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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
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*** 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.


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