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-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
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