, in this perfect mixture of the noble
and ignoble, of emotion and levity, of poetry and prose, we shall
have, at last, the page of Beaumarchais. A brilliant combination, a
combination which, thus reasoned out, seems so difficult to conceive;
yet one which the instinct of half, nay, of nearly all the performers in
creation would suggest. A page? A jackanapes? Sing the music as befits
him; giggle and ogle, and pirouette, and languish out Mozart's music: an
universal idea now become part and parcel of tradition: the only new
version possible being to give more or less of the various elements of
giggling, ogling, pirouetting, and languishing; to slightly vary the
style of jackanapes.
But no, another version did remain possible: that strange version given
by that strange solemn little Spanish singer, after whose singing of
"Voi che sapete" we all felt dissatisfied, and asked each other, "What
has she done with the page?" That wonderful reading of the piece in
which every large outline was so grandly and delicately traced, every
transition so subtly graduated or marked, every little ornament made to
blossom out beneath the touch of the singular crisp, sweet voice: that
reading which left out the page. Was it the blunder of an idealess vocal
machine? or the contradictory eccentricity of a seeker after impossible
novelty? Was it simply the dullness of a sullen, soulless little singer?
Surely not. She was neither an idealess vocal machine, nor a crotchetty
seeker for new readings, nor a soulless sullen little creature; she was
a power in art. A power, alas! wasted for ever, of little or no profit
to others or herself; a beautiful and delicate artistic plant uprooted
just as it was bursting into blossom, and roughly thrown to wither in
the sterile dust of common life, while all around the insolent weeds
lift up their prosperous tawdry heads. Of this slender little dark
creature, with the delicate stern face of the young Augustus, not a soul
will ever remember the name. She will not even have enjoyed the cheap
triumphs of her art, the applause which endures two seconds, and the
stalkless flowers which wither in a day; the clapping which interrupts
the final flourish, the tight-packed nosegays which thump down before
the feet, of every fiftieth-rate mediocrity. Yet the artistic power will
have been there, though gone to waste in obscurity: and the singer will
have sung, though only for a day, and for that day unnoticed. Nothing
can alter that. And nothing can alter the fact that, while the logical
heads of all the critics, and the soulless throats of all the singers
in Christendom have done their best, and ever will do their best to
give us a real musical Cherubino, a real sentimental whipper-snapper of
a page, this utterly unnoticed little singer did persist in leaving out
the page most completely and entirely. Why? Had you asked her, she
would have been the last person in the world capable of answering the
question. Did she consider the expression of such a person as Cherubino
a prostitution of the art? Had she some theory respecting the propriety
of dramatic effects in music? Not in the very least; she considered
nothing and theorised about nothing: she probably never had such a
thing as a thought in the whole course of her existence. She had only
an unswerving artistic instinct, a complete incapacity of conceiving
the artistically wrong, an imperious unreasoning tendency to do the
artistically right. She had read Mozart's air, understood its exquisite
proportions, created it afresh in her appreciation, and she sang it
in such a way as to make its beauty more real, more complete. She had
unconsciously carried out the design of the composer, fulfilled all
that could be fulfilled, perfected the mere music of Mozart's air. And
as in Mozart's air there was and could be (inasmuch as it was purely
beautiful) no page Cherubino, so also in her singing of the air there
was none: Mozart had chosen, and she had abided by his choice.
Such is the little circle of fact and argument. We have seen what means
the inherent nature of music afforded to composer and performer for the
expression of Beaumarchais's Cherubino; and we have seen the composer,
and the performer who was true to the composer, both choose, instead of
expressing an equivocal jackanapes, to produce and complete a beautiful
work of art. Were they right or were they wrong? Criticism, analysis,
has said all it could, given all its explanations; artistic feeling only
remains to judge, to condemn, or to praise: this one fact remains, that
in the work of the great composer, we have found only certain lovely
patterns made out of sounds; but in them, or behind them, not a vestige
of the page Cherubino.