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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e7226f --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #69856 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69856) diff --git a/old/69856-0.txt b/old/69856-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 6100910..0000000 --- a/old/69856-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1671 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Orpheus, by W. J. Turner - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Orpheus - or, The Music of the Future - -Author: W. J. Turner - -Release Date: January 22, 2023 [eBook #69856] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at - https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images - generously made available by The Internet Archive/American - Libraries.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORPHEUS *** - - - - - - ORPHEUS - - - - - ORPHEUS - - OR - - The Music of the Future - - BY - - W. J. TURNER - - _Author of “The Seven Days of the Sun,” etc._ - - [Illustration] - - NEW YORK - - E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY - - 681 FIFTH AVENUE - - - - - Copyright, 1926 - BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY - - _All Rights Reserved_ - - Printed in the United States of America - - - - - CONTENTS - - - CHAPTER PAGE - - I. DEFINITION OF MUSIC 1 - - II. IS MUSIC KNOWLEDGE OR LIFE? 14 - - III. THE GENERAL IDEA OF PROGRESS 27 - - IV. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS IN MUSIC 36 - - V. ABSOLUTE VALUE 47 - - VI. EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE 64 - - VII. BEYOND ALL SENSE 83 - - - - - ORPHEUS - - - - - CHAPTER I - - DEFINITION OF MUSIC - - -The dullest books on literature are the books which begin with a -history of the alphabet. A good history has its uses; however, this -book is not a history but a phantasy or, if you like, a philosophy. -For if it be a good phantasy it will be a good philosophy since all -philosophy is phantasy, or the imagination of love. - - _Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle_ - -We know, however, that philosophy degenerates from that love which -moves the spheres into that love of moving in the tracks of the spheres -which is called the love of knowledge, and philosophers are commonly -men who spend their lives describing the old tracks in which they are -running, and teaching how you also may keep your feet in them. So, too, -musician has come to mean a man who performs music--he plays over again -Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s studies; - - _partout il parcourit et parfournit_ - -This performance of his is a tribute to our weakness and a sign of our -imperfection, and, since we are weak and imperfect, is necessary; but -I cannot state too clearly and decisively at the outset that music -is not the playing or the hearing of symphonies and sonatas but the -imagination of love. - -If music is not the imagination of love, if it is not a spiritual -act, what is it? The commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered -arrangement of sounds. But two words of this definition beg the -question. What is meant by “ordered,” and what by “arrangement”? Order -and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order -that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, or -stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and what -is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in love all -things exist and have their being. Music is the imagination of love -_in sound_. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love. -There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life, and it -is possible that they may not all be imaginable _in sound_. I say it -is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not know at present, -and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has -abandoned sound as a means of expression. And that may happen. There -may be no unending future of music, only a limited future. Or the world -of music may be like the universe of Einstein, “finite but unbounded.” -And this indeed is my belief. It is a finite, a closed world. - -Can you express the life of the vegetable world in music? The -imagination of a plant? The tree that rises to the sun throws its -shadow upon the mind of man; you may think you cannot throw that shadow -in music but you can sound forth the _shadow_ of that shadow, turn -the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound, transform those -tremulous visual waves into auditory waves--not in the laboratory of -the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind. The musician may do -this. He may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of -verse--make a unique sensible impression upon the mind. Debussy’s -_Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ makes this impression of a -vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and Debussy’s music -is full of the imagination of a special order of life, the life of -trees, streams and lakes, the play of light upon water and on clouds, -the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight, and all -that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling -physical, all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to -the five senses. I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of -which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not -be expressed in music. - -Music is the most concrete and physical of all the arts as it is -probably the earliest and most primitive. Beasts which cannot draw or -write can make expressive sounds, and the earliest men undoubtedly -communicated by sound before they learned to communicate by written -or painted signs. But whether at the other end of the scale there is -a limit to music’s power of expression no one can say. It is only -possible at this stage in the history of mankind to affirm that up -till now the highest, most spiritual powers of the human mind have -been able to find expression in music. There is nothing in the world’s -finest literature that surpasses what we may find in the world’s best -music, although, as we shall see later, music may have a virtue that is -entirely its own. But it will not surprise us to find ourselves limited -to the work of a very few composers when we ask for music that is as -highly organized as the finest poetry. - -Music in this respect has been in the past nearer to painting and to -sculpture than to poetry. As with the plastic arts its swifter and -stronger appeal to the senses is a source of weakness as of strength. -It is a source of weakness because in every artist there is a natural -tendency to slip into what comes easiest in his medium. In music it is -easier to make sounds that merely gratify or stimulate the sense of -hearing and the cruder emotions than to make sounds of a more complex -character which will express the subtler and finer life of a more -spiritual imagination. Infantile music is both easier to compose and -easier to hear than mature music, so the public and the musician find -themselves in a natural league in favour of the rawer kinds of music. -Thus the song of obvious and commonplace sentiment and the jazz tune of -blatant rhythm have universal popularity. Even an animal, one sometimes -fancies might be conscious of such music. Its combinations are so -simple that they may certainly be understood by every human creature. -“All Nature hears thy voice,” one might almost say of the saxophone, -and possibly it is the sort of music to which the mountains would skip -like rams could they but hear it. - -All life moves in rhythm. We know to-day that the old distinctions -between spirit and matter are superficial. When I was a student at -the School of Mines at the age of seventeen, learning organic and -inorganic chemistry, we were taught Mendeléeff’s Law which showed that -all the elements were multiples of a common denominator, the atom; -and since then it has been discovered that instead of the atom being -the smallest possible bit of matter, finite and irreducible, it is a -solar system--its sun and planets being bits of positive and negative -electricity. All that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth -century materialism has crumbled away to that word “bits.” We cannot -as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on “bits.” Our minds -like our feet need a solid something beneath them. It is paralysing to -conceive that the floor we stand upon, the chair we sit upon, consist -solely of rotating electrical forces, but when we think of “bits” -welded together we feel safe again, although actually these “bits” are -a pure mental fiction, and what we stand and sit upon is _motion_. If -the motion stopped we should fall into the bottomless pit, the famous -vacuum abhorred of Nature (alias Tophet in biblical language). - -My chemistry teachers would have been as scandalized to think that at -the bottom of their inorganic and organic chemistry there was nothing -but motion, as my music teachers would have been scandalized to think -that at the bottom of the major and minor scales there was nothing but -love. They imagined that these were two entirely different worlds with -an infinite chasm between them. They thought that inorganic chemistry -was absolutely different from organic chemistry, although of course -they would have got into a hopeless muddle had they tried to prove -their belief--but then only fools and geniuses try to prove their -beliefs. Neither my chemistry nor my music teachers could ever explain -anything. One was simply asked to swallow whole and regurgitate whole -what was obviously mere unintelligible rigmarole. Those of us who had -this parrot-like faculty became in our turn Professors of Chemistry and -of Music. - -The great creative scientists of this age have disintegrated those -old hard ideas, and it now _appears_ that the Universe is a miracle -of rhythm, and that “matter,” just like man, is kept going, is -maintained as a co-ordinated whole by some electrical urge or spiritual -impulse--at bottom it is perhaps the same thing, although “thing” is -a very inappropriate word. The conception of the “will to live” has -a profounder meaning for us now, and we realize that if the “will to -live” dies in a man the man himself dies. A recent anthropologist, -the late Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S., in a book on the decay of -Melanesia, attributes the dying off of the population in certain -islands, unaffected by disease and with an abundance of food, to life -having become devoid of meaning to them after contact with an alien -and unassimilable civilization. They had lost faith in their old -world of ideas without having the power to enter the completely new -and strange white man’s world. With the decay of their ancient beliefs -they took no pleasure in their ancient religious exercises. Joy and -Ritual simultaneously faded. _They lost the desire to live._ Each one -of us goes on living only so long as he desires to live, and the desire -varies in degree. - -We have to admit that we use these words “life” and “living” still -without knowledge of what they mean, but it is not necessary, nor do I -think it possible, to know what they mean. Knowledge is not important, -it is life that is important, and we can feel life if we cannot know -it. The only way in which we can know life is by creating it, and it -will be my duty in a later chapter to discuss this. - -In the meantime it is clear that the line from Dante which I began by -quoting: - - _Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle_ - -is no idle phantasy but a literal truth. The world about us _seems_ -to be material, but exists in rhythm. It is a living world, and it is -kept alive by a spiritual force which we can best describe as love, and -I end this chapter with the definition with which I began it. All art -is the imagination of love, and music is the imagination of love _in -sound_. - - - - - CHAPTER II - - IS MUSIC KNOWLEDGE OR LIFE? - - -What is knowledge? And what is musical knowledge? The latter question -is no doubt included in the former, but we shall see. We know by -experience that it is possible to learn the alphabet of a language. The -alphabet as such has no longer any meaning, that is why it is possible -to use it with meaning--in that form we call language. But, at the -beginning, these perfectly conventionalized, perfectly meaningless -symbols, A, B, C, D, etc., had each a meaning and a very definite -meaning. And those series of meanings (which have now shrivelled -into the scentless, savourless, unembodied twenty-six ghosts of the -alphabet) precluded by their very vitality the possibility of all other -meanings. Their life was death to all other life and not until they -were dead could others live. This strange phenomenon is an element in -the beautiful myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus must not behold the -face of Eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she -disappeared, for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to -the spirit which is returning with him, who is not the Eurydice that -was but the Eurydice that is to be. And the whole life of language is -in this process of continuous dying. Words die by becoming abstract, -then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members -of a more complicated life, the life of the sentence. Sentences die -and become idioms, idioms ideas, ideas theories, theories philosophies -and religions. Every page of prose is a harvest raised from corpses -and under its flowering abundance dead bodies lie thickly buried. Then -a time comes when these extremely complex systems break up and the -words re-emerge in single units again, but with changed countenances -and expressions, to begin a new series of death-and-life existence. But -the letters themselves, of which all words are comprised, are finally -and forever dead--which is another way of saying they are immortal; -for they do not change as words change from one generation to another. -The “o” in dog does not differ from the “o” in god because “o” has no -longer individuality or meaning. What we call “knowledge” is that which -has become fixed and immortal, that which has ceased to live and have -being and is immutable. Obviously we cannot be said to know a thing -which is susceptible of change, which may differ to-morrow from what -it is to-day. Therefore we can only know what is unknowable, because -we only know what does not exist. This is no empty paradox. It is not -a play on the word “exist.” We may say we know the letters A, B, C, D, -etc., because they are the same for everybody; but they are only the -same for everybody because they are nothing to anybody. If I ask you -what A means to you it is impossible for you to tell me, since it means -no more to you than to me. A in itself is nothing, you can neither -think it nor feel it, you can only state it, and so it is, as I have -said, a fact. There are in all our literature only twenty-six absolute -facts. And they are facts merely because there is no life in them. - -In music there are also facts, so there is a part of music which we can -say we know. The modern European knows a certain number of musical -sounds which are the facts of music. They can be described in various -ways, but as European musical facts they are twelve semi-tones repeated -in series between two arbitrarily selected points which are the highest -and the lowest notes comfortably audible to the human ear. Each of -these semi-tones is an arbitrarily selected note or vibration number -chosen out of all the masses of vibrations which we call noises by -virtue of an inner unity, a mathematical symmetry which gives it form -and makes it a musical sound. But even this mathematical symmetry is -a fiction, a thing made by the human mind; and these sounds, like the -letters of the alphabet, have no life or meaning in themselves. - -But at this point a reservation must be made. For most, possibly for -all, the letters of the alphabet have a varied character, a character -which derives (_a_) from their different shapes, (_b_) from their -different sounds. The effect of their shape belongs to the world of -graphic art, the effect of their sound belongs to the world of music. -We may think of these impressions as the residuary fossils left by -giantlike primitive emotions which have stalked through those other -worlds. A certain artistic use can be made of them, and indeed we find -that every new wave of artistic expression is preluded by a breakdown -of the abstract combinations of symbols in which the symbols had become -most completely devitalized, and a return to a sense of a meaning, a -colour, a life in the symbol itself. This results in simplification, -which ultimately gives place to a new complication. What is called -progress in art consists mainly of this process. Whether there is -another kind of progress underlying this process must be considered in -another chapter. - -Now that we have become clear as to what facts are we can perceive what -knowledge is. But I must prevent the danger of a mere logomachy between -reader and writer by stating at once that I am giving here definitions -of “knowledge” and “life” to which we must both adhere. If any reader -likes to give the name of “true knowledge” to what I call life and says -that what I call knowledge is not true knowledge at all, he is welcome -to do so. But I am going to use my own terms, and I shall continue to -use the term “life” instead of so idiotic a term as “true knowledge.” - -The knowledge of music, then, is the knowledge of the facts, and the -facts are, as we saw, the alphabet of music, the twelve artificial -semi-tones of the tempered scale. If a musician knows these and -knows those combinations of them which are called intervals--as the -combinations of letters are called words--he knows what the man knows -who knows the letters of the alphabet and has a vocabulary of words. -He may know them by sight, by sound, or by sight and sound. If only -by sight he is in the position of a man who can read and write but -not speak the words of a foreign language; if only by sound he is in -the position of a man who can speak the words of a foreign language -and understand them when spoken but cannot read or write them. The -reader can make this analogy more precise by subdivisions which I shall -not bother to make here. I will merely point out that the ordinary -auditor, the music-lover who is no musician, knows the facts by sound -only and may so know them with greater or less precision and depth of -impression. That he should not know them by sight is immaterial to his -understanding what he hears, although it prevents his communicating -what he hears to anyone else. He is therefore technically equipped to -hear but not to compose music. - -Such knowledge may extend beyond the knowledge of the vocabulary of -words or chords to those more complicated combinations which have -also died and become facts--sentences, idioms, ideas; or, in music, -sequences, harmonies, melodies. All this knowledge represents so much -dead life which can be incorporated into a page of music as it can be -incorporated into a page of prose. When sentences, idioms and ideas -(or sequences, harmonies and melodies) have been used over and over -again so frequently as to have become immediately recognizable they -cease to have meaning; because, as I pointed out at the beginning of -this chapter, having been used so often in so many different contexts -they have shrivelled to that residuum or abstraction which fits the -lot. Having shed all individuality they shed all expression, and what -was once life becomes knowledge. For example, what was a feeling in -Wagner becomes merely a major ninth in Vincent d’Indy. When the music -of Debussy was first heard it was an emotional experience. Presently -the intellect abstracted an element which it found commonly in that -experience, and that element was the whole-tone scale. Then everybody -by using the whole-tone scale could write music which superficially -sounded like Debussy’s; but such music had no meaning or life, it was -dead music, mere knowledge. And Debussy’s music itself tended to become -a perceptive and not an emotional experience. There is a universal -tendency to this intellectual formalizing, stereotyping process which -I have called knowledge or death; and contrasted with it everywhere -is a complementary process, the process of creation or life. But the -one is necessary to the other and all experience is the one becoming -the other. Just as life uses death--as when we eat meat and transform -it into living tissue--so art uses knowledge. Music, therefore, is -experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming -experience, and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in -the medium. Music is the experience of life and death in _sound_. - -Has sound in itself any meaning? I mean by this is there a quality, -virtue, life--call it what you will--specifically in sounds and the -combination of sounds which does not exist elsewhere--in painting, -in sculpture, in architecture, in mathematics? I think there is; but -to go further into this would be to transgress the limits I have set -for myself, for here we touch on perhaps the profoundest problem of -philosophy. I shall be content to throw a little light upon it by -analogy. Experience in _sound_ has an individuality which separates -it from experience in the other arts. This individuality in the arts -is comparable to individuality in animal and vegetable life (the -different and analysable virtues of an elephant, a butterfly, a lily -and a violet) and to personality in human life. It is an implicit and -unexplained factor in all that I shall have to say; but we have to -remember that it is the combining, the making of a harmony of this -character or idiosyncrasy with the composer’s imagination of love which -makes music. It is then that musical _form_ is created. What we call -musical genius is related to this individuality in some mysterious and -as yet unfathomable way and it would seem that there are degrees of -musical genius. But it is only when great musical genius is combined -with great human personality that we get what we may call the great -artist as distinct from the merely great musician. - - - - - CHAPTER III - - THE GENERAL IDEA OF PROGRESS - - -It may be objected that my persuasion in Chapter I that music is the -imagination of love _in sound_ and in Chapter II that music is also -the experience of life-and-death _in sound_ are two conclusions not -only extraordinary in themselves but different. It will be seen that -they are not irreconcilable. My conception of the nature of music -must, if true, be such as to include all music, the music of Sullivan, -Puccini, Elgar and the Jazz-Kings as well as the music of Bach, Mozart, -Beethoven, and Wagner; the songs of the folk, old and new, peasant and -urban, as well as the songs of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. There is no -difficulty in this. - -We have seen that the development of music is analogous to the -development of language. That this must be so is obvious when we -understand that both music and language are mental structures -contemporary with the human mind, reflecting its development and -having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing. No arts have -been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell. -The reason for this gives us a clue to the character of progress in -general. The senses of smell and taste are too intimate, too physically -diffused, too direct or primitive in effect to be controlled by the -mind. We may say that the body now short-circuits in these sensations -and that the mind is cut out. But when, in the past, the sense of -touch developed into the more complicated organs of the eye and the -ear[1] which made touch _at a distance_ possible, then what the mind -sensed was more highly organized and less direct and amorphous. Smells -and tastes may be compared with noises before the mind has organized -them into musical sounds, or with sensations which have not yet passed -through the imagination and become organized into emotions and ideas. - -It would seem that the history of man is the history of this process of -organization and that the organizations differ more from one another -than do the senses from which they grew. A Chinaman, for instance, is -much more like an Englishman in his body than in his language; he can -have a child by an Englishwoman with whom he is unable to speak.[2] - -What we think is understanding Chinese music when we hear it is -merely recognition of that organization of vibration, which we call -musical sounds, an organization common to the human ear in all mankind. -The major part of popular music consists of stringing these sounds -together for the mere pleasure of recognizing them--pleasure in their -organization as contrasted with the unorganized mass of mere noise -out of which they have been selected; also its use of them in simple -combinations expressing simple emotions--sensations of rudimentary -organization--which again are common to all mankind. It is because -language is not an organization of the merely visual or auditory -sensations made by the physical eye and ear with which almost -everybody is born (there _are_ colour-blind and tone-deaf people) but -a post-natal acquired and complicated mental construction that it is -totally unintelligible until learnt. So Chinese music does not mean the -same to us as to a Chinaman, nor does European music mean the same to -him as to a European, because it is not merely a construction of the -ear, but is also in some although in varying degree a construction of -the mind. Just as it took a multitude of lives and deaths to evolve the -human eye and ear--organs with which all men are now born--so it has -taken many generations of that mental development we call culture and -tradition to create a language that was more than onomatopoeia, and a -music that was more than recognizable and, therefore, agreeable sounds. - -There is, and I maintain there can be no absolute, universal, pure art -immediately intelligible to all men. It was the false idea that music -was purely sensual which led Pater to think that music was such an art -and that all other arts should attain its perfection. The development -of every art is a development farther and farther away from the mere -sensations upon which it is founded, and these developments make a web -of experience which is constantly being rewoven and renewed (probably -without a single strand ever being lost or destroyed) and, without -this, music would dissolve into meaningless sounds. We look upon the -eye and the ear as beautiful complex creations of life. We think of -them as physical entities because their creation is so far back in -life that it belongs to the sub-human or animal epoch, and so they -have become physical things, if not material objects. But this power -of becoming _physical_ (life taking on flesh, the spirit achieving -form) or _material_ (electricity becoming molecules of hydrogen, lead, -etc.) is the process which I have described as death; and as that -necessary and important death, death the complement of life. But, as I -have already shown, a third kind of death, other than the material and -the physical, is that of _intellectual_ structure--known variously as -tradition, belief, dogma, logic, technique or, most comprehensively, -as knowledge. Just as a multitude of deaths were necessary to the -evolution of the eye and the ear so a multitude of deaths (an -Encyclopædia is a mental cemetery) are necessary to the evolution of -the mind. The past experience of music which every trained musician -possesses is such knowledge. If he merely repeats it, copies out of -the past stored in his mind, in the mind of his generation, in the -culture he and his generation have inherited, he is a mere academic -musician and not a creative artist. But there are degrees in this as -in everything else. It is not the possession of the tradition which -makes a musician academic and lifeless, it is the failure to use the -traditions to express himself; and this is a failure in musical life. -A musical mind which is a mere body of musical tradition is like a -detached ear or a plucked out eye--an ear which does not hear or an -eye which does not see. The life of hearing is not in the organ, not -in what has been heard--of which it is the physical representation, -the _death-shape_--it is in creation, the hearing of a new thing. And -creation is that movement from life to death, from soul to substance, -from the spirit to the form which is the imagining forth of love, for -love alone is a creative motive. - -And the forms of love vary from the flowering and seeding of plants -to the music of Beethoven. It is not a progress from bad to good, it -is not a retrogression from good to bad. It is rather a process which -fills the Universe with death--death in myriads of lovely forms, from -the form of the wood-violet to the form of the symphony. And this -process is life. And life increasing the varieties of death is the -general principle of progress. What is the purpose of this process? -We do not know. But we can say that its purpose is delight. _Ecstasy -clothing Himself in a thousand Forms._ The Universe delighting in -itself preserves itself in death, for in death the imagination of the -spirit is made immortal. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] How was this achieved? No biologist can tell us, but we shall not -go far wrong in seeing here again the created organs of Desire. - -[2] Here we can find a conclusive argument in proof of the superiority -of sentiment to sense in sexual experience. Sentiment is non-existent -among animals and it is very faint in the lower human types but in the -highest European types it now almost completely controls the sexual -sense. - - - - - CHAPTER IV - - THE IDEA OF PROGRESS IN MUSIC - - -In the history of the world as we know it we discover that not all -forms of death are immortal. There are animals which are extinct, -there are plants which have disappeared, there are flowers which bloom -no more. In vain has life fixed their images in that immortality of -automatic repetition which we call death. Even death, we seem to find, -is occasionally an illusion and its sleep is not more eternal than a -man’s dream. It is probable that all things as _things_ are perishable; -and we have no reason to believe that even the music of Beethoven will -last for ever, or even for as long as man lasts. But there is the -problem why some things last longer than others, and this perhaps -raises the question of value, of goodness. Here is a new element in -the idea of progress. Is it possible to discover any principle in -the history of music which explains why, already, Bach has outlasted -Frohberger? - -If we say that Frohberger is superfluous because Bach is the same as -Frohberger, only better, we are saying something very difficult to -understand, for how would it be possible to prove that two things can -be the same and yet different, one of them being better--except by -making goodness depend on quantity? But, obviously, to think that Bach -is three Frohbergers is not the same as thinking he is three times as -good as Frohberger. As the ordinary man speaks this is not at all what -he means. We definitely do think Bach is better than Frohberger, not -that he is Frohberger plus a Frohberger fraction. I submit that we -think so because we find all Frohberger in Bach plus something more -which is not Frohberger. But this has a tremendous consequence for, -if true, it means that Frohberger is not unique. He is included in -Bach. And may we not think that the music which vanishes from human -consciousness is the music which is not unique and that so long as -a composer is unique his music will be heard? I believe so. It is -reasonable to think that every act, everything created has value. Our -minds cannot imagine a Universe in which that would not be true; but we -can imagine complex organizations incorporating simpler organizations, -which then cease to have a separate existence. Therefore it is possible -that nothing goes out of the Universe, and the idea that a thing may -be lost seems illusion. Our minds find it difficult to imagine an -exit from the Universe. _Where?_ But the incorporation of the lesser -within the greater remains, as stated, a mechanical idea. We can find -no satisfaction in a mere increasing complexity of structure. “If -that is all that makes Bach better than Frohberger”--we can imagine -someone saying--“I never want to listen to music again.” The process, -we feel, must have a purpose or a meaning. Well, we have forgotten -one vital element. Delight. The Universe is the imagination of its -delight. If the purpose of the Universe were merely to attain to an -ever higher degree of complexity for its own sake it would not be -littered with these innumerable shapes of death--the violet, the lily, -the rose, the cedar, the oak, the pine, the butterfly, the tiger, the -elephant, and all other lovely and curious structures. Even man has -not supplanted the ape, nor has the fugue of Bach annihilated the -song of the shepherd boy. We may think all these things are unique -and that is why they still persist. But what about Frohberger, was he -not unique? Why has Frohberger vanished? For if Frohberger was not -unique how did he come to appear? Not to be unique is not to exist. -Yes, but his uniqueness may not have been in his music. Here at last -we have it. And _his_ music does not exist since there is no music -which can be said to be his. This is a different kind of non-existence -to that of the Dinosaur, the Dodo, the Great Auk. Although their -death-shapes no longer repeat themselves upon the earth they have not -completely vanished. Their images live in the imagination of man, -vivid, individual, unique. We have no such image of Frohberger’s music. -It is a shrivelled, meaningless ghost, a letter in the alphabet of -music, which has in itself no life. Frohberger’s music is not like -the Great Auk, an isolated death-shape of the physical world, nor -like the Centaur, an isolated death-shape of the intellectual world, -its position in music is that of one of those intermediates which, -like the “missing link,” can never be found because the mind works -_per saltum_. Frohberger and the “missing link” are for ever lost -in the gaps. All that is without residuary value, all that has been -completely incorporated in a new structure disappears thus because it -slips through the mesh of the mind--not because the mind is not fine -enough to retain the most minute differences, but because it chooses -not to perceive. This reconciles the pre-Bach existence of Frohberger’s -music with its present non-existence and delivers us from the apparent -contradiction; for it allows us to make what is, philosophically, a -necessary assumption, namely, that no two things are ever exactly the -same, and consequently that Bach’s music does not contain Frohberger’s -music absolutely. Therefore the equation is not: - - Bach = B(ach) + F(rohberger) - -but - - Bach = B + (F-X) - -X being that unknown quantity which is Frohberger’s uniqueness and -which we to-day cannot perceive. - -But although art feeds on knowledge as life feeds on death at the same -time creating more knowledge, as life creates more death--_Ecstasy -clothing Himself in Forms_--yet there remains much that is mysterious. -Why there are different forms of art is a question which insistently -recurs. A comparison of music with the other arts in order to discover -a value specific and exclusive to music is not likely to enlighten us. -Painters talk of “pictorial construction” as the specifically painter’s -element which in all good graphic art is wedded to the illustration, -psychology, representation or whatever other content a picture may -yield, be it ancient or modern. They point out that the spectator is -not emotionally moved by the representation of tears but by the rhythm -of lines and the recession of planes. The good writer knows that a -description of a sad event is not in itself saddening, it may even -be comic; but unlike the painter he has no technical term for this -essential quality without which literature is mere verbiage--unless, -indeed, we apply the word “poetic” to this quality, as we have every -right to do. Painting which is without this vital element--call it -“pictorial representation,” “significant form,” or what you will--is -not art but knowledge or science.[3] Literature which is without -this “poetic” quality is, again, mere knowledge, mere fiction. We -have no need to seek for examples. A dozen famous names leap to our -minds. Rather have we to seek for that literature which is poetic. -Similarly in music there is a specific, purely musical quality without -which music also is mere science. This quality I will call melodic -imagination. - -And here an interesting fact emerges. In all three arts the valuable -element, the element of life is linked with the imagination. In -painting pictorial imagination, in literature verbal imagination, -in music melodic imagination--_imagination_ always is the magical -essence, the power referred to in the lines: - -“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word -was God.” - -And we may be sure that there can be no art unless the word is made -flesh--in the forms of painting, literature, or music--and dwells among -us. But when we ask ourselves why it should take the form of painting -or of words, or of music, it is impossible to give an answer. We can -only echo: Why the lily, the rose, the violet? Why the tiger, the -elephant, the antelope? Why the Moon, Venus, and the Stars? _Ecstasy -clothing Himself in Forms._ - -And still we have failed to discover in music any principle of progress -other than increasing complexity of organization and a multiplication -of lovely deaths. A principle which does not as yet satisfy our -instincts since it seems quantitative rather than qualitative. But -perhaps we are on the verge of a discovery. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[3] Such according to eminent critics is the work of the painter -Sargent and, for my part, I have no difficulty in seeing that what they -say is just. - - - - - CHAPTER V - - ABSOLUTE VALUE - - -It may appear fantastic to assert that art is the only sphere where -absolute values appear, and that the function of art in the Universe -is to create absolute values, but it may be true. It is impossible -to avoid the insistent demand of the human instinct for absolute -values. This exists, an insatiable craving which will not rest content -with the good but demands the better. And yet it is impossible to -discover values that are absolute in themselves. The very notion is -a meaningless abstraction. I do not even believe we can prove that -Beethoven’s music is better music than Mozart’s or that Shakespeare’s -poetry is better than Milton’s, or _vice versa_, unless we first of -all limit the idea of music or poetry to something intellectually -measurable. For example it would be difficult to convince all -music-lovers that Bach’s counterpoint was better than Beethoven’s, or -that Palestrina’s was better than Bach’s; for what is to determine -“good” counterpoint? Very few musicians would accept any individual -theorist’s rules--all rules being mere abstractions or generalizations -from practice, and varying according to their historic date, so that -even the academic theory of one age differs from that of another. Even -in judging a fugue, one has ultimately to fall back upon expression, -significance, or meaning, and who is to say--and on what universally -acceptable principle is it to be said--that Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue is -better than Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” Op. 133? - -There is exactly the same difficulty in poetry. In an excellent and -well-known book on the English Sonnet a definition is given of perfect -sonnet form which is intellectually satisfactory. But we find that most -of the greatest English sonnets are not written in this form, while -thousands of mediocre sonnets observe it correctly. The same is true of -Bach’s Fugues. You cannot value them according to their correctness.[4] -What then becomes of our “perfect” sonnet and our “perfect” fugue? -Each is apparently an unreal abstraction--like all other attempts at -creating absolute value. But are these “absolute” ideas necessarily -valueless in themselves? I do not think so, for they correspond to and -are the formalization or _death-shapes_ of desires ineradicably rooted -in the human soul, those desires which create all values, and that -profounder urge which is satisfied with none. - -What is important to recognize is the diversity of these desires and -to understand that it is the diversity (in itself profoundly desired) -which nullifies standards. We can say that this fugue is more perfect -than that fugue--having made an abstract and definable conception -of the fugue form and separated it from all life. Criticism is an -application of such abstract conceptions--derived by analysis from the -practice of artists--from all past works of art to one present work of -art and, again, backwards, from all existent works of art to one past -work of art. The former is historical criticism (when a composer is -judged only on what preceded him) and the latter is, or should be, the -absolute æsthetic criticism. But what prevents its being so is that it -leaves out the future. The work of art is judged by the present and -the past but the future is unknown and the judgment is thereby vitiated -and is not and cannot be an absolute judgment. But this does not mean -that the future does not exist _now_, somewhere. To demonstrate this, -however, would take me on too far-stretching a parabola. I would merely -draw attention to this reservation, and say that its relevance will -appear later. - -My belief is that when I say, as I do emphatically say, that Beethoven -is a greater composer than Bach and find my assertion difficult -or impossible to prove I am judging by an instinctive but not yet -intellectually formalized sense of value, or values, which will only -emerge in the future to take a place among all the other principles -and standards--the totality of life in its sum of _death-shapes_ -so far created. So we see there can be no such thing as a perfect -fugue-in-itself but only the idea of one. The actual fugue must -have a meaning, it must be an expression of life; a fugue-in-itself -without relation to life, perfect and completely, is an impossibility. -Nevertheless a musician like Bach finds in himself the fugue-idea as -well as the fugue-emotion, the fugue-form as well as the fugue-content, -and there is a constant struggle between them to coincide exactly and -to materialize in one indivisible unity. Sometimes the fugue idea -prevails and sometimes the fugue-emotion prevails, and the result -always is an imperfect fugue. But this imperfection in all its varying -degrees is the musical reality. Absolute perfection, absolute unity is -annihilation, the end of all things and the attainment of Nirvana. But -even the fugue-idea is not a constant unchangeable abstraction or fixed -shape. It is modified by the actual fugues which are created, for it -is an abstraction, a general principle from examples, an induction -from particulars; and as fresh particulars arise, the induction must -be modified. Again, I spoke of the content or fugue-emotion, but this -fugue-emotion is not--except perhaps in the simplest and most feeble -examples--single but, on the contrary, multiple. Who is to appraise -or range in order of value these emotions? How is it to be done? The -belief that any single judgment may do it--the mind of any one critic, -expert or practitioner--is preposterous. But this does not suspend -individual judgment or make it vain, since it is through the conflict -or discord of all genuine individual judgments that new conceptions -or attempts at concord emerge. This conflict arises from unsatisfied -desire and, in the end, we think Beethoven better than Bach only -because Beethoven more profoundly satisfies our desire or satisfies -a deeper desire than any satisfied by Bach. Just as new conceptions -emerge or are induced from discordant or unrelated conceptions so -new emotions and new desires are induced from the discordance or -conflict of our desires. This process of organization would seem -infinite--a conception which I, personally, find intolerable and -incomprehensible--were it not for a strange phenomenon, and this -phenomenon is that ultimately at the core of all men there seems to be -the same desire. - -The world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters, -sculptors, scientists, mathematicians, musicians and poets. We may not -be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that Beethoven is -greater than Bach, that Bach is greater than Haydn, that Palestrina -is greater than Verdi, but we are all strangely certain that it is so. -What are we to make of this? Evidently there is a unity somewhere in -our diversity, and it is more than a lowest common factor--a far-away -dim primitive element, never quite lost sight of but growing ever -fainter, linking all men and all art. It is not that touch of nature -making the whole world kin, for that--although it might enable us to -have some sympathy with all things--would not enable us to range them -in value. Such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally -relate us. It is, on the contrary, by our very essence, by the most -spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united. We are not -unanimous about Scriabin, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, -Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, just as we are not unanimous -about Aubrey Beardsley, Sargent, El Greco, or about Byron, Tennyson, -and Conrad. - -Apparently each of us carries within him a fundamental note which -picks out all the notes struck upon us by nature and mankind and -ranges them in a series. And it is this which gives to each one his -values. The fundamental note which any individual carries may not be -the fundamental note of mankind, or of the Universe, but it must have -a more or less simple relationship with them. Thus the values of one -individual are true for all others, within their limits. They are real -values though not necessarily ultimate values; they can and will be -related to all other values but can only be so related through a more -fundamental note--hence the importance of such a note. It is my belief -that the profoundest, most fundamental note in music, so far, has -been struck by Beethoven. There is nothing in the music of any other -composer which his does not comprehend. But his, on the other hand, has -a new foundation to which no other music reaches. - -[Illustration] - -But this analogy of the fundamental note must be understood merely as -an analogy, suggestive rather than explanatory. Of all the simpler -musical intervals I find that of the seventeenth the most satisfying -to my ear. I may wonder what is the secret of the purity of its -concord--so much greater than that of the perfect fifth or the perfect -fourth, which at first sight seem to be more intimate relationships. -Then I discover that the ratio of the vibrations of the two notes -of the seventeenth is 1:5, whereas that of the perfect fifth is 2:3, -of the perfect fourth 3:4. Stated thus this may not mean much to the -non-mathematically minded reader but it denotes that the seventeenth -is a perfect and not a syncopated interval. That is to say there is no -syncopation of the vibrations of the two notes, but they beat together -in a closer more united rhythm than that of a perfect fifth or perfect -fourth. - -But the twelfth - -[Illustration] - -(I use the tenor or C clef partly because it is more obscure and will -annoy those who are only accustomed to the treble and bass clefs) -has a ratio of 1:3 which also is not a syncopated interval but has -the same kind of perfection as that of the octave (1:2) and the -seventeenth (1:5). Yet the twelfth is not so pleasing an interval as -the seventeenth, and the octave is inferior to them both. Nevertheless -the twelfth and octave are mathematically closer relationships than the -seventeenth. Evidently there is another principle to be discovered, and -I will call it the principle of affinity in unlikeness and illustrate -it by an analogy which may seem far-fetched but which I believe to be -illuminating and significant. - -Let us imagine that the unison or note A represents oneself; that -the relationship of the octave (1:2) represents that of father and -daughter; the relationship of the perfect fifth (2:3) that of brother -and sister; the relationship of the perfect fourth (3:4) that of two -brothers; the relationship of the twelfth (1:3) that of male and -female cousins--in which a new element that of sexual affinity, is -introduced, bringing with it a deeper reverberation although the blood -relationship is more distant. And, finally, the relationship of the -seventeenth, that of unrelated lovers which--although the most distant -of all in blood--strikes a still profounder sympathy and beauty. It is -now possible to understand more clearly why my analogy of the relation -of Beethoven to the rest of music as that of a more fundamental note is -not to be taken in its literal meaning. With Beethoven, a new element -came into music, an element of such sublimity and beauty that its -advent into the world of imagination is comparable in importance with -that of sex in the physical world. - -Sex as we know it did not always exist; it does not exist in the -inorganic world, hardly in the vegetable world, but dimly in the animal -world. It is a human discovery, and upon that new more fundamental -note (fundamental not in the vertical sense but in a focal sense) -rises the whole wealth of man’s intellectual and physical harmony. -But even in sex we have not touched an absolute. The presage of a -still profounder intimacy trembles fitfully here and there in music -throughout the historical European period. In the music of Palestrina, -of Byrd, of all the rarer spirits up to Bach, Mozart and Wagner there -are fitful gleams of a more central desire until, finally, a love that -plumbs deeper than even the love of sex rings forth unmistakeably in -the music of Beethoven and immediately creates for us a new hierarchy -of values. And so here we find for the time being an Absolute. The -world of art, we find, resembles both the world of the atom and the -world of solar space. There are greater and lesser planets and greater -and lesser satellites. We can imagine that if there were inhabitants -upon the Moon they might think the Earth was the primary fact of -their being, since it was the focal point of their orbit, whereas -the Sun would seem so eccentrically placed as to be an irregular and -incomprehensible singularity; until by a process of more profound -imagining they conceived the more fundamental though more distant -relationship in which it stood to them. - -Just as the Sun is the centre of the only system of the physical -universe so far formulated--for no centre has been found to the -innumerable suns of the stellar universe--so Beethoven is our temporary -Absolute in the world of music. And just as the Sun is the source of -all vegetable and animal life upon the earth, so I believe that in art -we find the vital spirit which animates our human life. Thus it would -seem to be true--as I suggested we might discover--that the function of -art in the world is to create absolute values in the imagination upon -which the human species can continually re-create its intellectual, -moral, and physical structures. And if this is so it means that in the -values of art we approach most nearly to Truth. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[4] See Mr. Harvey Grace’s excellent book on the organ works of J. S. -Bach. - - - - - CHAPTER VI - - EMOTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE - - -A technical analysis of the art of music as practised in Europe during -the past few hundred years would be interesting, but it lies outside -the scope of this book. What is relevant is to consider the emotional -and intellectual significance of the music composed during that -period. Folksong, from which most great composers have consciously -or unconsciously drawn, is the emotional substratum of all European -music. At its best it is simple, sensuous and passionate--the heart-cry -of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life, whose -joys are too short, or whose griefs are too enduring. Where it chiefly -differs from similar, later, more sophisticated music is in the -simple intensity of the emotion. In a society more subject to extreme -vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it -was easier, and natural, to believe that mere irresponsible “accident” -or mischance separated men from happiness.[5] In a beautiful old -Neapolitan song collected by Madame Geni Sadero the singer bewails -the loss of his love carried off by Moorish pirates in a raid on the -Italian coast. Such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody, -rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest -composers. These melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity, of -a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment, richly -provided with compensations. Any attempt at such sincerity would -to-day be insincere.[6] Equally insincere would be any modern -composer’s attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the -Sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the Sun in a wonderful -song included in the Sadero collection. In our civilized society man -knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday, and that -next year or the year after he may love again. It is not Moorish -pirates, or the accident of plague, or the malefic interference of -an unfriendly God that will bear away his happiness. It is happiness -itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his -possessions and asks himself, what he used not to ask himself: “Why do -I live?” - -I do not lament this change as a disaster. I merely wish to point out -the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the -music of yesterday. Those who believe that music is a purely abstract -art (mere negation this, which I have abundantly shown to be empty of -reality) will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man’s life; -but the great composers themselves knew better: - - “The error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a Means - of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of - Expression (the Drama) has been made a means.” - -Those words of Wagner’s show clearly that to Wagner, as Mr. Newman -aptly puts it: - - “To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it - till it was ‘workable’ and then to weave it along with others of the - same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined - for him by tradition--this was something he could not imagine himself - doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire - musicians engaged in.... Wagner always protested against the current - fashion of performing Beethoven’s symphonies as if they were nothing - more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns.” - -My preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why Wagner’s -instinct was right, although his mode of expression is so inexact as -to be often confusing and misleading.[7] What Wagner means is that -intellectual forms or _death-shapes_ are given no significance by -being manipulated, dove-tailed, and re-arranged by the intelligence -working from rules and examples. It is “life” that gives significance, -a spiritual urge into creation, and where this is absent there is no -artistic creation. We may perceive by his use of the word “drama” -that Wagner’s conception of “life” was a limited one; but he could -only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his -recognizing this. But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an -artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic -or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute -composers. The difference between all these composers (including -Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the -individual _psyche_--not in their musical faculty as composers. It -was natural to each one of them that his vital activity should run -into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has -made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. But -this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for--to quote Mr. Newman -again, since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate -here than the words of a poet or sculptor, besides being admirably -clear-- - - “It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians - who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our - perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing are inextricably - interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of - sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of - music, the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of - musical tone. In every poet there is something of the painter and the - musician; in every musician something of the poet and the painter; in - every painter something of the musician and the poet. The character - of the man’s work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the - tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or - weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts.” - -Thus we can explain the sensuous individuality of an artist as being a -result of the special and peculiar bias and intermixture of his senses. -But this is only a part of his character or personality, and it is my -argument that it is the minor (though essential and indispensable) -and not the major or most important part. For besides this physical -individuality he has a spiritual individuality. The former is the -instrument, the latter is the “life,” and, in the case of music, the -physical expression, the communication, the tangible (eye and ear are -“touch” at a distance) _death-shape_ is the musical creation or form--a -Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart or Wagner opera, a Schubert -song. - -The importance of Beethoven--which Wagner was the first to -understand--lay in that stupendous stream of “life” within him which -burst through all the old academic forms, as the sap bursts through a -tree into colour and blossom, and strewed the history of music with -those gigantic skeletons of spiritual life which we know as his works. -But we have yet to discover the meaning of these compositions. Their -full meaning can only be felt, it cannot be re-stated--except when his -works are adequately performed; but they have a characteristic to which -I shall try to give a verbal construction because I think it immensely -important. It is not a quality for which there exists a word, or a -phrase, or even a poem; but it is a particular kind of desire. “_Like -as a hart desireth the water-brooks so thirsteth my soul after the -living God_,” that--were it not for its association with the desires -of Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans, Anglicans, Catholics, Mohammedans, -Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and all those bodies of -people known to-day as “religious”--would perhaps be suggestive. At -any rate it would serve to distinguish the quality of this desire or -passion from the passion which created _Tristan und Isolde_. And, -magnificent and beautiful as that was, its magnificence compared with -the magnificence of Beethoven’s passion is as the magnificence of a -coloured duck to a black swan. The simile is a totally unworthy one, -for we have nothing to which we can compare Beethoven. We can easily -find similes for Wagner, but Beethoven is a _rara avis_. - -It is natural to the young to be idealists, an old idealist is -generally either a rogue or a fool--unless he happens to be a -Beethoven. The young find something stirring in their hearts when -listening to Beethoven which they never find when listening to Bach, -Mozart or Wagner, great as these composers are. Beethoven awakes a -feeling so romantic, so idealistic, of so fine and exquisite a bloom -that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret. -What Beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous -delights of Debussy and Strauss, from the fatiguing excitements of -Stravinsky and Jazz, from the gaieties of Verdi and Rossini, from the -sentimental nostalgia of Brahms, from the solid satisfaction of Bach, -from the sensitive melancholy of Mozart and from the lesser loves of -Wagner; but why it does so we cannot tell. - -“Had I been willing,” said Beethoven to Schindler in 1823, in the -course of a conversation about the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, “to -surrender thus my vital power and my life what would have been left of -the best and noblest in me?” What a different ring this plain statement -has beside the rhetorical pæans to renunciation on the lips of Wagner, -who was satisfied to accept what would never have satisfied Beethoven. - -It is a peculiarity of Beethoven that he can use the words “best” and -“noblest” without making an intelligent man laugh up his sleeve. If we -do succeed in laughing it is with the wrong side of our mouths. The -very words “good,” “noble,” “spiritual,” “sublime,” have all become in -our time synonymous with humbug. In Beethoven’s music they take on a -new and tremendous significance and not all the corrosive acid of the -most powerful intellect and the profoundest scepticism can burn through -them into any leaden substratum. They are gold throughout. Am I wrong -in thinking this an achievement without parallel in the modern world? -Point to me in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, _anywhere_, one -other artist who has recreated (not paid lip-service to) the meaning of -good and left to us the _imagination_ of a love transcending both the -sacred and the profane. There is none. - -We cannot live without values and at present we cannot conceive a -state when men would not ask themselves: “Why do I live?” “Is life -worth living?” This is the theme which touches us to-day when we marry -and settle down with our love, measure the spots on the Sun, and fear -neither plagues, pirates, nor eclipses: - - “Here I am an old man in a dry month, - Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. - I was neither at the hot gates - Nor fought in the warm rain - Nor knee-deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, - Bitten by flies, fought. - My house is a decayed house, - And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner, - Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, - Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. - The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; - Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. - The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, - Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. - I am an old man, - A dull head among windy spaces.” - -The bravest, the most intelligent, the most sensitive are oppressed -with that profound sense of the futility of life which Mr. Eliot -expresses so admirably in the above lines. It is, indeed, the constant -burden of the most characteristic of our modern poets: - - “This is the way the world ends - This is the way the world ends - This is the way the world ends - Not with a bang but a whimper.” - -Yes, we are convinced. This _is_ the way the world ends and we have no -more faith in anything. Democracy, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, have -all been added to the list of the Great Superstitions. Mussolini and -Lenin have made moonshine of Socialism and Communism. God is a word -used only in treatises on tribal magic, when it is spelt correctly -as god. Love has been appropriated by the writers of silly magazine -stories and even sillier novels. All honest men are reduced to silence -before the daily avalanche of fraudulent lies from pulpit, printing -press, parliament and platform. Everywhere men speak with the tongues -of serpents and the minds of manufacturers of chewing gum. And deep in -all men’s hearts there is only one thought: - - “I grow old--I grow old - I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” - -But in the midst of futility and inanity, in the midst of desperation -and despair there sounds the music of Beethoven which says without -bombast or credo: “This is _not_ the way the world ends.” And says it -in such a way that we are forced to listen. We listen to Beethoven when -we would listen to nobody else because he is a man without any of the -world’s illusions. How feeble and superficial seems the disillusionment -of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s poems compared with the agony of the Cavatina in -the B flat Quartet with its mysterious pause--as if the pulse of the -whole Universe were stopped and might not continue; of the Fugue in B -flat Op. 133; and of the last Pianoforte Sonata which Beethoven wrote. -In this last Sonata we feel the agony of a man whose imagination is -grappling with some insupportable horror. Let us conceive the Captain -of a ship standing on its bridge in a calm, unconscious sea. The boats -are useless because land does not exist anywhere. From the deck come -the cries, curses and weeping of the doomed crew, who are only his own -embodied emotions, for he is really alone. Slowly they are going down -into the unruffled water. The Captain does not shake his fist defiantly -into the sky and deny that he is going down, but knowing that he is -going down never to return sinks passionately into the sea. Such is -the mind and temper of Beethoven. There is agony but no whimper, and -if that is not ending with a bang I don’t know what is. In the music -of Beethoven there are no anodynes, no lullings of sense, no deceits -of the intelligence, but pure _virtus_. And this _virtus_ is thrilling -absolutely, without reservations. After the tremendous drama of the -first movement of the C minor Sonata, for example--a drama in which -there is the whole ecstatic misery of life--we are not assuaged by a -dream. The conflict does not cease. That wonderful Arietta--surely -the most wonderful thing in all music--is no bringer of peace and -resignation. In it something passes away but _its passing away is an -act of creation not of extinction_. It is this which gives Beethoven’s -music its peculiar significance, for Creation not Nirvana is the -essence of Beethoven. It has its root therefore in human personality -and may be most accurately described as the supremest imagination of -love in human art. But though beyond the conception of the Neapolitan -fisherman mourning for his lost bride it does not lessen but enriches -that ancient love-song, making it impossible for us to feel that it was -meaningless. - -And if anyone should say that the question: “Why do I live?” has not -been answered, I reply that Beethoven has rendered it ridiculous. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[5] The ancient Greeks with characteristic intellectual power did not -believe in mere irresponsible accident. - -[6] Compare for example the feebleness of our contemporary love-songs -and ballads. - -[7] For example we can ask nothing more than that a composer should -write “exciting musical patterns.” It all depends upon what is meant by -“exciting.” - - - - - CHAPTER VII - - BEYOND ALL SENSE - - -Music will not end with Beethoven. It is possible that the very -problems that confronted him and still confront us will fade out of -the imagination just as those political problems which occupied so -much of the attention of the historical world from the Greek Republics -to the British Empire are ceasing to exist before our very eyes. -And when we think of the religious dissensions of Christendom and -reflect on the questions which once divided father from son, sect -from sect, church from church, it is with difficulty that we can give -them a meaning intelligible to our minds, much less feel any shadow -of the life that was once in them. In the memory of living men, -heartburning intellectual problems have become empty phrases. Darwin, -Huxley, and the Anglican Bishops all seem as unreal as the waxworks of -Madame Tussaud and are seen to be the complementary phenomena of an -intellectual nightmare. No one to-day imagines that Truth wears the -strange Victorian get-up of any of these gentlemen. - -Similarly the sociological phantoms of the age of Bernard Shaw and -H. G. Wells, of Karl Marx and Lenin are cutting the last of their -antithetical capers. Socialist and Anti-Socialist, Communist and -Anti-Communist, Conservative and Revolutionary have suddenly caught -sight of their own faces behind the masks of their opponents. Their -passionate reality is seen to be no more than a Fancy Dress Ball--for -all these figments, these fictions, these _Ideas_ were never any more -than the Masks of false passions, passions which have never succeeded -in begetting a progeny, since they are the mere nightmare passions of -social indigestion. - -In another five generations there will be no poverty, there may be -no matrimony, there will certainly, if there is no poverty, be no -patrimony. Children may take their mother’s name and then fathers -will have not even a fifty-year royalty upon their creations. Men and -women will look upon their children as artists look upon their works -and will wish others to enjoy them. The world will be so changed that -none of the problems which to-day set our newspapers printing and -our politicians talking will even exist. Our present ideas on sex, -morality, beauty and value will in those days appear as strange, -as fantastic, as illusory as the ideas of our ancestors who took -Beecham’s pills to cure all ills. - -Will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day? -Necessarily, since life without change is inconceivable to us and music -that is alive must be changing. But the meaning of this change is not -to be apprehended by the mind, for it is no less than life itself. -A part of it, however, can be apprehended, for, although we feel -instinctively that the more the world changes the more that it is the -same[8] yet we cannot deny that it is the same with a difference. And -it is the difference which matters and is _matter_--that which appears, -is visible and audible--_the death-shape of the spirit_. - -It would be boring and futile to consider the methods which may -be invented of distributing music or of making music heard. That a -million persons listen to Beethoven by wireless or gramophone where, -previously, a thousand listened in a concert hall is one of those -statistical changes which it is beyond the wit of man to value. - -Fortunately there is a period fixed to the possibilities of “progress” -of this kind; and when every baby is born to Beethoven and to Freedom -then culture and statistics of culture, education and measurements -of education will have simultaneously ceased. There will be in those -days no newspaper interviews with Neo-Edisons because there will be no -newspapers; the people will have forgotten that it is interesting to -know whether a celebrity drinks de-caffeined coffee or dehydrogened -water because there will be no “people” and no celebrities. The Age of -Vulgarity will have passed. - -What sort of music will be listened to in those days? The music of -Orpheus, the music that comes out of darkness. - -According to Plato when Orpheus descended into hell and succeeded -by the strains of his mysterious music in softening the hearts of -Pluto and Persephone--who themselves were phantoms, prisoners of the -imagination, supernal beings chained to the bottom of Hades because -they were imagined there and existed only in _Imagination_--he brought -back with him but an Apparition. It was an Apparition that he gazed at -so fondly, and which nevertheless vanished before his eyes. His music -was that Apparition; those heavenly strains, mysterious, profound, -issuing from his mouth took form, the form of _Eurydice_--the -imagination of light in darkness, of love in the midst of death. - -The forms that music will take in the future are as yet unimagined; -but these forms will always be the form of Eurydice plucked by -Orpheus vainly out of Hell. And they will not be abstract forms but -the apparition of a real love which, bitten by the serpent of life, -descended into the kingdom of Pluto. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[8] The evolutionary theory will no longer be thought of as a -continuous or a discontinuous ascent; biological species will be -regarded as ripples on a pool; the Astronomical Universe will be -conceived as stationary. - - - THE END - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORPHEUS *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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J. Turner—A Project Gutenberg eBook - </title> - <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> - <style> /* <![CDATA[ */ - -body { - margin-left: 10%; - margin-right: 10%; -} - - h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { - text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ - clear: both; -} - -p { - margin-top: .51em; - text-align: justify; - margin-bottom: .49em; - text-indent: 1em; -} - -.p2 {margin-top: 2em;} -.p4 {margin-top: 4em;} -.p0 {text-indent: 0em;} - -hr { - width: 33%; - margin-top: 2em; - margin-bottom: 2em; - margin-left: 33.5%; - margin-right: 33.5%; - clear: both; -} - -hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} -@media print { hr.chap {display: none; visibility: hidden;} } - -hr.r5 {width: 5%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 47.5%; margin-right: 47.5%;} - -div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} -h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} - -table { - margin-left: auto; - margin-right: auto; -} -table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; width: 60%;} -table.autotable td, -table.autotable th { padding: 4px; } -.x-ebookmaker table {width: 95%;} - -.tdr {text-align: right;} -.page {width: 3em; vertical-align: top;} - -.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ - /* visibility: hidden; */ - position: absolute; - left: 92%; - font-size: smaller; - text-align: right; - font-style: normal; - font-weight: normal; - font-variant: normal; - text-indent: 0; -} - -.blockquot { - margin-left: 5%; - margin-right: 5%; -} - -.center {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em;} - -.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} - - -/* Images */ - -img { - max-width: 100%; - height: auto; -} -.w50 {width: 50%;} -.x-ebookmaker .w50 {width: 75%;} -.w10 {width: 10%;} -.x-ebookmaker .w10 {width: 13%;} - -.figcenter { - margin: auto; - text-align: center; - page-break-inside: avoid; - max-width: 100%; -} - -/* Footnotes */ -.footnotes {border: 1px dashed; margin-top: 1em;} - -.footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;} - -.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;} - -.fnanchor { - vertical-align: super; - font-size: .8em; - text-decoration: - none; -} - -/* Poetry */ -.poetry {text-align: left; margin-left: 30%; margin-right: 5%; text-indent: 0em;} -/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry in browsers */ -/* .poetry {display: inline-block;} */ -/* large inline blocks don't split well on paged devices */ -@media print { .poetry {display: block;} } -.x-ebookmaker .poetry {display: block; margin-left: 5%} - -.xbig {font-size: 2em;} -.big {font-size: 1.2em;} -.small {font-size: 0.8em;} - -abbr[title] { - text-decoration: none; -} - - /* ]]> */ </style> -</head> -<body> -<p style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Orpheus, by W. J. Turner</p> -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Orpheus</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:1em;'>or, The Music of the Future</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: W. J. Turner</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: January 22, 2023 [eBook #69856]</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p> - <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)</p> -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORPHEUS ***</div> - - - - -<h1>ORPHEUS</h1> - - - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="center"><span class="xbig"> -ORPHEUS</span><br> -<br> -OR<br> -<br> -<span class="big">The Music of the Future</span><br> -<p class="center p2"> -BY<br> -<br> -<span class="big">W. J. TURNER</span><br> -<i>Author of “The Seven Days of the Sun,” etc.</i></p> -<p class="center p2"><span class="figcenter" id="img001"> -<img src="images/001.jpg" class="w10" alt="Decorative image"> -</span></p> -<p class="center p4"> -<span class="smcap">New York</span><br> -<br> -<span class="big">E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY</span><br> -<br> -<span class="smcap">681 Fifth Avenue</span><br> -</p> - -</div> - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="center"> -Copyright, 1926<br> -<span class="smcap">By</span> E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY<br> -</p><hr class="r5"> -<p class="center"> -<i>All Rights Reserved</i><br> -</p><p class="center p4"> -Printed in the United States of America<br> -</p></div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2> -</div> - - - -<table class="autotable"> -<tr><th class="tdr">CHAPTER</th><th></th><th class="tdr">PAGE</th></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_I">I.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_I"><span class="smcap">Definition of Music</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_II">II.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_II"><span class="smcap">Is Music Knowledge or Life?</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_III">III.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_III"><span class="smcap">The General Idea of Progress</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_IV">IV.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_IV"><span class="smcap">The Idea of Progress in Music</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_V">V.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_V"><span class="smcap">Absolute Value</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_VI">VI.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_VI"><span class="smcap">Emotional Significance</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="tdr"> -<a href="#Chapter_VII">VII.</a></td><td><a href="#Chapter_VII"><span class="smcap">Beyond all Sense</span></a></td> -<td class="tdr page"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td></tr> -</table> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p> - - -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="center xbig">ORPHEUS</p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_I"><span class="smcap">Chapter I</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">Definition of Music</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>The dullest books on literature are the books which begin with a -history of the alphabet. A good history has its uses; however, this -book is not a history but a phantasy or, if you like, a philosophy. -For if it be a good phantasy it will be a good philosophy since all -philosophy is phantasy, or the imagination of love.</p> - -<p class="poetry"> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i lang="it">Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle</i></span><br> -</p> - -<p>We know, however, that philosophy degenerates from that love which -moves the spheres into that love of moving in the tracks of the spheres -which is called the love of knowledge, and philosophers are commonly -men who<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span> spend their lives describing the old tracks in which they are -running, and teaching how you also may keep your feet in them. So, too, -musician has come to mean a man who performs music—he plays over again -Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s studies;</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p class="poetry"><i lang="it">partout il parcourit et parfournit</i></p> -</div> - -<p>This performance of his is a tribute to our weakness and a sign of our -imperfection, and, since we are weak and imperfect, is necessary; but -I cannot state too clearly and decisively at the outset that music -is not the playing or the hearing of symphonies and sonatas but the -imagination of love.</p> - -<p>If music is not the imagination of love, if it is not a spiritual -act, what is it? The commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered -arrangement of sounds. But two words of this definition<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span> beg the -question. What is meant by “ordered,” and what by “arrangement”? Order -and arrangement imply meaning and significance. Can we have an order -that is an end in itself, is intrinsically satisfying, or beautiful, -or stimulating? But to whom? To man. But take away love from man, and -what is he? What is left is meaningless, even indescribable, for in -love all things exist and have their being. Music is the imagination -of love <em>in sound</em>. It is what man imagines of his life, and his -life is love. There are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds -of life, and it is possible that they may not all be imaginable <em>in -sound</em>. I say it is possible, I do not say it is probable. We do not -know at present, and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct -of mankind has abandoned sound as a means of expression. And<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span> that -may happen. There may be no unending future of music, only a limited -future. Or the world of music may be like the universe of Einstein, -“finite but unbounded.” And this indeed is my belief. It is a finite, a -closed world.</p> - -<p>Can you express the life of the vegetable world in music? The -imagination of a plant? The tree that rises to the sun throws its -shadow upon the mind of man; you may think you cannot throw that shadow -in music but you can sound forth the <em>shadow</em> of that shadow, -turn the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound, transform -those tremulous visual waves into auditory waves—not in the laboratory -of the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind. The musician may -do this. He may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of -verse—make a unique sensible<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span> impression upon the mind. Debussy’s -<i lang="fr">Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune</i> makes this impression of a -vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and Debussy’s music -is full of the imagination of a special order of life, the life of -trees, streams and lakes, the play of light upon water and on clouds, -the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight, and all -that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling -physical, all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to -the five senses. I do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of -which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not -be expressed in music.</p> - -<p>Music is the most concrete and physical of all the arts as it is -probably the earliest and most primitive. Beasts which cannot draw or -write can make<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span> expressive sounds, and the earliest men undoubtedly -communicated by sound before they learned to communicate by written -or painted signs. But whether at the other end of the scale there is -a limit to music’s power of expression no one can say. It is only -possible at this stage in the history of mankind to affirm that up -till now the highest, most spiritual powers of the human mind have -been able to find expression in music. There is nothing in the world’s -finest literature that surpasses what we may find in the world’s best -music, although, as we shall see later, music may have a virtue that is -entirely its own. But it will not surprise us to find ourselves limited -to the work of a very few composers when we ask for music that is as -highly organized as the finest poetry.</p> - -<p>Music in this respect has been in the past nearer to painting and to -sculpture<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span> than to poetry. As with the plastic arts its swifter and -stronger appeal to the senses is a source of weakness as of strength. -It is a source of weakness because in every artist there is a natural -tendency to slip into what comes easiest in his medium. In music it is -easier to make sounds that merely gratify or stimulate the sense of -hearing and the cruder emotions than to make sounds of a more complex -character which will express the subtler and finer life of a more -spiritual imagination. Infantile music is both easier to compose and -easier to hear than mature music, so the public and the musician find -themselves in a natural league in favour of the rawer kinds of music. -Thus the song of obvious and commonplace sentiment and the jazz tune of -blatant rhythm have universal popularity. Even an animal, one sometimes -fancies might<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span> be conscious of such music. Its combinations are so -simple that they may certainly be understood by every human creature. -“All Nature hears thy voice,” one might almost say of the saxophone, -and possibly it is the sort of music to which the mountains would skip -like rams could they but hear it.</p> - -<p>All life moves in rhythm. We know to-day that the old distinctions -between spirit and matter are superficial. When I was a student at -the School of Mines at the age of seventeen, learning organic and -inorganic chemistry, we were taught Mendeléeff’s Law which showed that -all the elements were multiples of a common denominator, the atom; -and since then it has been discovered that instead of the atom being -the smallest possible bit of matter, finite and irreducible, it is a -solar system—its sun and planets being<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span> bits of positive and negative -electricity. All that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth -century materialism has crumbled away to that word “bits.” We cannot -as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on “bits.” Our minds -like our feet need a solid something beneath them. It is paralysing to -conceive that the floor we stand upon, the chair we sit upon, consist -solely of rotating electrical forces, but when we think of “bits” -welded together we feel safe again, although actually these “bits” are -a pure mental fiction, and what we stand and sit upon is <em>motion</em>. -If the motion stopped we should fall into the bottomless pit, the -famous vacuum abhorred of Nature (alias Tophet in biblical language).</p> - -<p>My chemistry teachers would have been as scandalized to think that at -the bottom of their inorganic and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span> organic chemistry there was nothing -but motion, as my music teachers would have been scandalized to think -that at the bottom of the major and minor scales there was nothing but -love. They imagined that these were two entirely different worlds with -an infinite chasm between them. They thought that inorganic chemistry -was absolutely different from organic chemistry, although of course -they would have got into a hopeless muddle had they tried to prove -their belief—but then only fools and geniuses try to prove their -beliefs. Neither my chemistry nor my music teachers could ever explain -anything. One was simply asked to swallow whole and regurgitate whole -what was obviously mere unintelligible rigmarole. Those of us who had -this parrot-like faculty became in our turn Professors of Chemistry and -of Music.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p> - -<p>The great creative scientists of this age have disintegrated those -old hard ideas, and it now <em>appears</em> that the Universe is a -miracle of rhythm, and that “matter,” just like man, is kept going, -is maintained as a co-ordinated whole by some electrical urge or -spiritual impulse—at bottom it is perhaps the same thing, although -“thing” is a very inappropriate word. The conception of the “will -to live” has a profounder meaning for us now, and we realize that -if the “will to live” dies in a man the man himself dies. A recent -anthropologist, the late Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, F.R.S., in a book on -the decay of Melanesia, attributes the dying off of the population in -certain islands, unaffected by disease and with an abundance of food, -to life having become devoid of meaning to them after contact with an -alien and unassimilable civilization. They had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span> lost faith in their old -world of ideas without having the power to enter the completely new and -strange white man’s world. With the decay of their ancient beliefs they -took no pleasure in their ancient religious exercises. Joy and Ritual -simultaneously faded. <em>They lost the desire to live.</em> Each one of -us goes on living only so long as he desires to live, and the desire -varies in degree.</p> - -<p>We have to admit that we use these words “life” and “living” still -without knowledge of what they mean, but it is not necessary, nor do I -think it possible, to know what they mean. Knowledge is not important, -it is life that is important, and we can feel life if we cannot know -it. The only way in which we can know life is by creating it, and it -will be my duty in a later chapter to discuss this.</p> - -<p>In the meantime it is clear that the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span> line from Dante which I began by -quoting:</p> - -<p class="poetry"> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i lang="it">Amor che muove il mondo e l’altre stelle</i></span><br> -</p> - -<p class="p0">is no idle phantasy but a literal truth. The world about us -<em>seems</em> to be material, but exists in rhythm. It is a living -world, and it is kept alive by a spiritual force which we can best -describe as love, and I end this chapter with the definition with -which I began it. All art is the imagination of love, and music is the -imagination of love <em>in sound</em>.</p> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_II"><span class="smcap">Chapter II</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">Is Music Knowledge or Life?</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>What is knowledge? And what is musical knowledge? The latter question -is no doubt included in the former, but we shall see. We know by -experience that it is possible to learn the alphabet of a language. The -alphabet as such has no longer any meaning, that is why it is possible -to use it with meaning—in that form we call language. But, at the -beginning, these perfectly conventionalized, perfectly meaningless -symbols, A, B, C, D, etc., had each a meaning and a very definite -meaning. And those series of meanings (which have now shrivelled -into the scentless, savourless, unembodied twenty-six ghosts of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span> -alphabet) precluded by their very vitality the possibility of all other -meanings. Their life was death to all other life and not until they -were dead could others live. This strange phenomenon is an element in -the beautiful myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus must not behold the -face of Eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she -disappeared, for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to -the spirit which is returning with him, who is not the Eurydice that -was but the Eurydice that is to be. And the whole life of language is -in this process of continuous dying. Words die by becoming abstract, -then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members -of a more complicated life, the life of the sentence. Sentences die -and become idioms, idioms ideas, ideas theories, theories philosophies -and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span> religions. Every page of prose is a harvest raised from corpses -and under its flowering abundance dead bodies lie thickly buried. Then -a time comes when these extremely complex systems break up and the -words re-emerge in single units again, but with changed countenances -and expressions, to begin a new series of death-and-life existence. But -the letters themselves, of which all words are comprised, are finally -and forever dead—which is another way of saying they are immortal; -for they do not change as words change from one generation to another. -The “o” in dog does not differ from the “o” in god because “o” has no -longer individuality or meaning. What we call “knowledge” is that which -has become fixed and immortal, that which has ceased to live and have -being and is immutable. Obviously we cannot be said to know a thing -which is susceptible<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span> of change, which may differ to-morrow from what -it is to-day. Therefore we can only know what is unknowable, because -we only know what does not exist. This is no empty paradox. It is not -a play on the word “exist.” We may say we know the letters A, B, C, D, -etc., because they are the same for everybody; but they are only the -same for everybody because they are nothing to anybody. If I ask you -what A means to you it is impossible for you to tell me, since it means -no more to you than to me. A in itself is nothing, you can neither -think it nor feel it, you can only state it, and so it is, as I have -said, a fact. There are in all our literature only twenty-six absolute -facts. And they are facts merely because there is no life in them.</p> - -<p>In music there are also facts, so there is a part of music which we can -say we know. The modern European<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span> knows a certain number of musical -sounds which are the facts of music. They can be described in various -ways, but as European musical facts they are twelve semi-tones repeated -in series between two arbitrarily selected points which are the highest -and the lowest notes comfortably audible to the human ear. Each of -these semi-tones is an arbitrarily selected note or vibration number -chosen out of all the masses of vibrations which we call noises by -virtue of an inner unity, a mathematical symmetry which gives it form -and makes it a musical sound. But even this mathematical symmetry is -a fiction, a thing made by the human mind; and these sounds, like the -letters of the alphabet, have no life or meaning in themselves.</p> - -<p>But at this point a reservation must be made. For most, possibly for -all, the letters of the alphabet have a varied<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span> character, a character -which derives (<i>a</i>) from their different shapes, (<i>b</i>) from -their different sounds. The effect of their shape belongs to the world -of graphic art, the effect of their sound belongs to the world of -music. We may think of these impressions as the residuary fossils left -by giantlike primitive emotions which have stalked through those other -worlds. A certain artistic use can be made of them, and indeed we find -that every new wave of artistic expression is preluded by a breakdown -of the abstract combinations of symbols in which the symbols had become -most completely devitalized, and a return to a sense of a meaning, a -colour, a life in the symbol itself. This results in simplification, -which ultimately gives place to a new complication. What is called -progress in art consists mainly of this process. Whether there is -another kind of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span> progress underlying this process must be considered in -another chapter.</p> - -<p>Now that we have become clear as to what facts are we can perceive what -knowledge is. But I must prevent the danger of a mere logomachy between -reader and writer by stating at once that I am giving here definitions -of “knowledge” and “life” to which we must both adhere. If any reader -likes to give the name of “true knowledge” to what I call life and says -that what I call knowledge is not true knowledge at all, he is welcome -to do so. But I am going to use my own terms, and I shall continue to -use the term “life” instead of so idiotic a term as “true knowledge.”</p> - -<p>The knowledge of music, then, is the knowledge of the facts, and the -facts are, as we saw, the alphabet of music, the twelve artificial -semi-tones of the tempered scale. If a musician knows<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span> these and -knows those combinations of them which are called intervals—as the -combinations of letters are called words—he knows what the man knows -who knows the letters of the alphabet and has a vocabulary of words. -He may know them by sight, by sound, or by sight and sound. If only -by sight he is in the position of a man who can read and write but -not speak the words of a foreign language; if only by sound he is in -the position of a man who can speak the words of a foreign language -and understand them when spoken but cannot read or write them. The -reader can make this analogy more precise by subdivisions which I shall -not bother to make here. I will merely point out that the ordinary -auditor, the music-lover who is no musician, knows the facts by sound -only and may so know them with greater or less precision and depth of -impression.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span> That he should not know them by sight is immaterial to his -understanding what he hears, although it prevents his communicating -what he hears to anyone else. He is therefore technically equipped to -hear but not to compose music.</p> - -<p>Such knowledge may extend beyond the knowledge of the vocabulary of -words or chords to those more complicated combinations which have -also died and become facts—sentences, idioms, ideas; or, in music, -sequences, harmonies, melodies. All this knowledge represents so much -dead life which can be incorporated into a page of music as it can be -incorporated into a page of prose. When sentences, idioms and ideas -(or sequences, harmonies and melodies) have been used over and over -again so frequently as to have become immediately recognizable they -cease to have meaning;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span> because, as I pointed out at the beginning of -this chapter, having been used so often in so many different contexts -they have shrivelled to that residuum or abstraction which fits the -lot. Having shed all individuality they shed all expression, and what -was once life becomes knowledge. For example, what was a feeling in -Wagner becomes merely a major ninth in Vincent d’Indy. When the music -of Debussy was first heard it was an emotional experience. Presently -the intellect abstracted an element which it found commonly in that -experience, and that element was the whole-tone scale. Then everybody -by using the whole-tone scale could write music which superficially -sounded like Debussy’s; but such music had no meaning or life, it was -dead music, mere knowledge. And Debussy’s music itself tended to become -a perceptive<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span> and not an emotional experience. There is a universal -tendency to this intellectual formalizing, stereotyping process which -I have called knowledge or death; and contrasted with it everywhere -is a complementary process, the process of creation or life. But the -one is necessary to the other and all experience is the one becoming -the other. Just as life uses death—as when we eat meat and transform -it into living tissue—so art uses knowledge. Music, therefore, is -experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming -experience, and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in -the medium. Music is the experience of life and death in <em>sound</em>.</p> - -<p>Has sound in itself any meaning? I mean by this is there a quality, -virtue, life—call it what you will—specifically in sounds and the -combination of sounds which does not exist elsewhere—in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span> painting, -in sculpture, in architecture, in mathematics? I think there is; but -to go further into this would be to transgress the limits I have set -for myself, for here we touch on perhaps the profoundest problem -of philosophy. I shall be content to throw a little light upon it -by analogy. Experience in <em>sound</em> has an individuality which -separates it from experience in the other arts. This individuality in -the arts is comparable to individuality in animal and vegetable life -(the different and analysable virtues of an elephant, a butterfly, a -lily and a violet) and to personality in human life. It is an implicit -and unexplained factor in all that I shall have to say; but we have -to remember that it is the combining, the making of a harmony of this -character or idiosyncrasy with the composer’s imagination of love which -makes music. It is then that musical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span> <em>form</em> is created. What we -call musical genius is related to this individuality in some mysterious -and as yet unfathomable way and it would seem that there are degrees of -musical genius. But it is only when great musical genius is combined -with great human personality that we get what we may call the great -artist as distinct from the merely great musician.</p> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_III"><span class="smcap">Chapter III</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">The General Idea of Progress</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>It may be objected that my persuasion in Chapter I that music is the -imagination of love <em>in sound</em> and in Chapter II that music -is also the experience of life-and-death <em>in sound</em> are two -conclusions not only extraordinary in themselves but different. It will -be seen that they are not irreconcilable. My conception of the nature -of music must, if true, be such as to include all music, the music of -Sullivan, Puccini, Elgar and the Jazz-Kings as well as the music of -Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner; the songs of the folk, old and -new, peasant and urban, as well as the songs of Schubert and Hugo Wolf. -There is no difficulty in this.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span></p> - -<p>We have seen that the development of music is analogous to the -development of language. That this must be so is obvious when we -understand that both music and language are mental structures -contemporary with the human mind, reflecting its development and -having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing. No arts have -been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell. -The reason for this gives us a clue to the character of progress in -general. The senses of smell and taste are too intimate, too physically -diffused, too direct or primitive in effect to be controlled by the -mind. We may say that the body now short-circuits in these sensations -and that the mind is cut out. But when, in the past, the sense of touch -developed into the more complicated organs of the eye and the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span> ear<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> -which made touch <em>at a distance</em> possible, then what the mind -sensed was more highly organized and less direct and amorphous. Smells -and tastes may be compared with noises before the mind has organized -them into musical sounds, or with sensations which have not yet passed -through the imagination and become organized into emotions and ideas.</p> - -<p>It would seem that the history of man is the history of this process of -organization and that the organizations differ more from one another -than do the senses from which they grew. A Chinaman, for instance, is -much more like an Englishman in his body than in his language; he can -have a child by an Englishwoman with whom he is unable to speak.<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span></p> - -<p>What we think is understanding Chinese music when we hear it is -merely recognition of that organization of vibration, which we call -musical sounds, an organization common to the human ear in all mankind. -The major part of popular music consists of stringing these sounds -together for the mere pleasure of recognizing them—pleasure in their -organization as contrasted with the unorganized mass of mere noise -out of which they have been selected; also its use of them in simple -combinations expressing simple emotions—sensations of rudimentary -organization—which again are common to all mankind. It is because -language is not an organization of the merely visual or auditory -sensations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span> made by the physical eye and ear with which almost -everybody is born (there <em>are</em> colour-blind and tone-deaf people) -but a post-natal acquired and complicated mental construction that it -is totally unintelligible until learnt. So Chinese music does not mean -the same to us as to a Chinaman, nor does European music mean the same -to him as to a European, because it is not merely a construction of the -ear, but is also in some although in varying degree a construction of -the mind. Just as it took a multitude of lives and deaths to evolve the -human eye and ear—organs with which all men are now born—so it has -taken many generations of that mental development we call culture and -tradition to create a language that was more than onomatopoeia, and a -music that was more than recognizable and, therefore, agreeable sounds.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span></p> - -<p>There is, and I maintain there can be no absolute, universal, pure art -immediately intelligible to all men. It was the false idea that music -was purely sensual which led Pater to think that music was such an art -and that all other arts should attain its perfection. The development -of every art is a development farther and farther away from the mere -sensations upon which it is founded, and these developments make a web -of experience which is constantly being rewoven and renewed (probably -without a single strand ever being lost or destroyed) and, without -this, music would dissolve into meaningless sounds. We look upon the -eye and the ear as beautiful complex creations of life. We think of -them as physical entities because their creation is so far back in life -that it belongs to the sub-human or animal epoch, and so they have -become physical things,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span> if not material objects. But this power of -becoming <em>physical</em> (life taking on flesh, the spirit achieving -form) or <em>material</em> (electricity becoming molecules of hydrogen, -lead, etc.) is the process which I have described as death; and as that -necessary and important death, death the complement of life. But, as -I have already shown, a third kind of death, other than the material -and the physical, is that of <em>intellectual</em> structure—known -variously as tradition, belief, dogma, logic, technique or, most -comprehensively, as knowledge. Just as a multitude of deaths were -necessary to the evolution of the eye and the ear so a multitude of -deaths (an Encyclopædia is a mental cemetery) are necessary to the -evolution of the mind. The past experience of music which every trained -musician possesses is such knowledge. If he merely repeats it, copies -out of the past stored in his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span> mind, in the mind of his generation, in -the culture he and his generation have inherited, he is a mere academic -musician and not a creative artist. But there are degrees in this as -in everything else. It is not the possession of the tradition which -makes a musician academic and lifeless, it is the failure to use the -traditions to express himself; and this is a failure in musical life. -A musical mind which is a mere body of musical tradition is like a -detached ear or a plucked out eye—an ear which does not hear or an eye -which does not see. The life of hearing is not in the organ, not in -what has been heard—of which it is the physical representation, the -<em>death-shape</em>—it is in creation, the hearing of a new thing. And -creation is that movement from life to death, from soul to substance, -from the spirit to the form which is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span> the imagining forth of love, for -love alone is a creative motive.</p> - -<p>And the forms of love vary from the flowering and seeding of plants -to the music of Beethoven. It is not a progress from bad to good, it -is not a retrogression from good to bad. It is rather a process which -fills the Universe with death—death in myriads of lovely forms, from -the form of the wood-violet to the form of the symphony. And this -process is life. And life increasing the varieties of death is the -general principle of progress. What is the purpose of this process? We -do not know. But we can say that its purpose is delight. <em>Ecstasy -clothing Himself in a thousand Forms.</em> The Universe delighting in -itself preserves itself in death, for in death the imagination of the -spirit is made immortal.</p> - - -<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> How was this achieved? No biologist can tell us, but we -shall not go far wrong in seeing here again the created organs of -Desire.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a> Here we can find a conclusive argument in proof of the -superiority of sentiment to sense in sexual experience. Sentiment is -non-existent among animals and it is very faint in the lower human -types but in the highest European types it now almost completely -controls the sexual sense.</p> - -</div> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_IV"><span class="smcap">Chapter IV</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">The Idea of Progress in Music</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>In the history of the world as we know it we discover that not all -forms of death are immortal. There are animals which are extinct, -there are plants which have disappeared, there are flowers which bloom -no more. In vain has life fixed their images in that immortality of -automatic repetition which we call death. Even death, we seem to find, -is occasionally an illusion and its sleep is not more eternal than -a man’s dream. It is probable that all things as <em>things</em> are -perishable; and we have no reason to believe that even the music of -Beethoven will last for ever, or even for as long as man lasts. But -there is the problem why some<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span> things last longer than others, and -this perhaps raises the question of value, of goodness. Here is a -new element in the idea of progress. Is it possible to discover any -principle in the history of music which explains why, already, Bach has -outlasted Frohberger?</p> - -<p>If we say that Frohberger is superfluous because Bach is the same as -Frohberger, only better, we are saying something very difficult to -understand, for how would it be possible to prove that two things can -be the same and yet different, one of them being better—except by -making goodness depend on quantity? But, obviously, to think that Bach -is three Frohbergers is not the same as thinking he is three times as -good as Frohberger. As the ordinary man speaks this is not at all what -he means. We definitely do think Bach is better than Frohberger, not -that he is Frohberger<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span> plus a Frohberger fraction. I submit that we -think so because we find all Frohberger in Bach plus something more -which is not Frohberger. But this has a tremendous consequence for, -if true, it means that Frohberger is not unique. He is included in -Bach. And may we not think that the music which vanishes from human -consciousness is the music which is not unique and that so long as -a composer is unique his music will be heard? I believe so. It is -reasonable to think that every act, everything created has value. Our -minds cannot imagine a Universe in which that would not be true; but we -can imagine complex organizations incorporating simpler organizations, -which then cease to have a separate existence. Therefore it is possible -that nothing goes out of the Universe, and the idea that a thing may be -lost seems illusion. Our minds find it difficult to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span> imagine an exit -from the Universe. <em>Where?</em> But the incorporation of the lesser -within the greater remains, as stated, a mechanical idea. We can find -no satisfaction in a mere increasing complexity of structure. “If -that is all that makes Bach better than Frohberger”—we can imagine -someone saying—“I never want to listen to music again.” The process, -we feel, must have a purpose or a meaning. Well, we have forgotten -one vital element. Delight. The Universe is the imagination of its -delight. If the purpose of the Universe were merely to attain to an -ever higher degree of complexity for its own sake it would not be -littered with these innumerable shapes of death—the violet, the lily, -the rose, the cedar, the oak, the pine, the butterfly, the tiger, the -elephant, and all other lovely and curious structures. Even man has -not supplanted the ape,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span> nor has the fugue of Bach annihilated the -song of the shepherd boy. We may think all these things are unique and -that is why they still persist. But what about Frohberger, was he not -unique? Why has Frohberger vanished? For if Frohberger was not unique -how did he come to appear? Not to be unique is not to exist. Yes, -but his uniqueness may not have been in his music. Here at last we -have it. And <em>his</em> music does not exist since there is no music -which can be said to be his. This is a different kind of non-existence -to that of the Dinosaur, the Dodo, the Great Auk. Although their -death-shapes no longer repeat themselves upon the earth they have not -completely vanished. Their images live in the imagination of man, -vivid, individual, unique. We have no such image of Frohberger’s music. -It is a shrivelled, meaningless ghost, a letter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span> in the alphabet of -music, which has in itself no life. Frohberger’s music is not like -the Great Auk, an isolated death-shape of the physical world, nor -like the Centaur, an isolated death-shape of the intellectual world, -its position in music is that of one of those intermediates which, -like the “missing link,” can never be found because the mind works -<i lang="la">per saltum</i>. Frohberger and the “missing link” are for ever lost -in the gaps. All that is without residuary value, all that has been -completely incorporated in a new structure disappears thus because it -slips through the mesh of the mind—not because the mind is not fine -enough to retain the most minute differences, but because it chooses -not to perceive. This reconciles the pre-Bach existence of Frohberger’s -music with its present non-existence and delivers us from the apparent -contradiction;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span> for it allows us to make what is, philosophically, a -necessary assumption, namely, that no two things are ever exactly the -same, and consequently that Bach’s music does not contain Frohberger’s -music absolutely. Therefore the equation is not:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Bach = B(ach) + F(rohberger)</p> -</div> - -<p class="p0">but</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>Bach = B + (F-X)</p> -</div> - -<p class="p0">X being that unknown quantity which is Frohberger’s uniqueness and -which we to-day cannot perceive.</p> - -<p>But although art feeds on knowledge as life feeds on death at the same -time creating more knowledge, as life creates more death—<em>Ecstasy -clothing Himself in Forms</em>—yet there remains much that is -mysterious. Why there are different forms of art is a question which -insistently recurs. A comparison of music with the other arts in -order to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span> discover a value specific and exclusive to music is not -likely to enlighten us. Painters talk of “pictorial construction” as -the specifically painter’s element which in all good graphic art is -wedded to the illustration, psychology, representation or whatever -other content a picture may yield, be it ancient or modern. They point -out that the spectator is not emotionally moved by the representation -of tears but by the rhythm of lines and the recession of planes. The -good writer knows that a description of a sad event is not in itself -saddening, it may even be comic; but unlike the painter he has no -technical term for this essential quality without which literature -is mere verbiage—unless, indeed, we apply the word “poetic” to this -quality, as we have every right to do. Painting which is without this -vital element—call it “pictorial representation,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span> “significant form,” -or what you will—is not art but knowledge or science.<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Literature -which is without this “poetic” quality is, again, mere knowledge, mere -fiction. We have no need to seek for examples. A dozen famous names -leap to our minds. Rather have we to seek for that literature which is -poetic. Similarly in music there is a specific, purely musical quality -without which music also is mere science. This quality I will call -melodic imagination.</p> - -<p>And here an interesting fact emerges. In all three arts the valuable -element, the element of life is linked with the imagination. In -painting pictorial imagination, in literature verbal imagination, in -music melodic imagination—<em>imagination</em> always is the magical<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span> -essence, the power referred to in the lines:</p> - -<p>“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word -was God.”</p> - -<p>And we may be sure that there can be no art unless the word is made -flesh—in the forms of painting, literature, or music—and dwells among -us. But when we ask ourselves why it should take the form of painting -or of words, or of music, it is impossible to give an answer. We can -only echo: Why the lily, the rose, the violet? Why the tiger, the -elephant, the antelope? Why the Moon, Venus, and the Stars? <em>Ecstasy -clothing Himself in Forms.</em></p> - -<p>And still we have failed to discover in music any principle of progress -other than increasing complexity of organization and a multiplication -of lovely deaths. A principle which does<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span> not as yet satisfy our -instincts since it seems quantitative rather than qualitative. But -perhaps we are on the verge of a discovery.</p> - - -<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a> Such according to eminent critics is the work of the -painter Sargent and, for my part, I have no difficulty in seeing that -what they say is just.</p> - -</div> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_V"><span class="smcap">Chapter V</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">Absolute Value</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>It may appear fantastic to assert that art is the only sphere where -absolute values appear, and that the function of art in the Universe -is to create absolute values, but it may be true. It is impossible -to avoid the insistent demand of the human instinct for absolute -values. This exists, an insatiable craving which will not rest content -with the good but demands the better. And yet it is impossible to -discover values that are absolute in themselves. The very notion is -a meaningless abstraction. I do not even believe we can prove that -Beethoven’s music is better music than Mozart’s or that Shakespeare’s -poetry is better than Milton’s, or <em>vice versa</em>, unless we<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span> first -of all limit the idea of music or poetry to something intellectually -measurable. For example it would be difficult to convince all -music-lovers that Bach’s counterpoint was better than Beethoven’s, or -that Palestrina’s was better than Bach’s; for what is to determine -“good” counterpoint? Very few musicians would accept any individual -theorist’s rules—all rules being mere abstractions or generalizations -from practice, and varying according to their historic date, so that -even the academic theory of one age differs from that of another. Even -in judging a fugue, one has ultimately to fall back upon expression, -significance, or meaning, and who is to say—and on what universally -acceptable principle is it to be said—that Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue is -better than Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” Op. 133?</p> - -<p>There is exactly the same difficulty<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span> in poetry. In an excellent and -well-known book on the English Sonnet a definition is given of perfect -sonnet form which is intellectually satisfactory. But we find that most -of the greatest English sonnets are not written in this form, while -thousands of mediocre sonnets observe it correctly. The same is true of -Bach’s Fugues. You cannot value them according to their correctness.<a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> -What then becomes of our “perfect” sonnet and our “perfect” fugue? -Each is apparently an unreal abstraction—like all other attempts at -creating absolute value. But are these “absolute” ideas necessarily -valueless in themselves? I do not think so, for they correspond to and -are the formalization or <em>death-shapes</em> of desires ineradicably -rooted in the human soul, those desires which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span> create all values, and -that profounder urge which is satisfied with none.</p> - -<p>What is important to recognize is the diversity of these desires and -to understand that it is the diversity (in itself profoundly desired) -which nullifies standards. We can say that this fugue is more perfect -than that fugue—having made an abstract and definable conception -of the fugue form and separated it from all life. Criticism is an -application of such abstract conceptions—derived by analysis from the -practice of artists—from all past works of art to one present work of -art and, again, backwards, from all existent works of art to one past -work of art. The former is historical criticism (when a composer is -judged only on what preceded him) and the latter is, or should be, the -absolute æsthetic criticism. But what prevents its being so is that it -leaves out the future. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span> work of art is judged by the present and -the past but the future is unknown and the judgment is thereby vitiated -and is not and cannot be an absolute judgment. But this does not mean -that the future does not exist <em>now</em>, somewhere. To demonstrate -this, however, would take me on too far-stretching a parabola. I would -merely draw attention to this reservation, and say that its relevance -will appear later.</p> - -<p>My belief is that when I say, as I do emphatically say, that Beethoven -is a greater composer than Bach and find my assertion difficult -or impossible to prove I am judging by an instinctive but not yet -intellectually formalized sense of value, or values, which will only -emerge in the future to take a place among all the other principles -and standards—the totality of life in its sum of <em>death-shapes</em> -so far created. So we see there can be no such thing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span> as a perfect -fugue-in-itself but only the idea of one. The actual fugue must -have a meaning, it must be an expression of life; a fugue-in-itself -without relation to life, perfect and completely, is an impossibility. -Nevertheless a musician like Bach finds in himself the fugue-idea as -well as the fugue-emotion, the fugue-form as well as the fugue-content, -and there is a constant struggle between them to coincide exactly and -to materialize in one indivisible unity. Sometimes the fugue idea -prevails and sometimes the fugue-emotion prevails, and the result -always is an imperfect fugue. But this imperfection in all its varying -degrees is the musical reality. Absolute perfection, absolute unity is -annihilation, the end of all things and the attainment of Nirvana. But -even the fugue-idea is not a constant unchangeable abstraction or fixed -shape. It is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span> modified by the actual fugues which are created, for it -is an abstraction, a general principle from examples, an induction -from particulars; and as fresh particulars arise, the induction must -be modified. Again, I spoke of the content or fugue-emotion, but this -fugue-emotion is not—except perhaps in the simplest and most feeble -examples—single but, on the contrary, multiple. Who is to appraise -or range in order of value these emotions? How is it to be done? The -belief that any single judgment may do it—the mind of any one critic, -expert or practitioner—is preposterous. But this does not suspend -individual judgment or make it vain, since it is through the conflict -or discord of all genuine individual judgments that new conceptions -or attempts at concord emerge. This conflict arises from unsatisfied -desire and, in the end, we think<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span> Beethoven better than Bach only -because Beethoven more profoundly satisfies our desire or satisfies -a deeper desire than any satisfied by Bach. Just as new conceptions -emerge or are induced from discordant or unrelated conceptions so -new emotions and new desires are induced from the discordance or -conflict of our desires. This process of organization would seem -infinite—a conception which I, personally, find intolerable and -incomprehensible—were it not for a strange phenomenon, and this -phenomenon is that ultimately at the core of all men there seems to be -the same desire.</p> - -<p>The world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters, -sculptors, scientists, mathematicians, musicians and poets. We may not -be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that Beethoven is -greater than Bach, that Bach is greater than Haydn,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span> that Palestrina -is greater than Verdi, but we are all strangely certain that it is so. -What are we to make of this? Evidently there is a unity somewhere in -our diversity, and it is more than a lowest common factor—a far-away -dim primitive element, never quite lost sight of but growing ever -fainter, linking all men and all art. It is not that touch of nature -making the whole world kin, for that—although it might enable us to -have some sympathy with all things—would not enable us to range them -in value. Such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally -relate us. It is, on the contrary, by our very essence, by the most -spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united. We are not -unanimous about Scriabin, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, -Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Dvorak, just as we are not unanimous -about<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span> Aubrey Beardsley, Sargent, El Greco, or about Byron, Tennyson, -and Conrad.</p> - -<p>Apparently each of us carries within him a fundamental note which -picks out all the notes struck upon us by nature and mankind and -ranges them in a series. And it is this which gives to each one his -values. The fundamental note which any individual carries may not be -the fundamental note of mankind, or of the Universe, but it must have -a more or less simple relationship with them. Thus the values of one -individual are true for all others, within their limits. They are real -values though not necessarily ultimate values; they can and will be -related to all other values but can only be so related through a more -fundamental note—hence the importance of such a note. It is my belief -that the profoundest, most fundamental note in music, so far, has -been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span> struck by Beethoven. There is nothing in the music of any other -composer which his does not comprehend. But his, on the other hand, has -a new foundation to which no other music reaches.</p> - -<p class="center"><span class="figcenter" id="img002"> -<img src="images/002.jpg" class="w50" alt="Music notes"> -</span></p> - -<p>But this analogy of the fundamental note must be understood merely as -an analogy, suggestive rather than explanatory. Of all the simpler -musical intervals I find that of the seventeenth the most satisfying -to my ear. I may wonder what is the secret of the purity of its -concord—so much greater than that of the perfect fifth or the perfect -fourth, which at first sight seem to be more intimate relationships. -Then I discover that the ratio of the vibrations<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span> of the two notes -of the seventeenth is 1:5, whereas that of the perfect fifth is 2:3, -of the perfect fourth 3:4. Stated thus this may not mean much to the -non-mathematically minded reader but it denotes that the seventeenth -is a perfect and not a syncopated interval. That is to say there is no -syncopation of the vibrations of the two notes, but they beat together -in a closer more united rhythm than that of a perfect fifth or perfect -fourth.</p> - -<p>But the twelfth</p> - -<p class="center"><span class="figcenter" id="img003"> -<img src="images/003.jpg" class="w50" alt="Music notes"> -</span></p> - -<p class="p0">(I use the tenor or C clef partly because it is more obscure and will -annoy those who are only accustomed to the treble and bass clefs) -has a ratio of 1:3 which also is not a syncopated interval but has -the same kind of perfection as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span> that of the octave (1:2) and the -seventeenth (1:5). Yet the twelfth is not so pleasing an interval as -the seventeenth, and the octave is inferior to them both. Nevertheless -the twelfth and octave are mathematically closer relationships than the -seventeenth. Evidently there is another principle to be discovered, and -I will call it the principle of affinity in unlikeness and illustrate -it by an analogy which may seem far-fetched but which I believe to be -illuminating and significant.</p> - -<p>Let us imagine that the unison or note A represents oneself; that -the relationship of the octave (1:2) represents that of father and -daughter; the relationship of the perfect fifth (2:3) that of brother -and sister; the relationship of the perfect fourth (3:4) that of two -brothers; the relationship of the twelfth (1:3) that of male and -female cousins—in which a new element<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span> that of sexual affinity, is -introduced, bringing with it a deeper reverberation although the blood -relationship is more distant. And, finally, the relationship of the -seventeenth, that of unrelated lovers which—although the most distant -of all in blood—strikes a still profounder sympathy and beauty. It is -now possible to understand more clearly why my analogy of the relation -of Beethoven to the rest of music as that of a more fundamental note is -not to be taken in its literal meaning. With Beethoven, a new element -came into music, an element of such sublimity and beauty that its -advent into the world of imagination is comparable in importance with -that of sex in the physical world.</p> - -<p>Sex as we know it did not always exist; it does not exist in the -inorganic world, hardly in the vegetable world, but dimly in the animal -world. It is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span> a human discovery, and upon that new more fundamental -note (fundamental not in the vertical sense but in a focal sense) -rises the whole wealth of man’s intellectual and physical harmony. -But even in sex we have not touched an absolute. The presage of a -still profounder intimacy trembles fitfully here and there in music -throughout the historical European period. In the music of Palestrina, -of Byrd, of all the rarer spirits up to Bach, Mozart and Wagner there -are fitful gleams of a more central desire until, finally, a love that -plumbs deeper than even the love of sex rings forth unmistakeably in -the music of Beethoven and immediately creates for us a new hierarchy -of values. And so here we find for the time being an Absolute. The -world of art, we find, resembles both the world of the atom and the -world of solar space. There are greater<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span> and lesser planets and greater -and lesser satellites. We can imagine that if there were inhabitants -upon the Moon they might think the Earth was the primary fact of -their being, since it was the focal point of their orbit, whereas -the Sun would seem so eccentrically placed as to be an irregular and -incomprehensible singularity; until by a process of more profound -imagining they conceived the more fundamental though more distant -relationship in which it stood to them.</p> - -<p>Just as the Sun is the centre of the only system of the physical -universe so far formulated—for no centre has been found to the -innumerable suns of the stellar universe—so Beethoven is our temporary -Absolute in the world of music. And just as the Sun is the source of -all vegetable and animal life upon the earth, so I believe that in art<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span> -we find the vital spirit which animates our human life. Thus it would -seem to be true—as I suggested we might discover—that the function of -art in the world is to create absolute values in the imagination upon -which the human species can continually re-create its intellectual, -moral, and physical structures. And if this is so it means that in the -values of art we approach most nearly to Truth.</p> - - -<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[4]</a> See Mr. Harvey Grace’s excellent book on the organ works -of J. S. Bach.</p> - -</div> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_VI"><span class="smcap">Chapter VI</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">Emotional Significance</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>A technical analysis of the art of music as practised in Europe during -the past few hundred years would be interesting, but it lies outside -the scope of this book. What is relevant is to consider the emotional -and intellectual significance of the music composed during that -period. Folksong, from which most great composers have consciously -or unconsciously drawn, is the emotional substratum of all European -music. At its best it is simple, sensuous and passionate—the heart-cry -of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life, whose -joys are too short, or whose griefs are too enduring. Where it chiefly -differs from similar, later, more sophisticated music is in the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span> -simple intensity of the emotion. In a society more subject to extreme -vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it -was easier, and natural, to believe that mere irresponsible “accident” -or mischance separated men from happiness.<a id="FNanchor_5" href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> In a beautiful old -Neapolitan song collected by Madame Geni Sadero the singer bewails -the loss of his love carried off by Moorish pirates in a raid on the -Italian coast. Such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody, -rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest -composers. These melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity, of -a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment, richly -provided with compensations. Any attempt at such<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span> sincerity would -to-day be insincere.<a id="FNanchor_6" href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Equally insincere would be any modern -composer’s attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the -Sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the Sun in a wonderful -song included in the Sadero collection. In our civilized society man -knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday, and that -next year or the year after he may love again. It is not Moorish -pirates, or the accident of plague, or the malefic interference of -an unfriendly God that will bear away his happiness. It is happiness -itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his -possessions and asks himself, what he used not to ask himself: “Why do -I live?”</p> - -<p>I do not lament this change as a disaster. I merely wish to point out<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span> -the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the -music of yesterday. Those who believe that music is a purely abstract -art (mere negation this, which I have abundantly shown to be empty of -reality) will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man’s life; -but the great composers themselves knew better:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“The error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a Means -of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of -Expression (the Drama) has been made a means.”</p> -</div> - -<p>Those words of Wagner’s show clearly that to Wagner, as Mr. Newman -aptly puts it:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it -till it was ‘workable’ and then to weave it along with others of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span> -same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined -for him by tradition—this was something he could not imagine himself -doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire -musicians engaged in.... Wagner always protested against the current -fashion of performing Beethoven’s symphonies as if they were nothing -more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns.”</p> -</div> - -<p>My preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why Wagner’s -instinct was right, although his mode of expression is so inexact as -to be often confusing and misleading.<a id="FNanchor_7" href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> What Wagner means is that -intellectual forms or <em>death-shapes</em> are given no significance by -being manipulated,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span> dove-tailed, and re-arranged by the intelligence -working from rules and examples. It is “life” that gives significance, -a spiritual urge into creation, and where this is absent there is no -artistic creation. We may perceive by his use of the word “drama” -that Wagner’s conception of “life” was a limited one; but he could -only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his -recognizing this. But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an -artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic -or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute -composers. The difference between all these composers (including -Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the -individual <em>psyche</em>—not in their musical faculty as composers. -It was natural to each one of them that his vital<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span> activity should run -into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has -made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. But -this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for—to quote Mr. Newman -again, since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate -here than the words of a poet or sculptor, besides being admirably -clear—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“It is only the most superficial of psychologists and æstheticians -who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest. Our -perceptions of sight, of taste, of touch, of hearing are inextricably -interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of -sensations in terms of another, as when we speak of the colour of -music, the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of -musical tone. In every poet there is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span> something of the painter and the -musician; in every musician something of the poet and the painter; in -every painter something of the musician and the poet. The character -of the man’s work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the -tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or -weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts.”</p> -</div> - -<p>Thus we can explain the sensuous individuality of an artist as being a -result of the special and peculiar bias and intermixture of his senses. -But this is only a part of his character or personality, and it is my -argument that it is the minor (though essential and indispensable) -and not the major or most important part. For besides this physical -individuality he has a spiritual individuality. The former is the -instrument, the latter is the “life,”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span> and, in the case of music, the -physical expression, the communication, the tangible (eye and ear are -“touch” at a distance) <em>death-shape</em> is the musical creation or -form—a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart or Wagner opera, a -Schubert song.</p> - -<p>The importance of Beethoven—which Wagner was the first to -understand—lay in that stupendous stream of “life” within him which -burst through all the old academic forms, as the sap bursts through a -tree into colour and blossom, and strewed the history of music with -those gigantic skeletons of spiritual life which we know as his works. -But we have yet to discover the meaning of these compositions. Their -full meaning can only be felt, it cannot be re-stated—except when his -works are adequately performed; but they have a characteristic to which -I shall try to give a verbal<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span> construction because I think it immensely -important. It is not a quality for which there exists a word, or a -phrase, or even a poem; but it is a particular kind of desire. “<em>Like -as a hart desireth the water-brooks so thirsteth my soul after the -living God</em>,” that—were it not for its association with the desires -of Baptists, Methodists, Wesleyans, Anglicans, Catholics, Mohammedans, -Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Mormons, and all those bodies of -people known to-day as “religious”—would perhaps be suggestive. At -any rate it would serve to distinguish the quality of this desire or -passion from the passion which created <em>Tristan und Isolde</em>. And, -magnificent and beautiful as that was, its magnificence compared with -the magnificence of Beethoven’s passion is as the magnificence of a -coloured duck to a black swan. The simile is<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span> a totally unworthy one, -for we have nothing to which we can compare Beethoven. We can easily -find similes for Wagner, but Beethoven is a <em>rara avis</em>.</p> - -<p>It is natural to the young to be idealists, an old idealist is -generally either a rogue or a fool—unless he happens to be a -Beethoven. The young find something stirring in their hearts when -listening to Beethoven which they never find when listening to Bach, -Mozart or Wagner, great as these composers are. Beethoven awakes a -feeling so romantic, so idealistic, of so fine and exquisite a bloom -that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret. -What Beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous -delights of Debussy and Strauss, from the fatiguing excitements of -Stravinsky and Jazz, from the gaieties of Verdi and Rossini, from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span> the -sentimental nostalgia of Brahms, from the solid satisfaction of Bach, -from the sensitive melancholy of Mozart and from the lesser loves of -Wagner; but why it does so we cannot tell.</p> - -<p>“Had I been willing,” said Beethoven to Schindler in 1823, in the -course of a conversation about the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, “to -surrender thus my vital power and my life what would have been left of -the best and noblest in me?” What a different ring this plain statement -has beside the rhetorical pæans to renunciation on the lips of Wagner, -who was satisfied to accept what would never have satisfied Beethoven.</p> - -<p>It is a peculiarity of Beethoven that he can use the words “best” and -“noblest” without making an intelligent man laugh up his sleeve. If we -do succeed in laughing it is with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span> the wrong side of our mouths. The -very words “good,” “noble,” “spiritual,” “sublime,” have all become in -our time synonymous with humbug. In Beethoven’s music they take on a -new and tremendous significance and not all the corrosive acid of the -most powerful intellect and the profoundest scepticism can burn through -them into any leaden substratum. They are gold throughout. Am I wrong -in thinking this an achievement without parallel in the modern world? -Point to me in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, <em>anywhere</em>, one -other artist who has recreated (not paid lip-service to) the meaning of -good and left to us the <em>imagination</em> of a love transcending both -the sacred and the profane. There is none.</p> - -<p>We cannot live without values and at present we cannot conceive a -state when men would not ask themselves:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span> “Why do I live?” “Is life -worth living?” This is the theme which touches us to-day when we marry -and settle down with our love, measure the spots on the Sun, and fear -neither plagues, pirates, nor eclipses:</p> - -<p class="poetry"> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">“Here I am an old man in a dry month,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I was neither at the hot gates</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nor fought in the warm rain</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nor knee-deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bitten by flies, fought.</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">My house is a decayed house,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 10em;">I am an old man,</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A dull head among windy spaces.”</span><br> -</p> - -<p>The bravest, the most intelligent, the most sensitive are oppressed -with that profound sense of the futility of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span> life which Mr. Eliot -expresses so admirably in the above lines. It is, indeed, the constant -burden of the most characteristic of our modern poets:</p> - -<p class="poetry"> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">“This is the way the world ends</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">This is the way the world ends</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">This is the way the world ends</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Not with a bang but a whimper.”</span><br> -</p> - -<p>Yes, we are convinced. This <em>is</em> the way the world ends and -we have no more faith in anything. Democracy, Liberty, Equality, -Fraternity, have all been added to the list of the Great Superstitions. -Mussolini and Lenin have made moonshine of Socialism and Communism. -God is a word used only in treatises on tribal magic, when it is spelt -correctly as god. Love has been appropriated by the writers of silly -magazine stories and even sillier novels. All honest men are reduced -to silence before the daily avalanche of fraudulent lies from pulpit, -printing<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span> press, parliament and platform. Everywhere men speak with the -tongues of serpents and the minds of manufacturers of chewing gum. And -deep in all men’s hearts there is only one thought:</p> - -<p class="poetry"> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">“I grow old—I grow old</span><br> -<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”</span><br> -</p> - -<p>But in the midst of futility and inanity, in the midst of desperation -and despair there sounds the music of Beethoven which says without -bombast or credo: “This is <em>not</em> the way the world ends.” And says -it in such a way that we are forced to listen. We listen to Beethoven -when we would listen to nobody else because he is a man without -any of the world’s illusions. How feeble and superficial seems the -disillusionment of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s poems compared with the agony of -the Cavatina in the B flat Quartet with its mysterious pause—as if -the pulse of the whole<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span> Universe were stopped and might not continue; -of the Fugue in B flat Op. 133; and of the last Pianoforte Sonata -which Beethoven wrote. In this last Sonata we feel the agony of a -man whose imagination is grappling with some insupportable horror. -Let us conceive the Captain of a ship standing on its bridge in a -calm, unconscious sea. The boats are useless because land does not -exist anywhere. From the deck come the cries, curses and weeping of -the doomed crew, who are only his own embodied emotions, for he is -really alone. Slowly they are going down into the unruffled water. -The Captain does not shake his fist defiantly into the sky and deny -that he is going down, but knowing that he is going down never to -return sinks passionately into the sea. Such is the mind and temper of -Beethoven. There is agony but no whimper, and if that<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span> is not ending -with a bang I don’t know what is. In the music of Beethoven there are -no anodynes, no lullings of sense, no deceits of the intelligence, but -pure <i lang="la">virtus</i>. And this <i lang="la">virtus</i> is thrilling absolutely, -without reservations. After the tremendous drama of the first movement -of the C minor Sonata, for example—a drama in which there is the whole -ecstatic misery of life—we are not assuaged by a dream. The conflict -does not cease. That wonderful Arietta—surely the most wonderful thing -in all music—is no bringer of peace and resignation. In it something -passes away but <em>its passing away is an act of creation not of -extinction</em>. It is this which gives Beethoven’s music its peculiar -significance, for Creation not Nirvana is the essence of Beethoven. It -has its root therefore in human personality and may be most accurately -described as the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span> supremest imagination of love in human art. But -though beyond the conception of the Neapolitan fisherman mourning for -his lost bride it does not lessen but enriches that ancient love-song, -making it impossible for us to feel that it was meaningless.</p> - -<p>And if anyone should say that the question: “Why do I live?” has not -been answered, I reply that Beethoven has rendered it ridiculous.</p> - - -<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_5" href="#FNanchor_5" class="label">[5]</a> The ancient Greeks with characteristic intellectual power -did not believe in mere irresponsible accident.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_6" href="#FNanchor_6" class="label">[6]</a> Compare for example the feebleness of our contemporary -love-songs and ballads.</p> - -</div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_7" href="#FNanchor_7" class="label">[7]</a> For example we can ask nothing more than that a composer -should write “exciting musical patterns.” It all depends upon what is -meant by “exciting.”</p> - -</div> -</div> -<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span></p> - -<h2 class="nobreak" id="Chapter_VII"><span class="smcap">Chapter VII</span><br><span class="small"><span class="smcap">Beyond all Sense</span></span></h2></div> - - -<p>Music will not end with Beethoven. It is possible that the very -problems that confronted him and still confront us will fade out of -the imagination just as those political problems which occupied so -much of the attention of the historical world from the Greek Republics -to the British Empire are ceasing to exist before our very eyes. -And when we think of the religious dissensions of Christendom and -reflect on the questions which once divided father from son, sect -from sect, church from church, it is with difficulty that we can give -them a meaning intelligible to our minds, much less feel any shadow -of the life that was once in them. In the memory of living men,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span> -heartburning intellectual problems have become empty phrases. Darwin, -Huxley, and the Anglican Bishops all seem as unreal as the waxworks of -Madame Tussaud and are seen to be the complementary phenomena of an -intellectual nightmare. No one to-day imagines that Truth wears the -strange Victorian get-up of any of these gentlemen.</p> - -<p>Similarly the sociological phantoms of the age of Bernard Shaw and -H. G. Wells, of Karl Marx and Lenin are cutting the last of their -antithetical capers. Socialist and Anti-Socialist, Communist and -Anti-Communist, Conservative and Revolutionary have suddenly caught -sight of their own faces behind the masks of their opponents. Their -passionate reality is seen to be no more than a Fancy Dress Ball—for -all these figments, these fictions, these <em>Ideas</em> were never any -more than<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span> the Masks of false passions, passions which have never -succeeded in begetting a progeny, since they are the mere nightmare -passions of social indigestion.</p> - -<p>In another five generations there will be no poverty, there may be -no matrimony, there will certainly, if there is no poverty, be no -patrimony. Children may take their mother’s name and then fathers -will have not even a fifty-year royalty upon their creations. Men and -women will look upon their children as artists look upon their works -and will wish others to enjoy them. The world will be so changed that -none of the problems which to-day set our newspapers printing and -our politicians talking will even exist. Our present ideas on sex, -morality, beauty and value will in those days appear as strange, -as fantastic, as illusory as the ideas of our<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span> ancestors who took -Beecham’s pills to cure all ills.</p> - -<p>Will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day? -Necessarily, since life without change is inconceivable to us and music -that is alive must be changing. But the meaning of this change is not -to be apprehended by the mind, for it is no less than life itself. -A part of it, however, can be apprehended, for, although we feel -instinctively that the more the world changes the more that it is the -same<a id="FNanchor_8" href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> yet we cannot deny that it is the same with a difference. And -it is the difference which matters and is <em>matter</em>—that which -appears, is visible and audible—<em>the death-shape of the spirit</em>.</p> - -<p>It would be boring and futile to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span> consider the methods which may -be invented of distributing music or of making music heard. That a -million persons listen to Beethoven by wireless or gramophone where, -previously, a thousand listened in a concert hall is one of those -statistical changes which it is beyond the wit of man to value.</p> - -<p>Fortunately there is a period fixed to the possibilities of “progress” -of this kind; and when every baby is born to Beethoven and to Freedom -then culture and statistics of culture, education and measurements -of education will have simultaneously ceased. There will be in those -days no newspaper interviews with Neo-Edisons because there will be no -newspapers; the people will have forgotten that it is interesting to -know whether a celebrity drinks de-caffeined coffee or dehydrogened -water because there will be no “people” and no celebrities.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span> The Age of -Vulgarity will have passed.</p> - -<p>What sort of music will be listened to in those days? The music of -Orpheus, the music that comes out of darkness.</p> - -<p>According to Plato when Orpheus descended into hell and succeeded -by the strains of his mysterious music in softening the hearts of -Pluto and Persephone—who themselves were phantoms, prisoners of the -imagination, supernal beings chained to the bottom of Hades because -they were imagined there and existed only in <em>Imagination</em>—he -brought back with him but an Apparition. It was an Apparition that -he gazed at so fondly, and which nevertheless vanished before -his eyes. His music was that Apparition; those heavenly strains, -mysterious, profound, issuing from his mouth took form, the form of -<i>Eurydice</i>—the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span> imagination of light in darkness, of love in the -midst of death.</p> - -<p>The forms that music will take in the future are as yet unimagined; -but these forms will always be the form of Eurydice plucked by -Orpheus vainly out of Hell. And they will not be abstract forms but -the apparition of a real love which, bitten by the serpent of life, -descended into the kingdom of Pluto.</p> - - - -<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a id="Footnote_8" href="#FNanchor_8" class="label">[8]</a> The evolutionary theory will no longer be thought of -as a continuous or a discontinuous ascent; biological species will -be regarded as ripples on a pool; the Astronomical Universe will be -conceived as stationary.</p> - -</div> -</div> - - -<p class="center p2">THE END</p> - -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ORPHEUS ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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