Part 2

The fallacy of the extensive method is that it is trying to satisfy a craving essentially insatiable. Such an appetite for mere quantity of sound grows by what it feeds on; luxury breeds ennui; and, as every sensualist knows to his sorrow, there never can be "plenty of it." A sense of this futility inherent in the extensive method as it has been practised in modern Germany and elsewhere has led another school, chiefly modern French, to try for similar results by a different method, which may be called the intensive. Such a composer as Debussy, who may here be taken as typical, aims, to be sure, primarily at sensuous rather than at mental or spiritual values, but achieves them by qualitative refinement and contrast rather than by quantitative accumulation, and avoids exaggeration in favor of a delicate, almost finical, understatement and suggestiveness. While sonority is as much his god as Strauss's, he is the connoisseur of subtle, elusive sonorities, each to be sipped like a wine of rarest bouquet, rather than an enthusiast of the full-bodied brew. The subtlety of the methods often leads his admirers to claim a superior "spirituality" in the aims, but this is a mistake. His school is more spiritual than Strauss's only as a _gourmet_ is more spiritual than a glutton. Both schools prefer sensation to thought and emotion, association to intrinsic beauty, color to line. The difference is that "Pelléas et Mélisande" is the violet or ultraviolet end of the spectrum of which "Salome" is the red.

A curious by-product of the cult of the elusive sonority is the exaggerated, the almost morbid, interest that has emanated from modern France in novelty of harmonic idiom. One would suppose, to read many contemporary critics, that the sole criterion of a good composer depended on his use of some recondite scheme of harmony, whether based on the whole-tone scale, on the mediæval modes, on new applications of chromaticism, on the "harmonic polyphony" of Casella and others, or on the arbitrary asperities of the Italian noise-makers and Mr. Leo Ornstein. If you wish to be considered an "ultra-modernist" you may do quite as you please, both as regards commission and omission, in rhythm, melody, polyphony, form, provided only you are harmonically eccentric. This insistence on harmony, on the momentary tone-combination, suggests a predominant concern with the sensuous side of music which is highly significant as a symptom. It is a stressing of that which the senses alone can perceive from moment to moment, without any aid from memory, imagination, comparison, and other mental acts required for the perception of rhythm and melody. In short, it is an evidence of the same materialistic tendency to rely on the physical rather than the mental appeal, on the investiture of the idea rather than on the idea itself, which we noted in the extensive method. Whatever their differences, both methods are thus at one in the tendency to use materials as makeshifts for thought. Mahler failing to get with eight horns the effect that Schubert got with two--plus a great melodic idea--at the opening of his C Major Symphony, Debussy confectioning a banal bit of tune in muted string or pastoral flute sonorities with piquant harmonies--both are appealing, with varying success, from our minds and hearts to our auditory nerves. The increasing measure of success attending such appeals shows vividly the numerical advantage that the hungry or curious auditory nerves have, in the modern democratic audience, over the enlightened minds and hearts.

III

And indeed, how should we expect it to be otherwise? Enlightened minds and hearts, we must remember, are the finest and rarest fruits of civilization, to be cultivated only under conditions of decent leisure, fair physical and mental health, and free association with "the best that has been done and thought in the world." When they are so rare even in the class that has all these advantages, how shall we expect them to be common among those living either in an industrial servitude that for monotony of toil is almost worse than chattel slavery, or by clerical and other secondary work that through the modern specialization and subdivision of labor condemns each individual to a more or less mechanical repetition of a few small acts through the larger part of his working hours, a routine the relation of which to human life as a whole he often does not see? Writers on sociology are beginning to realize[1] that such conditions of work inevitably produce a morbid psychological condition in the worker, dulling his mind by the meaningless drudgery and depressing his body and nerves by fatigue-poisons, so that even in his few hours of leisure his perfectly natural seeking for pleasure does not take entirely normal paths. Too exhausted to respond to delicate shades and subtle relationships, whether in sensuous or mental objects, his jaded nerves cry out for violent stimuli, for sharp contrasts, for something to goad and whip them into new activity. This craving for violent stimuli is the essential feature of the fatigue-psychology. Now, is it not highly suggestive that the age of industrialism is also the age of a hundred goads for tired nerves--of the newspaper headline, the dime-novel and "penny-thriller," the lurid moving-picture drama, ragtime and the "revue"? And is it not possible that the sensationalism of so much modern music is only another evidence, on a somewhat higher plane, of the working of this same psychology of fatigue?

Again, these overworn nerves of ours have within a comparatively short period had brought to bear upon them, through the progress of modern invention with its cheap printing, quick transportation, and long distance communication, a thousand distractions. No longer insulated from the outlying world, so to speak, by time and space, as were our more simply-living ancestors, we read, hear, and see as much in a day as they did in a week. The inevitable result has been a diffusion of attention fatal to concentrated thought except for the most resolute, breeding in the average man mental indigestion and habits of disorder and impatience, and gradually evolving the characteristic modern type--quick, sharp, and shallow. Outward distraction has thus added its influence to inner weariness to urge our art away from quiet thought towards ever noisier solicitation. For thought always depends on simplification, on inhibition: in order to think we must neglect the given-by-sense, as we see strikingly in the case of the absent-minded, in order to attend to the given-by-memory-and-imagination; and over-stimulation of sense is therefore just as hostile to thought as the depression of the higher mental faculties through fatigue. Thus it is highly characteristic of our prevailing attitude that we strive, not for elimination, but for accumulation, distraction, dissipation. The formula is always mental apathy, physical and nervous excitement. Not having the joy of the mastery which comes only through thought, because we lack both concentration and favorable opportunity to discipline ourselves, we seek the stimulus of constant change. We digest nothing, taste everything; "eclecticism" is our euphemism for spreading our attention very wide and very thin; and the nightmare that you soon uncover under all our art is not that our minds may become bewildered (for that they are already), but that our senses may become jaded--which of course they do.

Still another line of influence that may be traced from general modern conditions to the peculiar qualities of modern art concerns especially the third of the classes described above, the capitalist class. Here again we find a morbid condition, a distortion of wholesome human contacts; but here instead of the impediment of meaningless drudgery, it is the incubus of a fruitless, selfish idleness. Cut off from the normal outlet of energy in useful work, the luxurious classes become pampered and bored, and develop through very vacuity a perverted taste for the unusual, the queer, the generally upside down and backside to. Every season sees a new crop of the "isms" thus produced, the ephemera of the world of art, which live a day and die as soon as they lose their one interest, novelty. Of all manifestations of so-called "art" they are the most sterile, the most completely devoid of vital relation to any real impulse. They might be ignored did they not complicate still further an already complicated situation, and were they not an additional, though a largely negative, illustration of the close causative relation between general social conditions and artistic expression that our discussion is making more and more evident. Fortunately they produce little enduring effect beyond their own narrow circles; for as they spring not from any vital interest, but only from an unguided curiosity and desire for excitement, they take mutually opposing forms and largely cancel each other. Thus, for instance, fads for very old or for very new music, directed as they are toward the mere age or the mere newness, and having no concern with the quality of the music itself, leave the actual public taste just where it would have been had they never arisen. Nevertheless the diversion of so much energy, which might under better conditions find an outlet in fruitful activity, to a sterile posture-making, is uneconomical and to be regretted.

So far, we have been looking chiefly from the point of view of the devil's advocate, at the injurious influences on contemporary music that can be traced with some degree of plausibility to the capitalistic and industrial social system of the nineteenth century. Noting the sensational bent, whether extensively or intensively expressing itself, of the chief contemporary schools, we have asked ourselves whether it could be attributed in some measure to the kind of demand made by an audience dulled by overwork at monotonous tasks and depressed by fatigue-poisons. Remarking the multiplicity of fads and "isms" by which our art is confused, we have asked how far these might be attributed to the cravings of a group whose normal appetites have been perverted by luxury and self-centered isolation. All of these evils, we have insisted, are aggravated in their effects by the distractions under which we live. It is now time, however, taking a more positive view and attempting a more constructive theory, to ask how these evils may be combated, what more hopeful elements already exist in the situation, and what others may be expected to develop in the future.

IV

First of all, it may be suggested that, so far as these evils are fairly attributable to the social conditions of the nineteenth century, they may fairly be expected to be mitigated somewhat by those changes which already seem probable in those of the twentieth. The capitalistic era seems likely to be followed by an era of coöperation or communism; and in countless ways such a change must eventually be deeply revivifying to all forms of art. Of course, it is only too easy to indulge in baseless dreams of the results upon art of a millennium brought about in this way, only too easy to forget that we are only at the threshold of such new systems of organization, and that they may go the wrong way instead of the right. All we can safely say is that if they do go the right way they will rescue art, among many other human interests, from the condition to which much of it has been prostituted under capitalism.

Let us suppose, for instance, that something like what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Great State[2] eventually results from the troublous reconstructions through which we are living. The Great State is only one of three possibilities he sees in the further adjustment of the leisure class and the labor class of our present order. The first possibility (and a disagre vivid one it must seem to all thoughtful Americans) is that "the leisure class may degenerate into a waster class," and the labor class "may degenerate into a sweated, overworked, violently resentful and destructive rebel class," and that a social _débâcle_ may result. The second possibility is that the leisure class "may become a Governing Class (with waster elements) in an unprogressive Bureaucratic Servile State," in which the other class appears as a "controlled, regimented, and disciplined Labour Class." The third possibility is that the leisure class "may become the whole community of the Great State, working under various motives and inducements, but not constantly, nor permanently, nor unwillingly," while the labor class is "rendered needless by a general labour conscription, together with a scientific organization of production, and so re-absorbed by reendowment into the Leisure Class of the Great State."

The first two of these possible conditions would be fatal to art, one through anarchy and loss of standards, the other through conventionalization. The third would bring about a renascence, after a troubled period of conflicting standards and of readjustments such as we find ourselves in to-day. The main elements in such a progress would be, first, the gradual refining, deepening, and vitalizing of the taste of the general public under the influence of increasing leisure, health, self-respect, and education; second, the cutting off of extravagance, luxury, and faddism in the wealthier classes by a wholesome pressure of enforced economy; third, increasing solidarity of feeling in the whole social fabric through such a mutual _rapprochement_, giving the indispensable emotional basis for vital art.

There are already some encouraging evidences of such developments. Much preparatory work towards the formation of better standards of public taste has been unobtrusively done, at least in our larger cities, by free lectures and cheap recitals and concerts. Two disadvantages, however, have often attended such work, reducing its benefits. One has come from the common fallacy that what is done for the many must be done so as to please the many--a view often supposed to be "democratic." Emerson was more truly democratic when he told us to "cease this idle prating about the masses," and set about extracting individuals from them; for real democracy never forgets that the majority are always inferior, and its aim must be to give the superior minority a chance to make their influence felt. In other words, to level down to the people is to vulgarize rather than to popularize. Theodore Thomas set a model for the conductor of popular concerts in the best sense, for all time, when he replied to one of his orchestra players who said that people did not like Wagner: "Then we must play him until they do."

The second disadvantage is even harder to avoid, even for administrators of the highest standards, because it seems to be almost intrinsic in this kind of work. It comes from the passive nature of the people's participation. Giving even the best concerts seems often too much like handing the people music at the end of a stick--"Take it or leave it"; naturally, having so little choice in its selection, they often leave it; and even when they try their best to take it, they cannot get so much out of it as if they were actively helping to produce it. This is the reason that more active forms of music-making, even if crude, like the music school settlement work and the community choruses that have been making such strides in recent years, seem so full of promise. The singing in the public schools, too, would have done far more than it has, had not the standards been debased, as Mr. T. W. Surette has ably shown,[3] to the childish tastes, not of the children themselves, who could appreciate better things, but of their dull and routine-enslaved elders. Yet here again we must beware of a too easy optimism.

There is no magic about the community chorus that can suddenly change bad taste to good. Too often we seem here, as in all other activities for popularizing music, to oscillate helplessly between two evils. On the one hand is the crudity of actual taste: the majority prefer ragtime and the musical comedies to folk-songs or the simple classics. On the other hand is the apathy that comes of prescriptions from outsiders: musical activity that is not spontaneous is sterile. Progress seems to come painfully and uncertainly from a constant zigzagging between these two evils, getting gradually away from them as the taste of the minority exercises its persuasiveness.

As for the wealthier classes, it must be confessed that there are so far few evidences of any permanent displacement of luxury and artificiality by saner and simpler tastes. Yet there are even here one or two hopeful signs, of which the most conspicuous is the recent enthusiasm for folk-songs. This is rather too good to be altogether true. It is hard to believe in the complete sincerity of those who go into the same rhapsodies over a perfectly simple and rather crude peasant song that a year or two ago they reserved for the exquisite day-dreams of Debussy or the exotic inconsequentialities of Cyril Scott. Moreover, the appreciation of folk-song, though a normal and indeed indispensable stage in musical education, is only the very first phase of initiation to the deeper and subtler beauties of musical art, and not a stage to be dwelt in with complacency. Yet so far as it goes, and in the measure of its sincerity, the interest in folk-song is of good augury. It means concern with melody, always and everywhere the soul of music, rather than with externalities like orchestral color, or harmonic "effects," or quasi-poetic associations and programs. It means sympathy with simple and broadly human, universal emotions, such as inspire the greatest as well as such primitive music. It may mean the beginning of a real and eventually a developed taste for good music. And it is a good foundation for such a _rapprochement_ of all classes of music-lovers as may come, we may hope, with the coming of the Great State.

If our cursory examination of the general tendencies of our day reveals no striking preponderance of good over bad, shows us no movement of any majority that we can acclaim without qualification, we may now remind ourselves for our comfort that this has always been the case in all times, and that there is indeed a curious illusion, resolvable only by close scrutiny, that makes our own time seem worse to us, in comparison with others, than it really is. We have to remember that the baser elements of our own time make a much greater impression on us, in relation to the finer ones, than those of the past. A living fool can make as much noise as a wise man (if not far more); a dead one is silent forever. The gold of Beethoven's day, of which he was himself the purest nugget, comes down to us bright and untarnished, so that we forget all the dross that has been thrown on the scrapheap of time. Our own gold is almost hidden from us by the glitter of the tinsel.

"The world of music," says Sir Charles Stanford,[4] "is not substantially different from what it has been. It has always exalted those of its contemporary composers who dealt in frills and furbelows above those who considered the body more important than its clothes. Only a few wise heads knew of the existence of Bach. Rossini was rated by the mass of the public far higher than Weber, Spohr than Beethoven, Meyerbeer than Wagner. Simrock said that he made Böhm pay for Brahms."

It is always necessary to wait for the winnowing process of time before we can see the true proportions of an age. Hence we can never see our own age in its true proportions, and since the second- and third-rate elements in it are ever more acclaimed by the majority than the first-rate, we always see it worse than it is. We live, so to speak, in the glare of noon-day, and cannot see the true coloring of our world, which will appear only at evening. Hence in every age the tragi-comedy is repeated of acclaiming the mediocre and the meretricious, and ignoring worth. The Gounods always patronize the Francks. The answer of philosophy is Emerson's:

"Ideas impregnable: numbers are nothing. Who knows what was the population of Jerusalem? 'Tis of no importance whatever. We know that the Saint and a handful of people held their great thoughts to the death; and the mob resisted and killed him: and, at the hour, fancied they were up and he was down; when, at that very moment, the fact was the reverse. The principles triumphed and had begun to penetrate the world. And 'tis never of any account how many or how rich people resist a thought."

Our final question, then, resolves itself to this: Are there in the music of our day, known or unknown to the majority, any such vital "thoughts," based on principles that a discerning criticism may see even now to have "triumphed and begun to penetrate the world"? Is there music being written to-day which is modern, not through its pampering to jaded sense or dulled intelligence, but through its intuition and expression of the deeper emotional experience and spiritual aspiration of our time? Is there music, in short, not only seductive to the ear but beautiful to the mind? To answer such a question intelligently we shall have to take account of certain truths which the foregoing discussion has tended to establish, and which may now be made explicit. Thought, emotion, all that we call the spiritual side of music, expresses itself not through sonorous or harmonic effects, primarily sensuous in appeal, but through melody and rhythm and their interplay and elaboration in so-called thematic development. In truly great music we remember, not such and such a bit of tone-color, not this or that sonority, but the soaring or tender curve of the themes, their logical yet ever new unfolding, their embodiment, in the whole composition, of richest variety with completest final unity. The man in the street is absolutely right in feeling that music succeeds or fails by its tunes; his limitation arises in his conception of "tune."

Again, since the creation and manipulation of great "tunes" or themes, unlike the hitting off of sonorous effects or the discovery of _rococo_ harmonies, comes never by luck, but only through a discipline based on the assimilation of all that is best in music, we always find that all really fine music is firmly founded upon tradition, and reaches its roots into the past, while blossoming, so to speak, into the future. The artist, despite the popular supposition to the contrary, depends on his forerunners quite as closely as the scientist. You can no more write a solid sonata without knowing Beethoven than you can work efficiently in biology in ignorance of Darwin. Yet on the other hand this assimilation of the past has to produce, not an academic and sterile complacency with what is, but an equipped and curious advance upon what is to be: the artist, like the scientist, brings all his learning to the test in acts of creative imagination, leaps in the dark. Thus artistic advance may be figured as like the shooting of frost crystals on a window pane; never is there a crystal that is not firmly attached by traceable lines to the main body; yet no one can prophesy whither each fine filament may strike out in its individual adventure. The great artist is bound to the past by love and docility, to the future by a faith that overleaps convention.