d. The musical defect to be guarded against is the attempt to

subject dramatic music to the laws of symphonic music: this is easily overcome, and there only remains the poetic defect to be avoided, _i.e._

e. All poetic or verbal material that cannot be "musicalised," or caught up into the spirit of music, is superfluous and harmful; therefore in proportion as the music-drama is perfected will this kind of material tend to disappear.

So far, so good. The point remaining to be considered is this: can we _ever_ totally eliminate this non-musical material from opera? Let us say, for example, in terms of the Wagnerian æsthetic, that a good opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet will be nearer artistic perfection than Shakespeare's play, because it will dispense with all the poet's clumsy methods of reaching the Feeling through the viscous waters of the Understanding--that it will concern itself only with the "purely human," with the "inner springs of action" of the souls of the characters, and that it will raise these--to use a term borrowed from electrical science--to the highest potential, the highest incandescence. Granting all this, let us then press our question a point further still. There will, let us admit, be less non-emotional matter in the opera than in the drama, less hard, incalcitrant material that cannot be emotionalised, but that has to be there because without it the structure cannot hang together. Admitting that there will be less of it, will any one venture to say that there will be _none_ of it in the opera? I think not. _Â priori_ considerations apart, an appeal to practical experience will soon disillusionise us. Of all the thousands of operas that have been written since opera began, not one, outside the works of Wagner, will pass successfully through the ordeal. Of Wagner's operas, _Rienzi_, _The Flying Dutchman_, _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_ are, by his own admission, as I have already shown, put out of court. _The Ring_ will certainly not stand the test; _Parsifal_ certainly will not; _The Mastersingers_ certainly will not. There only remains _Tristan_, of the form and substance of which he himself was justly proud. It will pass the judges with a lighter sentence than any of the others; but will it be dismissed without a stain on its character? By no means. Even in the pure, dazzling, magnificent metal of _Tristan_ itself we find embedded, here and there, a refractory piece of alien ore, of raw material not yet put through the subtle alchemy that must divinise it. If then this last straw fails us, where shall we look for salvation? The only answer can be that _salvation on these lines is impossible_. Reduce the coarser, explanatory, unemotional matter of opera--the merely utilitarian stuff, the paste that binds the more precious things together--reduce this as you will, _some_ of it you are still bound to retain in opera, for without it opera cannot have enough intellectual, dramatic consistency to ensure our getting hold of it. And if (1) granting the premisses, the reasoning by which the Wagnerian theorem is supported has been flawless, and (2) the brain that strove to embody that theorem in practical art was an organ mightier than anything the sons of men are likely to see for a very long time to come--then, I take it, there is only one conclusion possible, that the failure occurs through attempting to realise the theory in the wrong medium. To phrase it differently, the logic of the case is not rigorously enough applied at the last stage, when it comes to be pushed to its ultimate conclusion. Always bearing in mind that, according to Wagner, the strong point of the musical drama, as compared with any other poetic art-form, is that the non-emotional matter in it can be reduced to a minimum, let us ask ourselves whether a form cannot be found in which even this minimum can be dispensed with. The answer will be that the necessary conditions are united in the symphonic poem, which is therefore the true heir of Wagner's theory, and has been too long kept out of its lawful inheritance.

Two points now fall to be considered: (1) Can the affiliation of the symphonic poem to the Wagnerian theory be properly established, and the superiority of its rights of succession over those of its half-brother opera be fully demonstrated; and (2) are there no defects, suggested by Wagner himself, that unfit the symphonic poem to hold sway over opera?

The first point need not detain us long; least of all can the thorough-going Wagnerian here have much right to protest. If Wagner's reasoning is right his conclusion must be accepted--namely, that the less waste matter you have in your poetic music the better. Now he himself attributed the failure to "musicalise" the poetic subject completely to this cause, that instead of addressing the Feeling we were too prone to address the Understanding. He tells us, too, that _words_ are the channel through which the Understanding operates. In all cases, then, where words are employed, there is a strong probability of their carrying us with them further along the path of mere Understanding than the ideal art requires; and diminish this feature as much as you can, some of it is still bound to persist. So that your only resort is to find a form that shall make use of all the advantages of poetic music and keep clear of this one defect. This form is unquestionably the symphonic poem. It _does_ eliminate the defects that attend the use of words, for it dispenses with words; it meets Wagner's demand that music shall not sing merely for its own sake, but for a poetic purpose; it can order its structure upon the same lines as opera, _i.e._ the themes are conceived at once in terms of musical beauty and in terms of poetic appropriateness, and they suggest, by the modifications they undergo, the changing aspect of the personages and scenes of the drama. A symphonic poem is the concentrated essence of opera; it is to the opera as Bovril is to the ox.

But Wagner himself, it may be said, expressly warned us against programme music as being an artistic error. That is quite true. Wagner's argumentation here, however, is exceptionally weak. It is clear that he had no properly thought-out principles to guide him at this point. To begin with, his differentiation of programme music from the symphonic poem is thoroughly fallacious. If programme music is music based upon a programme--_i.e._ upon a literary subject--then every symphonic poem, nay, every opera, necessarily belongs to that category. The truth probably is that Wagner clung to this false distinction because he thought it would help him out of an embarrassing situation. He found himself compelled to say something publicly upon Liszt's symphonic poems; and I am afraid his essay on that subject is hardly a model of the ingenuous. To condemn Liszt was, of course, impossible for many reasons. At all costs he had to be commended; but if we critically examine the essay of eighteen pages, we shall find that surprisingly little of it really deals with Liszt's work. There is much declamation, and much æsthetic theorizing--most of it very good; but surprisingly little rational criticism of Liszt's symphonic poems. Practically all that Wagner does is (1) to admit the _â priori_ proposition that it is just as sensible to write a symphonic poem as a symphony--he asks "whether March or Dance ... can supply a worthier motive of form than, for instance, a mental picture of the ... characteristic features in the deeds and sufferings of an Orpheus, a Prometheus, and so forth," and whether it is not nobler for music to take its Form "from an imagined Orpheus or Prometheus motive, than from an imagined march or dance motive"; and (2) to contrast disparagingly the procedure of Berlioz with that of Liszt. But the final impression the essay leaves on me is that it was a duty which Wagner performed rather unwillingly. He did not want to say too much for Liszt's music; so on the one hand he argued that at any rate the symphonic poem was permissible, and on the other hand that it was preferable to the programme music of Berlioz.

Here his distinctions and his reasoning will not hold. He objected in Berlioz, as we have seen, to the way in which the musician followed the literary clues of his subject, without recasting these so as to fit them in with a scheme that was _musically_ logical. Now it is absurd to condemn programme music _en masse_ because a particular man blunders in it; Berlioz may quite well be wrong[34] and programme music still be right. But take Wagner's criticism as it stands, and correlate it with the previous arguments of this paper, and what is the conclusion to be drawn? Just this, that if Wagner could not, as he says, "hold on to scenic motives not present" before his eye, he was not listening to the music in the proper way. It is _not_ necessary, for most of us, to have a poetic scene put visibly before us; we can easily reconstruct it in imagination; and what the symphonic poem does is to give us the musical feeling the opera aims at giving us, and to tell us to _imagine_ the occasion of it all, instead of putting this occasion on a stage before us. The prelude and finale of _Tristan_ constitute a rudimentary symphonic poem, in the hearing of which we never ask to hear a word or see an actor. A more explicit symphonic poem does the same thing on a larger scale. We can, if we like, make a three-act opera out of _Romeo and Juliet_, but on Wagner's own principles the essence of the thing is contained in Tchaikovski's concert overture. And if I am told that this theme is to be associated with the lovers, this with Friar Lawrence, and so on, then during the playing of the overture the whole drama is acted in my brain, and is quite as real for me as if I beheld artificial men and women acting artificially in an artificial stage-setting. So with _Ein Heldenleben_. Nothing would be easier than to make an opera out of this subject; but who wants the opera, with its eking out of the parts that really do matter with a number of parts that really do not matter, with all its stage absurdities, its posturing actors? We have the diffuse emotions of three or four hours concentrated into the rich emotions of forty minutes. We have the whole life of the hero just as we would get it in the opera; but the small basket of strawberries has fewer pieces of grit in it than the bigger basket.[35]

I hope I shall not be taken to mean that the opera is a false and useless form, and that composers should henceforth all work frenziedly at the manufacture of symphonic poems. My position is that for certain purposes we _must_ have opera; by it alone can certain needs of our soul be satisfied, just as--though Wagner did not know it--for the satisfaction of other needs we must resort to pure poetry and pure music. But for certain other satisfactions we must have recourse to the symphonic poem; and this form, I contend, is the only form that can be deduced logically from Wagner's own æsthetic theory. As I have tried to show, in the symphonic poem alone can you get music fertilised by a poetic purpose, and yet, by eliminating the actual words, avoid the intrusion even of the minimum of non-emotional substance. In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning describes how the artificer has to fashion a gold ring. In order to make his material workable, he has to blend an alloy with the gold; but when the circle is complete he drives out the alloy with a spirt of acid, leaving the pure metal only. That is the symphonic poem; the opera is the ring with the alloy left in it. If perfection of form is what we want--the consummate, intimate transfusion of matter and form, the "truly unitarian" form to which Wagner aspired--then it is in the symphonic poem that we must look for it, not in the opera.

Only one objection that Wagner might urge against this has, I believe, not yet been considered. He expressly laid it down, it may be pointed out, that it is _not_ sufficient for us to carry the external, moving, concrete features of the drama in our heads; they must be set before us, in the fulness of real life, on the stage. "Not a Programme," he says in _Zukunftsmusik_, "which rather prompts the troublous question 'Why'?[36] than stills it--not a Programme, then, can speak the meaning of the symphony; no, nothing but a stage performance of the Dramatic Action itself."

This was an opinion he always maintained; but after all is it anything more than a mere _obiter dictum_? Wagner had a passion for seeing anything and everything upon the stage--a passion that at times becomes rather childish, for he was quite unconscious of a number of the absurdities of his characters and his situations that are painfully evident to the audience. Truth to tell, his notions of the stage were just a little crude at times; in any case he did not see that even the best acting in opera is _per se_ bound to be inferior to the best acting in drama--people cannot sing and at the same time be wholly natural in demeanour. I take it, then, that his predilection for stage-settings was a purely personal one; it has no logical relation to his general æsthetic theory; and we can refuse to be bound by it. We all like opera, and we tolerate its absurdities and its intellectual deficiencies because we know these are inseparable from it; but once more it has to be said that from these stage absurdities the symphonic poem is free. Mr. Arthur Symons has recently pointed out the strain that is put on our sense of the ridiculous when what should be merely a symbol is thrust visibly before our eyes. The Stranger in Ibsen's _Lady from the Sea_ is very impressive as a symbol of the call of the sea to the blood of Ellida Wangel; but when an ordinary human being in a tourist suit comes on the stage and purports to be the symbol incarnate, our sense of the poetry of the thing is severely tried. So with the scene where Wotan attempts to bar Siegfried's progress with his spear, and Siegfried shatters it with his sword. This is all very fine as a symbol of "the last ineffectual stand of constituted authority against the young, untrammelled individuality of the future"; but what the candid eye sees on the stage is a young man chopping in two a piece of stick held by an old man, who picks up the pieces, walks off with them, and says, "Advance! I cannot stop thee!" What is very impressive, merely conceived imaginatively as a symbol, becomes unimpressive when narrowed down to ordinary men with legs and arms, holding "property" swords and spears.

Opera, indeed, has no lack of absurdities, and this will always prevent it taking rank as the highest form of dramatic art; and Wagner, as I have said, must be held to have taken some of his own stage absurdities and puerilities with quite abnormal seriousness. It stands to reason, too, that the symphonic poem suffers from no such disabilities. If Wagner's theory be correct, then a symphonic poem on a given subject can follow, as regards its musical form, the lines laid down for it by the poetic impulse, just as efficiently as an opera on the subject could do; while it avoids the "padding" that is inseparable from opera by simply giving us, in our programme, an outline of the poetic subject, instead of daubing the subject over, from head to foot, with pseudo-poetry that rarely rises above the level of rhymed or rhythmic prose. As for the inability to follow the poetic motives of the subject from the programme--well, I fancy we are not all so imperfectly endowed with imagination as Wagner seems to have been here. I quite admit that there are minds like his in this respect, to which poetic music conveys little or nothing without speech and action--that are unable, while they listen, say to _Ein Heldenleben_, to keep all the details of the story moving at equal pace with the music; but the sufficient answer to such people is that other people _can_ do this. To sum it all up, the symphonic poem is theoretically deducible from Wagner's own æsthetic; while in practice, if we miss in it some of the elements that make opera interesting, we are compensated by the absence of other elements that make opera tedious and absurd.

XI

One point still remains to be discussed, though we need only touch on it very briefly. How far can music represent external things--ought it, indeed, to try to represent external things at all? It was Schopenhauer, I think, who said that music was not a representative but a presentative art. But that was very superficial psychologising even in his day, and it is still more superficial in ours. The whole problem is exceedingly simple if people, in their anxiety to prove that music cannot "imitate," would not confuse it unnecessarily. Heaven only knows how much bastard æsthetic has been born of that unfortunate remark of Beethoven's about the Pastoral Symphony, which we have already had occasion to examine. As a specimen, look at this quotation from Victor Cousin, intended to demonstrate, in its own way, that music must not be "painting," but only an "expression of emotion." "Give the wisest symphonist a tempest to render. Nothing is easier than to imitate the whistling of the winds and the noise of the thunder. But by what combination of ordered sounds could he present to our sight the lightning flashes which suddenly rend the veil of night, and that which is the most terrific aspect of the tempest, the alternate movement of the waves, now rising mountain high, now sinking and seeming to fall headlong into bottomless abysses? If the hearer has not been told beforehand what the subject is, he will never divine it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of scientific skill and genius, sounds cannot represent forms. Music, rightly advised, will refuse to enter upon a hopeless contest; it will not undertake to express the rise and fall of the waves and other like phenomena; it will do better; with sounds it will produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest. It is thus that Haydn will become the rival, even the conqueror of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and sway the soul even more profoundly than painting."[37]

The point is, be it observed, that unless you were told beforehand, you could not say whether a given orchestral piece was meant to represent a tempest or a battle; the composer is therefore advised not to try to paint a tempest, but to "produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest." Why, how in the name of all æsthetic innocence does this help us? How are we, in the absence of a verbal indication, to distinguish "the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest" from the feelings which would arise in us during the various scenes of a battle? We only hear, that is, a certain mass of sound; how are we to know, from the mere "feeling" this arouses in us, that it refers to a battle or a tempest or anything else? What man, for example, listening to solemn music, can possibly know whether it is meant to describe the death of Napoleon, the funeral of Mr. Gladstone, the poetic contemplation of nature, the opening of the St. Louis Exhibition, the life-work of John Stuart Mill, or anything else under the sun? The "feelings" are perfectly incompetent to pierce through the indefinite tone to the definite scene that inspired it. What the composer has to do is to tell us what this definite scene is; nobody, for example, would have guessed that the fourth movement of Schumann's _Rhenish_ symphony had its origin in the installation of the Archbishop of Geissel as Archbishop of Cologne, if the composer himself had not told us so. Nobody would have known that a certain part of the Pastoral Symphony represents a peasant's gratitude after a storm, if Beethoven had not said so himself. The "feelings" are no more reliable guides in cases of this kind than the "painting" is. And if the composer has to give us a verbal clue in order to let us know definitely what feelings he is representing, he has only to give us a verbal clue to make it quite clear to us what his painting is intended to represent; and there is no more odium in needing the verbal clue in the latter case than there is in the former.

No one in his senses has ever pretended that music alone could depict external things so accurately that we could recognise them infallibly at once, without any assistance from the sight, as in opera, or from a verbal accompaniment. As M. Alfred Ernst has put it: "It is not a question of painting an object--music could not succeed in doing that; nor is it a question of reproducing exactly the sounds of nature, such as the murmur of flowing water, the rumbling of thunder, the song of birds; but, when these phenomena are in the subject that is being treated, of recalling them to the mind by means of tone.... Thus conceived, music does not materialise itself in becoming descriptive; it would be more accurate to say that it spiritualises the phenomena of nature...." And he shows how Mozart, for example, employs description. "In his _Don Juan_ he has more than once translated the gesture, the mimic, of his personages. We may cite, for instance, the ascending scales in the orchestra in the duel between the Commandant and Don Juan. The figures in the bass refer to the old man, those above to Juan; each time that one of the two adversaries steps towards the other and attacks, this figure comes out, strident, quick as the thrust of a sword, and at the moment when Don Juan presses the Commandant, lunges at him time after time, strikes him and kills him, the violin scales succeed each other without giving the auditor time to breathe.... At the beginning of the sextet, when Leporello tries to slip away, fearing to be taken for Don Juan, the orchestra reproduces his stealthy movements; we see the unhappy wretch creeping along cautiously, his back bent, feeling round for a way out."[38] Nor does one need to be reminded of the numerous pieces of "description," of "imitation," in Wagner--of the water-music, the fire-music, the swish of Klingsor's spear, the voices of the forest, and so on. Every dramatic, or, indeed, vocal writer is full of passages of this kind; it simply cannot be avoided in music that aims at something beyond abstract note-spinning.

But in every case, as we can see, the music is not left to tell its story alone; we are not compelled to guess the subject represented merely from the tones themselves. The subject is told us in some way or other--we see Don Juan thrusting at the Commandant, or the spear flying at Parsifal's head, or the fire licking the couch of Brynhilde; or else there is, in the words of the song or opera, some suggestion of the external thing that is being illustrated in the music. And in the symphonic poem, all that we require in order that everything may be perfectly clear is a statement, in the programme, of the picture upon which the music is based. I am not expected to know, merely from the tones alone, what the "giant" motive in the _Rheingold_ is meant to represent; but when I am told that it relates to the giants, I can take delight in the expressiveness of its lumbering, unwieldy movements. Similarly I must be told that the opening pages of _Also sprach Zarathustra_ are meant as a representation of the majesty and spaciousness of Nature. And--again to draw upon the argument of the foregoing pages--there is nothing that can be done in this line in the song or the opera that cannot be done quite as effectually in the symphonic poem, if composers would only give their hearers the same full insight into their literary intentions as the song or opera writer does, and if hearers would only take the trouble to master these intentions before they listen to the music that is based upon them. If they would do this, their pleasure in the symphonic poem would be enormously increased; everything in it would be alive to them. For myself, at any rate, to listen to _Till Eulenspiegel_ or _Ein Heldenleben_ or _Don Quixote_ is not only to enjoy the music but to see the whole action as clearly as if I were reading it in a book or watching it on the stage. I get none of the boredom, none of the unfortunate provocations to laughter, that are inseparable from that artificial, stagey form of art, the opera. I miss, of course, some of the factors that make opera so glorious--the inexpressible thrill communicated by the human voice, the quickening of the pulse that is given by the movements of the actors and the catastrophes of the stage; but on the other hand I am spared a great many things, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that my sense of form is receiving the purest, most undiluted pleasure it is possible for it to receive in poetic music. The case for programme music is quite as strong as the case for opera or for the symphony. That many stupid things have been done in its name, that many fools and weaklings have fought under its banner, counts for nothing; how many symphonies, how many operas, are there that the world would willingly let die! The rightness of the form is not affected by the wrongness of the people who choose to work in it; and that the form itself is essentially right, I have, I hope, given adequate proof. Finally, to the question of how far music is justified in trying to suggest external things, we can only say that it is better not to be too dogmatic. Things that would have seemed impossible a hundred years ago are done with ease to-day. Who would believe that a windmill could be represented in music? Yet Strauss's windmill in _Don Quixote_ is really extraordinarily clever and satisfying; he suggests wonderfully, too, the caracoling of the horse as the knight puts him through his paces. His pictorial faculty, indeed, is something unique in the history of music; Wagner's is only an imperfect instrument by the side of it. The representative power of music is growing day by day. The only æsthetic fact we can be sure of is this, that no piece of representation will be tolerated unless it is at the same time _music_. That is the ultimate test; the imitative passages that make us smile are the passages that are merely imitative, without sufficient musical charm to keep them alive for us. But here, of course, we simply get back to the position already advanced in this article--that in all poetic music there must be as thorough a satisfaction as possible not only of the literary or the pictorial but of the musical sense.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] See an interesting article by Max Vancsa--_Zur Geschichte der Programm-Musik_--in Nos. 23 and 24 of _Die Musik_ (1903).

[20] The reader will of course not take this to mean that a piece of programme music should sound just as well when played as absolute music, _i.e._ should be as interesting to the man who does not know the programme as to the man who does. Against that current fallacy I argue further on.

[21] The term "poetic" is used as a kind of verbal shorthand. A piece of music may be suggested by a drama, a novel, a historical event, a poem, a philosophical treatise (like _Also sprach Zarathustra_), or anything else. The one phrase "poetic music" will conveniently cover the æsthetic facts involved in all these modes of suggestion.

[22] That is, sound _quâ_ sound (music), _plus_ sound congealed into definite symbols (words).

[23] I am not, of course, putting this forward as the way in which music actually and historically developed. I am simply disengaging from the historical facts, in order to throw it into stronger relief, the psychological element underlying them; just as in economics we try to understand what has actually been the course of events by isolating from the other factors of human nature the factors that concern the desire of gain, and arguing deductively from these.

[24] There is emotion, of course, at the back of the notes; the reader will not take me to mean that the pleasure is merely physical, like a taste or an odour. But the emotive wave is relatively small and very vague; it neither comes directly from nor suggests any external existence.

[25] I take some of these historical facts from the article of Max Vancsa, already cited.

[26] See Strabo's _Geography_, Bohn edition, vol. ii. p. 120.

[27] The Bible Sonatas, together with Kuhnau's other piano works and his prose writings, may be had in vol. iv. of the _Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst_, carefully edited by Karl Päsler. Mr. Shedlock, in his book on _The Pianoforte Sonata_, gives a pretty full account of Kuhnau; but it is a pity he could not have found space for a complete translation of the preface to the Bible Sonatas.

[28] "He was and remained," says Wagner, "a prince's musical officer, with the duty of catering for the entertainment of his pomp-struck master.... Docile and devout, the peace of his kind and cheerful temper stayed unruffled till advanced old age; only the eye, that looks upon us from his portrait, is suffused with a gentle melancholy."

[29] See Ambros: _Die Grenzen der Musik und Poesie_ (1885), iv. v.

[30] It is significant that even the sturdy, independent Gluck too fell a victim to princely patronage in the very middle of his career. After striking out for himself in _Telemacco_ (1749) and _La Clemenza di Tito_ (1750), and apparently being well on the way to the reform of the opera, he became, in 1754, Kapellmeister at Vienna. From that date to 1762, when _Orfeo_ was produced, he wrote, not like Gluck, but like a court servant. See a pithy paragraph on the subject in Mr. Hadow's book, _The Viennese Period_ (vol. v. of the Oxford History of Music), p. 90.

[31] The development of the opera, too, was an important factor. It was not till men had mastered dramatic musical expression in association with words that they could properly aim at the same kind of expression without words.

[32] Even Berlioz, in a weak moment, said he hoped that the music of the _Symphonie fantastique_ would itself "have a musical interest, independent of the dramatic intention," though he insisted on the title, at any rate, of each movement being given to the audience. See his Preface to the Symphony.

[33] Here, and elsewhere in this article, I venture to make my quotations from Mr. W. Ashton Ellis's translation of Wagner's prose works.

[34] I am not, of course, agreeing with Wagner's criticism of Berlioz; it seems to me quite superficial and unilluminative, but to discuss it would be foreign to our present purpose.

[35] The reader will understand that I am not founding my case on the actual musical value of _Ein Heldenleben_; I am only using that work as an illustration of an æsthetic theory. In the actual _Heldenleben_ there is rather more grit than I like; but there is no real need for it to have been put there. In the article on Strauss in the present volume I have tried to show how he has needlessly weakened his scheme by not keeping to the one piece of portraiture throughout.

[36] _i.e._ the troublous question as to what the music "means" poetically.

[37] _Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien._ I make the quotation from Mr. Basil Worsfold's little book on _Judgment in Literature_.

[38] _L'Œuvre dramatique de Berlioz_, pp. 30-34, etc.

_To ALFRED WILLIAMS_

HERBERT SPENCER AND THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC

I

It is now nearly fifty years since Spencer first published his celebrated essay on "The Origin and Function of Music." That essay has been elaborately assailed from many quarters; it has been objected to as insufficient from the standpoint of æsthetic psychology, and as at variance with some of the known facts of musical history. Nevertheless Spencer, in accordance with his general intellectual habit, always clung tenaciously to his theory, and, without modifying it at all, returned to the subject in later years only in order to re-asseverate his doctrine and to repel the critical assaults that were made upon it. He had no difficulty in dealing with the counter-theory of Darwin--that music sprang from the amorous rivalry of the males in the presence of the females of certain species--for Darwin's brief excursion into the alien field of musical æsthetic was as humorous and unprofitable as a discussion of bimetallism by Tchaikovski would have been. Then Spencer dealt with the redoubtable objections of the late Edmund Gurney and those of Dr. Wallaschek, undoubtedly scoring at times against them when they had needlessly overstated their own case, though not, it seems to me, removing the impression that they had successfully attacked the central point of his theory. Towards the very end of his days he returned yet again to the subject, in his _Facts and Comments_, and did me the honour to combat the brief criticism of his theory which I had put forward in my _Study of Wagner_, asserting that I exhibited a "confusion between the origin of a thing and the thing which originates from it," and that some of my criticisms "went far towards conceding" what I denied. I can only say that while I considered that Spencer passed over in silence certain of the stronger points I had urged against him, aiming at a merely dialectical victory here and there by interpreting my words in a different sense from that intended by me, I was still quite unconvinced, even by his later arguments, of the truth of his original theory. I shall try to show that that theory rests on a misunderstanding of the real nature of music, and on too ready an assumption of a causal connection between phenomena that are really only similar, and that it is helped out by unintentional misstatements as to some of the main factors of the problem. The question has an interest above and beyond Spencer's connection with it. The speech-theory of the origin of music has here and there been adopted as an established æsthetic fact, and æsthetic deductions have been made from it that must affect our views of current developments of the art. Wagner--working of course on lines of his own--contended that song is "just speech aroused to highest passion," and admiring commentators innumerable have followed him in his error. It is worth while therefore, as a contribution to a rather obscure point in musical æsthetic, to try to demonstrate the falsity of the speech-theory, and at the same time to place over against it a theory of the origin and nature of music that squares better with the facts of history and psychology; and this is best done by examining the speech-theory in the hands of its strongest advocate.

Briefly, Spencer's theory is this: "Variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling," since "all feelings ... have this common characteristic, that they are muscular stimuli." Thus according to the intensity and the quality of the feeling, the tones in which it is expressed will vary in loudness, in _timbre_, in pitch, in width of intervals, and in rapidity. "These vocal peculiarities, which indicate excited feeling, are those which especially distinguish song from ordinary speech." In other words, excited speech merges into recitative, and recitative in its turn merges into song; and song "originally diverged from emotional speech in a gradual, unobtrusive manner." Against this view I argued, in my _Study of Wagner_, that "it errs in supposing that, because song exhibits some of the characteristics of speech, the one has necessarily taken its rise from the other. The resemblances between the external characteristics of speech and those of song are only what might be expected, seeing that both are phenomena of sound, and sound can only vary in the ways indicated by Spencer.... The mere resemblance of song and speech in their most external characteristics is not a proof that one is the outcome of the other, but simply that they have certain causal phenomena in common; while the internal differences between them are greater than their resemblances." The careful reader will observe, in fact, that Spencer unconsciously sophisticates his argument from the very commencement. It is quite true that "variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling"; it is also quite true that the "vocal peculiarities which indicate excited feeling"--such as loudness, high pitch, increased resonance, and so on--are more pronounced in song than in ordinary speech. But it does not at all follow from this that _song took these peculiarities from speech_--that speech got them first, then developed them into recitative, and then still further into song. To make a symmetrical but artificial chain of this kind is to beg the question at the outset. Spencer never put before himself the obvious alternative--"Could not, and would not, song have had all these peculiarities even if speech had never been invented? Given, that is, the capacity of men to feel emotion in varying degrees, would not a strong emotion naturally express itself in louder, more varied, more resonant tones than a weak emotion--and this even if man had as yet no language?" Spencer, in fact, simply details the characteristics of _tone_ as the expression of feeling, and then illegitimately appropriates them, in the first place, to one order of tone, namely speech. No one would dream of disputing the physiological facts which he established in his essay with his usual patient and scrupulous accuracy. It is unquestionable that, on the whole, a loud tone in speaking and a loud tone in singing both indicate heightened feeling; and that in all the other respects enumerated by him, song and speech exhibit precisely the same characteristics. But this does not authorise us, in any way, to assert that song has "grown out of" speech. Spencer argued too hastily from a mere analogy to a cause. We are prepared to admit--to state the foregoing argument in another way--that in moments of emotional excitement the ordinary speech of men becomes more rhythmical, acquires a more pronounced _timbre_, and generally varies in the ways Spencer has enumerated. What we are _not_ prepared to admit is that this is either a lower form of music or the stuff out of which music has grown. Our contention is that while the difference between speech and excited speech is one of degree only, _the difference between speech and music is one not merely of degree, but of kind_--we are dealing with similar physiological but widely separated psychological phenomena; and that this is true not only of modern music, as Spencer seems to admit, but of that primitive music out of which our complex modern art has grown.

Moreover, Spencer ignored the new light which modern physio-psychological research has thrown upon the question, some of which I referred to in the _Study of Wagner_. Stricker, in his _Du Langage et de la Musique_ (1885), has, among a lot of statements and conclusions that need to be taken with caution, at all events made out a good case for believing that the organs of speech and the organs of song are controlled by different cerebral spheres. Wallaschek's conclusions, again, are too important to be passed over in silence by any advocate of the speech-theory. I venture to quote in full from my _Wagner_ the passage in which I condensed Wallaschek's argument: "Further, it is now not only placed beyond dispute that the faculty of articulate speech has its distinct cerebral centre, but it has been localised in the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain;" and Dr. Wallaschek, in a brilliant paper, has striven to show that there must be another centre that controls musical thought and speech.[39] Without going into Dr. Wallaschek's theory in detail, it may be sufficient here to note some of his facts and conclusions: (_a_) "the forming of concepts goes on in a different part of the brain, and the concepts travel along other channels, than the expression of the feelings and the merely automatic processes;"[40] (_b_) children with aphasia (_i.e._ destruction or disturbance of the faculty of articulate speech) are yet able to sing;[41] (_c_) patients with aphasia, who cannot speak connectedly upon ordinary occasions, can sometimes articulate the words when singing a song--the words being brought up into consciousness by association with the melody;[42] (_d_) the third left frontal convolution (which controls articulate speech) is very small in idiots and lower races, who yet are highly susceptible to music;[43] (_e_) the faculty of musical memory may be destroyed without disturbing the other mental faculties;[44] (_f_) consequently "we express ourselves and hear in quite a different manner when we sing and when we speak."[45] All this evidence Spencer ignored to the last.

Nor does it ever seem to have occurred to him to analyse the state of mind of a musician at the moment of composition, and to utilise the result thus obtained in order to throw light on the origin of music. Had he done this he would have seen the force--which his criticism of me showed he had _not_ seen--of M. Combarieu's remark that "Mr. Spencer neglects or ignores everything that gives to the art he is studying its special and unique character; he does not appear to have realised what a musical composition is, what are the rules it obeys, what is the nature of the charm and the beauty we find in it. In short, we can bring against him a fundamental fact, in comparison with which everything else has only a quite secondary value: that is, the existence of a musical manner of thinking (_une pensée musicale_). The musician thinks with sounds, as the literary man thinks with words."[46]

Here, indeed, is the crux of the disagreement between Spencer and those who reject the speech-theory as an absolutely inadequate explanation of the origin of music. What was his criticism of this criticism? "Here," he says, "we have a striking example of the way in which an hypothesis is made to appear untenable by representing it as being something which it does not profess to be. I gave an account of the _origin_ of music, and now I am blamed because my conception of the origin of music does not include a conception of music as fully developed. What is every process of evolution but the gradual assumption of traits which were not originally possessed?" It will be seen, I think, that Spencer quite missed the true point of M. Combarieu's objection. We do not expect that from a theory of the origin of music among primitive men one should be able to forecast all the later _forms_ into which music has branched; but we do expect that, since evolution is a continuous process, the theory of the earlier music should not be at variance with all the main psychological features of the later music. We say to Spencer, "Take your theory, and we are unable to work it out in detail. You assert that the expression of musical thought and emotion has taken three successive forms--excited speech, recitative, and music. Well, we find it impossible to leap to this conclusion, as you have done, merely because there are certain resemblances, due to physiological causes, between speech and song. We cannot trace such a process historically--for your own sketch of the supposed historical process is demonstrably inaccurate in evidence and hasty in inference--nor can we even _imagine_ the process psychologically. To us, there is a great psychological and æsthetic gulf fixed between excited speech and song--_not only between the speech and the song of to-day, but between the ruder speech and ruder song of primitive man_. On the other hand, we have a theory that imposes no such strain, either historical or psychological, upon us. That theory is, that music arises from a peculiar set of stimuli and peculiar organs of expression of its own, with which speech not only has nothing whatever to do now, but never had anything to do, as _fons et origo_. Allowing for all the differences between our music and that of the savage who blows his reed and thumps his tam-tam, and for all the differences of general mental structure between him and us, we can still see that the same causes which incite us to music incited him. Now no one will for a moment contend that there is any but an infinitesimal resemblance between a Bach fugue or a Strauss symphonic poem and excited speech; neither can we perceive that there was ever any but the faintest resemblance between the causes that provoked the savage to excited speech and those that impelled him to his rude kind of music. But _your_ theory, while it disregards the plain fact that no demonstration could deduce a Bach fugue from excited speech, and overlooks the mental elements in primitive man from which the Bach fugue _could_ develop step by step, invites us to believe that music grew out of something with which we are unable to correlate it either now or in the most primitive times."

"But," it may be objected, "all this is pure assertion. You simply take music as it is written to-day, attribute this to something which you call a 'musical faculty,' or a 'musical manner of thinking,' and then, having invented this convenient faculty, blandly assume that it is from a similar faculty that the rude music of primitive man originated. What you have to do is to prove the existence of this musical faculty, this specifically musical way of conceiving and expressing things, that, on your assumption, is innate in the human mind, and needs no help from speech even in the earliest days of the race." Well, no one, I think, will question the existence in us, at the present day, of something that may well be called, in general terms, the musical faculty. For the musician as we now know him--and, indeed, have known him for some centuries--music is a means of emotional expression that can function without the aid of poetry or even of speech. It takes its rise from its own order of feelings; it has its own self-sufficient manner of expressing them; it tells its own story to the mind of the hearer; and neither the feeling, nor its manner of expression, nor its effect on the auditor, suggests any dependence on speech. The musician, in order to begin composition, has not to receive a preliminary stimulus either from poetry, or from any concept or sentiment that could for a moment be expressed in words. (He may, of course, set poetry to music; but on the other hand he may not; and it is the self-existing order of music we are now discussing.) The musician, under the influence of an inward stimulus of some very obscure kind, may take three or four tones--say those of the opening subject of a sonata or a fugue--and build with them a structure ordered and controlled by certain laws purely its own, having for its object the susciting in our minds of a series of feelings from which all thought of speech is absent. The musician joys in building tones together in this way; we in our turn joy both in the process of building and in the finished edifice itself.

"So far, so good," the opponent may say; "this is what music now is, as the result of a long course of evolution from its original germ. But will you assert that primitive man was impelled to _his_ rude music by the workings of some similar faculty--that, without any reliance, even in the earliest days, upon speech, and without any intermediate stage of recitative, he _produced music_, bearing the same relation to his emotions as the music of Bach and Beethoven did to theirs?" Well, this is precisely what we do assert; nor do I see any difficulty in the way of the theory that primitive man came to utter himself in his rude music by the same psychological processes by which we utter ourselves in ours to-day. Speech had no more to do with the impulse to his music than it has with the impulse to ours. Spencer's theory would have it that first man spoke, then he advanced to excited speech, that this became more rhythmical and more definite and thus expanded into recitative, and that from this there emerged song "in a gradual, unobtrusive manner"--so gradual and so unobtrusive, I am afraid, that we can neither trace it emerging nor imagine it doing so. Is it not more reasonable to believe that music first came into the world when the savage took delight in any tones--those of the human voice, of a reed, or of a drum--purely _as_ tone, and began to take a further simple delight in the relations between tones? Need we concern ourselves at all with speech, excited or torpid? Can we not begin with mere feeling venting itself in mere sound--as we know it must have done at first--and draw a line from this straight through all the music of all the world? Why should we assume that for man to express his feelings in tone he must first have invented speech, and then have developed the emotional side of this until it was able to cut itself loose and commence life on its own account, by some process that is really unimaginable? We know that feeling vents itself in sound, and that waves of feeling vent themselves in waves of sound, as may be observed in the vague crooning of an infant over its toys, or the moaning of a man in pain. This is one fundamental fact in the origin of music. Another is the indisputable fact that men, whether civilised or savage--that many animals, indeed--are susceptible to tone _purely as tone_; and a further fact is that the primitive organism takes pleasure in the relations between tones, as may be seen in the boy who keeps on thumping two tin cans that happen to give out different sounds. There is surely no need to insist upon the point that both tones and the relations between tones _in themselves_ interest and charm, in a minor degree, the savage as they do us. It is from this phenomenon, I should imagine, not from excited speech, that music took its rise; and the evidence from the music of primitive tribes, upon which Spencer drew in support of his theory, does nothing to invalidate mine. In his original essay he quoted, from his own _Descriptive Sociology_, a number of passages relating to the song-customs of various undeveloped races. I cannot, among all these quotations, see one that suggests that the music of these people was simply a hyper-excited form of speech. On the contrary, it is clear from his own citations that their delight was in music purely as music; that their feelings spontaneously flowed, as ours do, into a system of tones and relations between tones that existed in and by and for itself, with only the same kind of dependence upon the words that is exhibited in a song by Brahms or a chorus by Handel.[47] No doubt the general course of the words controls the general course of music in some degree, as it does in our own song-writing; but there is nothing whatever to contradict the view that savage music, even as our own, springs spontaneously from a non-verbal emotion, and seeks an expression either absolutely independent of speech or only remotely influenced by it. The East African, says Spencer, "in singing, contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rhythm, and repeats them till they nauseate." If this does not betoken a state of mind fundamentally analogous to that of the absolute musician, it is hard to say what the words mean. Plainly, what sets the East African singing, what determines that one note shall follow another, what makes him so indifferent to the sense or nonsense of the words, is simply the delight in tone _as_ tone, in the relations of tones _as_ relations of tones, simply the need for what he feels to vent itself in precisely that way and no other--in a word, the primitive _pensée musicale_, the primitive "musical manner of thinking."[48] Abundant evidence can be had to corroborate this, and I quoted some of it in my _Wagner_. "Speaking of the Iroquois, Dr. Morgan says that their war-songs are in a dead language, or, at all events, they are unable to interpret them.... Mr. Baker, too, observed the meaninglessness of the Indian song."[49] There is not much trace here of excited speech first becoming recitative and then musical song.[50]

Dr. Wallaschek's conclusions, again, as to the music of savages are as follows:--

(1) "In primitive times vocal music is not at all a union of poetry and music. We find, on the contrary, vocal music among tribes which, owing to the insufficient development of language, cannot possibly have any kind of poetry. Thus the position of vocal music is quite independent of any other art. (2) It is impossible that in these cases music arose as a direct imitation of the natural accents ready made in speech. (3) Because these texts are neither themselves a language, nor could the melody _alone_ have been taken from a developed language, for in such case the words would have been borrowed together with the music. Entirely meaningless words simply serve to facilitate the vocalisation." Further, "another striking feature of these savage songs is _the liberty with which the composer treats the grammatical structure of the sentence and the logical order of words_. Thus in many of the Andamanese songs the words in their poetic form are so mutilated to suit the metre as to be hardly recognisable.... If negroes sing they keep strict time, and do not allow themselves to be hindered by any obstacle in the use of the words." Other evidence of the same kind might be adduced, from which it is quite clear that we are face to face with a phenomenon on which Spencer's theory throws no light at all. There seems to be no doubt that there is in the savage, though of course in a relatively undeveloped form, the same musical sense as in ourselves, something that has always flown directly, for its expression, to a mode of utterance of its own, compounded of tones, relations of tones, and rhythm, which is the natural language of this sense, and which never needed to pass through the intermediate stage of imitation or exaggeration of the accents of speech.[51]

Look for a moment at the two theories and their implications side by side. We know that primitive man, like the animal,[52] is susceptible to tone, sequences of tone, colour of tone, and rhythm; and that, from purely physiological causes, a number of his feelings tend to express themselves in vocal sounds. Now these are all the elements we require in order to construct modern music. The composer feels strongly, and is impelled to find an outlet for his emotions in tone. According to the line of his emotion, so to speak, is the line of his music--the pure feeling takes hold of the sounds through which alone it can utter itself, and shapes them, in form, in colour, in sequence, in intensity, after its own image. We have in primitive man, in a rude and undeveloped stage, all these elements out of which the modern music-maker builds his gorgeous palaces. According to the intensity of the emotion of the savage will be the width of the intervals of his voice, the resonance, the colour of it; according to the shade of his feeling will be the shade of his rude melody; and from the _ensemble_ of the qualities of the sounds in which he is uttering himself will his hearers be able to guess what mood it was that animated his song. Here, then, are all the elements out of which music _could_ grow, even if man had never learned to speak three connected words. Yet we are asked by Spencer to believe that these elements, _sufficient in themselves to give birth to music_, remained dormant in the human breast for untold centuries, until man had evolved a fairly elaborate system of speech--for it must be remembered that Spencer's theory presupposes not the rude and merely utilitarian speech of the man only one remove from the beast, but a comparatively highly organised language, capable of expressing connectedly a savage's thoughts about something more than his daily physical wants. Some such abstract, æsthetic, reflective form of speech we are compelled to postulate if we are to grant the probability of music arising, as Spencer says it did, from the excited speech of man. Then, when man has slowly and painfully learned to speak, and had plenty of practice in speaking excitedly, we are invited to believe that by some mysterious process _music_ arose, the expression of feeling in organised tone, the delight in tone _quâ_ tone, in sequences and relations _quâ_ sequences and relations. And all this time the elements out of which this organised system of sound _could_ grow, which were innate in man from the very first, by reason of the fact that he had nerves, muscles, and vocal organs, have been doing absolutely nothing! Though they required only the stimulus of feeling to call them into being, and though they were receiving this stimulus day by day, hour by hour, they had to deny themselves for centuries upon centuries, until they could receive precisely the same kind of stimulus _after_ man had learned to speak! Is this credible?

II

If Spencer's theory is æsthetically and psychologically inconceivable, he is hardly happier in the pseudo-historical evidence by which he seeks to support it. His notion seems to be that all ancient music, and the Oriental and savage music of the present day, represent the art at the second or recitative stage of development--a kind of half-way house between excited speech and full-blown song. Thus the Chinese and Hindoos "seem never to have advanced" beyond recitative. "The dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the _songs_[53] of civilised races"--which is surely a quite illegitimate comparison. Again, "hence it follows that the primitive (Greek) recitative was simpler than our modern recitative, and, as such, much less remote from common speech than our own singing is." These typical quotations will serve to show how blandly Spencer assumes the very thing he has to prove. The dance-chants of savages are not as highly organised as our European songs; but does this indicate that there is not the same psychological difference between the song and the speech of the savage as there is between the song and the speech of the European? The ancient Greek music was not so complex as ours; but will Spencer be bold enough to say that a man of Athens, listening to contemporary music, did not feel under it precisely the same kind of æsthetic pleasure as we feel when we listen to a song by Brahms or a symphony by Beethoven--a kind of pleasure different in essence and in temperature from any that can be given by speech? Did the Greek, that is, listening to Greek music, feel as I do when I listen to an eloquent preacher or an intoning Quaker, or as I do when I listen to _music_ in the real sense of the term? Surely there can be no doubt in the matter. Setting aside the difference due to the enormous development of our art on the formal and technical side, there can be no question that the Greek took pleasure in his music _quâ_ music, not _quâ_ "recitative."[54] And as with the Greeks, so with Orientals and savages. How Spencer can imagine that Oriental music as a whole, and particularly that of China and India, has for the most part remained stationary at recitative, is a mystery to me, in face of the mass of evidence that may be had from any history of music or any collection of travels. There is, indeed, in much Oriental music, that dubiety of scale (according to our notions) which has misled unwary travellers into the belief that the native singing cannot be real music, because it is so different from ours. But nothing can be better established than the fact that melodies pure and simple, tunes written and sung merely to express that _pensée musicale_ to which I have already referred, are common in the music of all Oriental nations. Spencer's statement "that the music of Eastern races is not only without harmony, but has more the character of recitative than of melody," and that "the chant of the early Greek poet was a recitative with accompaniment in unison on his four-stringed lyre," is a fair sample of the uncritical way in which he has assumed anything that would be likely to bear out his theory. His confusion of two or three distinct things by dubbing them all "recitative" is one of the main sources of his errors on this question.

As for his attempt to limit harmonic music to modern Europe, I will only say, with Naumann, that wherever we have, as in the old Egyptian paintings, a representation of a concert with many instruments of various shapes and sizes, it is incredible that the performers should all have been playing the same notes. The result, of course, could not have been harmony in our acceptation of the word, for this is to a large extent dependent upon theory for its development; but it was conceivably one of the roots from which harmony could grow. And as Spencer admitted that his theory contained no explanation of harmony, that theory is obviously weakened by any fact indicating that the desire for harmony is innate in the human breast, like the love of tones, sequences of tones, and relations between tones. We must dismiss from our minds all the misleading connotations of the term "harmony," as we must with the term "recitative"; and when we do this there is ample evidence to show that the harmonic sense--the joy in hearing two tones sounded together--is as innate, and as independent of the stimulus of speech, as the melodic sense. The mere sweeping of the harp-strings during singing is not what _we_ would call harmony; but if it does not point to a rudimentary feeling that tones in combination are more pleasurable than single tones, it is difficult to say what it does indicate. Everywhere, in truth, we come down to the really fundamental fact, that there is even in primitive man a real _musical sense_, independent of speech in origin, and, as far as we can see, much earlier than speech in the order of time, for man certainly expressed his feelings in pure indefinite sound long before he had learned to agree with his fellows to attach certain meanings to certain stereotyped sounds.

III

The music of savage tribes is, however, the last stronghold of Spencer; and if his theory fails to find proper support in that quarter, it can hardly resist all the weight of evidence that may be brought against it from others. Here, he says, he has Sir Hubert Parry on his side, "who adopts the view I have here re-explained and defended," and who "has in his chapter on Folk-Music exemplified the early stages of musical evolution, up from the howling chants of savages--Australians, Caribs, Polynesian cannibals, etc.--to the rude melodies of our own ancestors. I do not see how any unbiassed reader, after examining the evidence placed by him in its natural order, can refuse assent to the conclusion drawn." Well, the final refutation of Spencer can be had out of the mouth of Sir Hubert Parry himself. What Sir Hubert's own theory of the origin of music may be I do not know; but certainly neither the facts nor the arguments he has adduced in his _Art of Music_ give any colour to the theory that music first arose as a modification of the attributes of emotional speech. Let us examine Sir Hubert Parry's evidence.

We begin at the beginning with the descending chromatic howl of the Carib which he quotes on page 49 of his book--the "howling chant" to which Spencer refers; and if, as the philosopher will have it, this represents "the early stages of musical evolution," his case has gone by the board at once. There could be no more conclusive testimony to the fact that music has its origin not in speech, but in the venting of mere vague emotion in mere vague sound; for where Spencer sees the previous influence of speech in this howl of the Carib I cannot imagine. He might as well suppose that speech antedates the howl of a dog or the roar of a lion. On what grounds does he find support for his theory here? Simply that a howl of this kind, like the song of the Omaha Indians, is distinguished by indefiniteness of intervals! "Now this," he says, "is just one of the traits to be expected if vocal music is developed out of emotional speech; since the intervals of speech, also, are indefinite." Was there ever a more palpable _non sequitur_? Because A has one of the characteristics of B, therefore A must have grown out of B! Here is a complete justification of my previous remark that Spencer has converted a mere likeness into a cause. The real reason for music exhibiting some of the traits of speech is that, music and speech being the expression of allied orders of feeling, and both finding voice through the same muscular apparatus, they simply cannot help having a great many features in common. But we really require something more than a demonstration that the intonations of music, being affected by the same physical organs, point to very much the same mental and physical phenomena as the intonations of speech, in order to convince us that music _had its origin_ in speech.

Take now the further examples given by Sir Hubert Parry, and discover in them, if you can, any evidence that does not go to show that they are born directly of a primitive _pensée musicale_, without any sign of the previous intervention of speech. Written over them all, indeed, is conclusive proof that when primitive man sings, or even croons, to himself, he is unconsciously guided by a rudimentary musical sense. Savages contrive, says Sir Hubert, "little fragmentary figures of two or three notes, which they reiterate incessantly over and over again. Sometimes a single figure suffices. When they are clever enough to devise two they alternate them, but [naturally] without much sense or orderliness"; and he shows, later on, how even among savages there is a continuous growth in this primitive sense of design. Now all this is in accordance with the theory of the origin of music already advanced in this essay; and these phenomena of savage music will easily account for all the most complex modern developments of the art, which Spencer half admits his theory will _not_ account for. Savage man, merely because he is a physical organism, expresses himself in sound. Again, merely because he is a physical and psychical organism, he takes pleasure in sounds, in successions of sounds, and in the co-relations of sounds; and, to complete the list of the elements necessary to constitute all the music that has ever been written in the world, Sir Hubert Parry shows that, even in the savage whose rude attempt at song is little more than a howl, there is a rudimentary sense of form, of balance, of design. "When little fragments of melody[55] become stereotyped," says Sir Hubert, "as they do in every savage community sufficiently advanced to perceive and remember, attempts are made to alternate and contrast them in some way; and the excitement of sympathy with an expressive cry is merged in a crudely artistic pleasure derived from the contemplation of something of the nature of a pattern." Is there any support for the speech-theory here? Is it not, indeed, an interloper pure and simple, obscuring a trail that is perfectly clear and open if left alone?

The one fact upon which Spencer always seems to rely is that the intervals of speech and the intervals of the most primitive chant are both indefinite. Even here, however, Sir Hubert Parry's book is unpropitious to him, for Sir Hubert insists on the obvious fact that indefiniteness of intervals in early music is entirely a matter of lack of instruments by which to fix the various notes of a scale. "It is extremely difficult to make sure what intervals savages intend to utter, as they are very uncertain about hitting anything like exact notes till they have advanced enough to have instruments with regular relations of notes more or less indicated upon them." To pass from an indefinite howl to a definite series of notes, when an instrument has been invented that guides the voice and fixes its tones, may be the work of a day. Wherein then comes the function of speech and recitative, which are supposed to occupy the intermediate stages of evolution between the howl and the song--for I suppose Spencer would hardly contend that man learned to speak _before_ he learned to howl? And at what stage appears this elementary feeling for musical design which the savage exhibits? Can this be conceived to grow out of the habit of speech? If not, if it is independent of speech, if it is something that concerns itself with pure sound alone, what was it doing in all the ages when man was making sounds, but had not yet made himself a language? "The crudest efforts of savages," says Sir Hubert Parry, "throw light upon the true nature of musical design, and upon the manner in which human beings endeavoured to grapple with it." Again, "the savage state indicates a taste for design, but an incapacity for making the designs consistent and logical; in the lowest intelligent stage, the capacity for disposing short contrasting figures in an orderly and intelligent way is shown." Once more, can speech be logically conceived as playing the leading part in this long but continuous drama of evolution?

Finally, in Sir Hubert Parry's own pages Spencer could have found evidence of yet another element of pure musical enjoyment in the savage mind--none other than an incipient desire for harmony. Speaking of the rise of harmony in the Middle Ages, and of the curious device of making two wholly different tunes go together by the process of "easing off the corners and adapting the points where the cacophony was too intolerable to be endured," Sir Hubert shows the existence of this same practice among savages. "This," he says, "may seem a very surprising and even laughable way of obtaining an artistic effect, but in reality the actual practice of combining several tunes together is by no means uncommon. Several savage and semi-civilised races adopt the practice, as, for instance, the Bushmen at the lower end of the human scale, and the Javese, Siamese, Burmese, and Moors about the middle. In these cases the process usually consists of simultaneously singing or playing short and simple musical figures, such as savages habitually reiterate, with the addition in some cases of a long sort of indefinite wailing tune which goes on independently of all the rest of the performance. The Javese carry such devices to extremes, producing a kind of reckless, incoherent, instrumental counterpoint, very much like a number of people playing various tunes at once, with just sufficient feeling for some definite central principle to accommodate the jarring elements. The practice of combining tunes seems to have become universal quite suddenly, and it led very quickly to fresh developments. And it is worth noting that one of these developments was precisely the same in principle as that adopted by the Bushmen and the Javese, and other semi-savage experimenters in such things; which was to accompany the main combination of two melodies by a short musical figure which could be incessantly reiterated as an accompaniment." Phenomena like these undermine the crude and hasty inference that Orientals and savages have no notion of harmony; they prove that, as low down in the human scale as our investigations will carry us, man tries to make harmony because it pleases his musical sense. How far he succeeds depends upon other things than his mere desire.

So that, to sum up, we can dismiss speech altogether from our hypothesis of the origin of music, seeing that, while no man can represent to us either the psychological or historical processes by which music has grown or could grow out of speech, we find innate in the human organism every element out of which music _can_ grow, independently of speech--the delight in tone, the delight in successions of tones, the delight in combinations of tones, the delight in rhythm, the delight in design. Even Spencer himself, in the chapter on "Developed Music" in his _Facts and Comments_, sees that these elements are sufficient to account for certain kinds of music, though his total analysis, particularly in the distinction between merely symmetrical music and poetical music, is æsthetically incomplete and _à priori_. To Spencer's oft-reiterated question, "If my theory does not explain the origin of music, how else can its genesis be explained?" we may reply that his theory really explains nothing; it only asserts. It points to certain resemblances between speech and song, and then dogmatically lays it down, without an atom of proof, that the one has arisen from the other. _Per contra_, an analysis of primitive music shows us that in the rudest savage we have, in embryo, every element that goes to make the most complicated music of modern times--some of these elements, indeed, appearing even in animals. If we are to believe that these in themselves could not develop into music, we must have a reason why; and if we are to believe that an imitation of the accents of speech was necessary before primitive man could express what he felt in mere indefinite sound, we must have not only some proof that it ever occurred, but some demonstration of how the process is possible; for to me, at least, it is psychologically inconceivable. When Spencer says that "song emerged from speech," he is, I contend, merely using a verbal formula that conveys nothing representable to us; it is of the family of those "pseudo-ideas" upon which he himself has emptied the vials of his scorn in _First Principles_.

FOOTNOTES:

[39] _Ueber die Bedeutung der Aphasia für den musikalischen Ausdruck_ (Vierteljahrsschr für Mus-Wiss., September 1891).

[40] Article cited, p. 57.

[41] _Ibid._, p. 60.

[42] For example: "One patient, from the beginning of his disease to his death, could say nothing but _Yes_ and _No_.... One morning a patient began to sing 'I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.' The speechless patient joined in and sang the first verse with the other, and then the second verse alone, articulating every word correctly."--_Ibid._, p. 61.

[43] Article cited, p. 53, _note_: "Many idiots, who are scarcely capable of other impressions, are extraordinarily susceptible to music, and can remember a song which they have once heard."

[44] "A peasant, who as the result of a heavy blow on the head lay unconscious for three days, found, when he came to himself, that he had forgotten all the music he ever knew, though he had lost nothing else."--_Ibid._, p. 64 (quoted from Carpenter, _Mental Physiology_, 4th edit., p. 443).

[45] _Ibid._, p. 65.

[46] See Jules Combarieu, _Les rapports de la musique et de la poésie, considerées au point de vue de l'expression_ (1894), wherein there is an elaborate and searching examination of Spencer's theory.

[47] To say nothing of the savage music which is either purely non-verbal, or linked to an almost meaningless refrain.

[48] No importance, I take it, need be attached to such sentences as that the Malays "rehearse in a kind of recitative at their _bimbangs_ or feasts." The word recitative here affords no support for Spencer's theory. Travellers who have written of the music of primitive races have always been prone to use the term too loosely. Accustomed as they are to the highly developed music of Europe, with its fixity of scale and its wide range of instrumental tone, they use the term recitative as the easiest one to indicate, in a rough-and-ready way, a kind of music much less developed than our own in these respects. But such a use of the term is quite unscientific. There is no reason to believe that what we call their recitative is not really their music.

[49] Wallaschek, _Primitive Music_, pp. 173, 174.

[50] Of course Spencer might have rejoined that the songs in their present state represent the fully developed tree, which had to pass, in remoter times, through the previous stages he mentions. Apart from the general objections I have already urged against this theory, however, it is evident that Spencer cannot have the music of savage races under two categories--song _and_ recitative--using the one or the other as suits the purpose of his argument at the time. It will be seen later that his theory rests, to a very large extent, on the supposition that the music of savages and of Orientals represents only the second or recitative stage of the development from speech.

[51] As Berlioz expressed it in the _Grotesques de la musique_, "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if every human language were to perish, it would be none the less the most poetic, the grandest, and the freest of all the arts."

[52] See the chapters entitled "Orpheus at the Zoo," in Mr. Cornish's _Life at the Zoo_. Every one who has kept dogs or snakes must have noticed how vivid their musical perceptions are. My own dog has a decided musical faculty in him. He is exceedingly susceptible to the mezzo-soprano voice in the upper part of its middle register. Tones produced there--but no others in that or any other voice--he will try to imitate. It is not a howl, but a real attempt to hit the right pitch and to shape the sound with his mouth. "Excited speech" has nothing to do with _his_ musical perceptions. The excited speech usually comes later, from the singer whom he is favouring with this sincerest form of flattery.

[53] Italics mine.

[54] It seems quite clear that the Greeks had distinct tunes like our melodies, that were passed about from one singer or player to another. "In later times," says Müller, "there existed tunes written by Terpander, of the kind called _nomes_.... These nomes of Terpander were arranged for singing and playing on the cithara." They were, he goes on to say, "finished compositions, in which a certain musical idea was systematically worked out, as is proved by the different parts which belonged to one of them." There were popular songs, and there were certain tunes that were sung at festivals. Nor was the music invariably associated with poetry; there was music that was purely instrumental. Olympus (B.C. 660-620) seems to have been a musician only. "Olympus is never, like Terpander, mentioned as a poet; he is simply a musician. His nomes, indeed, seem to have been originally executed on the flute alone, without singing." See K. O. Müller's _History of the Literature of Ancient Greece_ (Eng. trans.), vol. i. chap. 12. For an expert treatment of the whole subject, see Hugo Riemann's _Handbuch der Musikgeschichte_, Erster Teil (1904), especially Book I., chap. I., § 3, § 4, § 5.

[55] It does not seem to have occurred to Spencer that if savages have melodies, however tiny and primitive, it can hardly be true that they are only in the recitative stage. The plain fact is that his use of the term recitative was wholly unscientific. He never saw that there is a vast æsthetic distinction between recitative in the sense of more sonorous and more formal speech--as in the case of an orator or a preacher--and recitative in the musical sense. In the latter case the distinctively musical appetite comes into play; in the former it does not. The one is an intensification of ordinary speech, but never becomes more than speech; the other is music, even though restricted music. They spring from different faculties and appeal to different organs of enjoyment.

_To BERTRAM DOBELL_

MAETERLINCK AND MUSIC

One is always meeting with curious literary and artistic affinities where one least expects them. The human mind, of course, is really homogeneous throughout. We have all to build up our inner and outer universe out of very much the same kind of brain and sense organs: so that it is hardly surprising if here and there one feels that the work of this or that musician or artist is the counterpart of the work of this or that poet or prose writer, or _vice versâ_. One sees, for example, a good deal of Weber and the German Romanticists in the stories of Hoffmann; of Lessing and Diderot in the work of Gluck; of Tourgeniev and Dostoievski in the music of Tchaikovski; of Berlioz's music--as Heine suggested--in the pictures of Martin. This phenomenon is so frequent as to excite little wonder. What is rather more curious is to find, here and there, that one of the main spiritual principles of a certain artist is implicit in the æsthetic system of another artist who works in an entirely different medium, and whose whole work, at first sight, seems to be of a diametrically opposite order. Between Wagner and Maeterlinck, for instance, who would say that there is a fundamental sympathy of soul and a community of artistic outlook--between the musician of stupendous passion and restless activity and the quiet mystic who seems to be serenely poised far above all activity and all passion, placing, in his lofty philosophising, so little store by all the things that appeared so vital, so real, to the musician? Nevertheless there is, as I shall try to show, a curious similarity between the æsthetic systems of the two men.[56] They share something of the same excellencies; they break down or find their limitations almost at the same point. Let us cursorily examine the two systems.

I

If we did not possess Maeterlinck's own dramas, we might be able to judge from his essays what his position towards the drama and fiction would be. Here we have revealed to us a manner of apprehending life and of looking out upon the world that could find expression only in some such novel dramatic form as Maeterlinck has adopted. The dramatist himself, however, has given us, in his exquisite chapters on "The Tragical in Daily Life" and "The Awakening of the Soul," in _The Treasure of the Humble_, a statement, at once explicit and impassioned, of his creed. He advances the theory that the ordinary tragedy of startling incident is, or ought to be, a thing of the past, a concept of barbaric ages, when men could be thrilled by the secret under forces of life only by reaching towards them through crude and violent action. In a more refined and subtle age like this, we should be able to trace the hand of destiny even when it does not work through media so coarse and palpable. It is not the primitive sensation of seeing one man act the murder of another that is the essence of tragedy. It is the sense of spiritual enlightenment that comes to us; the feeling that, somehow or other, the murder itself, the passion and the events that led up to it, the consequences that flow from it, are all subtly interwoven threads of the great indwelling laws of things. Most of the action, indeed, that is associated with our current notion of tragedy is, from a higher point of view, both æsthetically superfluous and an evidence of our earthiness. We should be capable of being moved to pity, of feeling the most refined tragic sorrow, by a play that eliminates the coarser and more obvious facts, and relies on gentler and more intimate suggestions of universal truth. Our present age, he thinks, is capable, or is becoming capable, of this. "In former days," he says in his essay on "The Awakening of the Soul," "if there was question, for a moment, of a presentiment, of the strange impressions produced by a chance meeting or a look, of a decision that the unknown side of human reason had governed, of an intervention or a force, inexplicable and yet understood, of the sacred laws of sympathy and antipathy, of elective and instinctive affinities, of the overwhelming influence of the thing that had not been spoken--in former days these problems would have been carelessly passed by; and, besides, it was but seldom that they obtruded themselves upon the serenity of the thinker. They seemed to come about by the merest chance. That they are ever pressing upon life, unceasingly and with prodigious force--this was unsuspected of all; and the philosopher hastened back to familiar studies of passion, and of incident that floated on the surface."

This is clearly part of a philosophy of life and art in which the cruder nervous strands are put aside, as useless for that spiritual illumination which the thinker desires. They are too thick to be sensitive to the finer currents that pass through them; only the more delicate nerve-tracts, alive to every wave of feeling, can be stimulated to philosophic light and heat. The essence of all Maeterlinck's work, of course, is this supersensitiveness. He is endowed with other senses than ours, other modes of apprehending the universe. He is a mystic, and by reason of being a mystic he is at the same time out of touch with many things that the normal man calls real, and delicately sensitive to many currents in the spiritual atmosphere of the universe of whose very existence the normal man is all his life unaware. We have to remember that this world is after all only what our own senses and intellect make it for each of us. The little we can see and feel must be as nothing compared with the immensities that we can neither see nor feel, but that always attend our thoughts, our footsteps, our very breathing, like silent, invisible spectators. Even the world of the animal is not our world, for the animal is alive to many things that never penetrate our consciousness; and there are exceptionally constituted human beings on whose nerves the universe seems to write different messages from those that are communicated to the ordinary soul. The mystic catches vibrations in life to which duller natures are, except in moments of abnormal exaltation, for the most part insensitive. When we find fault with him for the apparent weakness of his hold upon reality, we need to remember that his realities are not always ours. He frequently has difficulty in expressing himself in our ordinary speech, for the reason that this is mainly the instrument of normal cerebration, not of the sub-normal or the super-normal. Hence Maeterlinck's theorem--which is not half such a paradox as it looks--that the profounder vibrations of the soul are more easily communicated by silence than by speech. We are beset by intuitions that can never find adequate expression in words. "How strangely," he says, "do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!" Speech hardly seems necessary to him as a means of carrying on his thoughts, which, as they lie in deeper, more obscure places than language has ever visited, must seek a more immediate way of passage from his own brain to that of another. "A time will come, perhaps, when our souls will know of each other without the intermediary of the senses.... A spiritual epoch is perhaps upon us...." Thus the favourite means of communication between the soul of the spiritual elect is not speech, but silence--silence, which is far more eloquent, far more illuminative of the profoundest depths of being, than language can ever be. "It is idle," he writes, "to think that by means of words any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.... It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak." And just as the mystic despises words as instruments of communication, so he looks down upon facts as guides to illumination. As the inner life is too subtle to be expressed in ordinary language, so its interests are too refined to be spent upon crude facts. These are "nothing but the laggards, the spies and camp followers, of the great forces we cannot see."[57]

II

Here, then, is a philosophy of life which, in the hands of the artist, aims at creating a new type of "static" drama, in which speech shall give way, as far as possible, to suggestion, incident and action to the immediate revelation of soul-states. Though the drama is to deal with real life in a way that Maeterlinck would regard as most rigorously real, there is to be a progressive withdrawal from most of the points that the average man regards as the essence of reality.

In the first place, naked facts and violent actions are to be passed over, as not necessary for the communication to us of the essential thing that the dramatist has to say; in the second place, mere words are no longer to be looked upon as indispensable intermediaries between the thought and the expression. Now all this, in its main features, finds a very close parallel in the work and the arguments of Wagner. Let us look for a moment at his theories as they figure in actual practice, taken out of the wordy metaphysic in which he delighted to obscure them.

The drama and the novel represent an attempt to fire the reader with a certain emotion that has already flamed up in the writer. The tragedy of _King Lear_, for example, aims at inspiring in us a sentiment of pity for an old man who is shattered by filial ingratitude. _Othello_ aims at enlisting our sympathies for an affectionate man and wife whose happiness is broken to pieces, partly by misunderstanding, partly by diabolical machinations. There are innumerable other points in the plays, but these are the great central forces. These are what moved Shakespeare to the composition of the dramas. These are the ideas from which he started; and these are the ideas that finally remain with us when we have seen or read the plays. But owing to the clumsy, intractable nature of the material in which he works, the dramatist can stimulate this central idea or feeling in us only by a most roundabout process. He cannot plunge at once into his subject. He must commence at a point far distant from that to which he wishes to lead us, and then work up to it gradually. He cannot adequately communicate an emotion without unfolding before our eyes the long and complex scenes or set of circumstances that give rise to this emotion. He cannot confine himself to the characters and the events that make up the real drama; he has to illustrate these--to draw sparks from them, as it were--by the impact of minor incidents and persons. In a word, he has to fill us with a multiplicity of more or less superfluous feelings before he can communicate to us the feeling that is really essential.

In music all this is altered. (The reader will of course remember that I am expounding Wagner.) There being no distinction between the feeling and the expression, no bar between the emotion and the speech, the musician can plunge at once into the very heart of his subject. Further, he need never leave the heart of it; he can devote all his energies to elucidating the really necessary factors; he has no need to waste half his time in showing, from the description of extraneous things, how such and such a situation has come about, or how a man comes to feel in such and such a way. It takes half-an-hour's reading of the Tristan legend, or any poem on the subject, before we feel the atmosphere of tragedy closing round us, or know precisely why it should come. In Wagner's opera, not only is the fact that there _is_ a tragedy suggested in the first bars of the music, but the very tint and spiritual quality of the tragedy are painted for us at once. All through the work, again, we live in the very centre of the metropolis of that territory of emotion--love, grief, and pity--to which the legend and the poets have to guide us by devious and frequently uninteresting paths. We see Tristan and Isolde in the first bar and in the last; we never leave them for a moment. Thus not only does the musician draw us at once to the point he wishes us to reach, but his independence of all the scaffolding necessary to the poet gives him more freedom of development. He can wring from the souls of his characters the last bitter juice of their emotions. Wagner himself was fond of pointing out the gradual growth of his art in these respects. In the _Flying Dutchman_ he tried "to keep the plot to its simplest features; to exclude all useless detail, such as the intrigues one borrows from common life." The plot of _Tannhäuser_ will be found "far more markedly evolving from its inner motives"; while "the whole interest of _Lohengrin_ consists in an inner working within the heart of Elsa, involving every secret of the soul." Wagner's aim was to shake himself clear of the wearisome mass of detail that, in the poetical drama, is necessary to show the "whence and wherefore" of each feeling. "I too, as I have told you," he writes, "felt driven to this 'whence and wherefore'; and for long it banned me from the magic of my art. But my time of penance taught me to overcome the question. All doubt at last was taken from me, when I gave myself up to the _Tristan_. Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outer form. A glance at the _volume_ of this poem will show you at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearing of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul. The whole affecting Action comes about for the reason only that the inmost soul demands it, and steps to light with the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine."

Here the analogy with Maeterlinck's theory becomes evident. Both men despise the cruder, external, historical, active facts on which the drama has felt itself till now compelled to rely; both aim at a subtle form of drama in which the soul-states shall be the first and last thing. There is more in life, they say, than conscious reason; it is the innermost processes of the soul that we desire to have laid bare to us in drama. This reflection led Wagner to the choice of the myth as the best material on which to work. "I therefore believed," he writes, "I must term the 'mythos' the poet's ideal Stuff--that native nameless poem of the Folk, which throughout the ages we ever meet new handled by the great poets of periods of consummate culture; for in it _there almost vanishes the conventional form_ _of man's relations, merely explicable to abstract reason_, to show instead the eternally intelligible, the purely human." This is not clarity itself, but what Wagner means is that in music as he conceives it you come face to face with the essential truth of things at once, without having to make a wearisome journey through a mass of unimportant detail, as you have to do in the novel and the poetical drama before you can get to the heart of the emotion. And this is quite true, so far as it goes. If you conceive life like the mystic or his soul's brother the musician, if you prefer the general to the particular, the vague to the definite, the suggested to the spoken, you will naturally seek a medium that shall allow free passage to your emotion in its broadest form. Like Wagner, you will not want to stop and explain for half-an-hour who Tristan and Isolde were, who were the people round them, what the causes were that led to their tragic end, and so on. You will want to get to the centre of your subject at once; you abandon all attempts at demonstration and plunge at once into expression. And if, with Maeterlinck, it seems quite unimportant to know the names and histories of two or three given men and women, the scenes in which they live, the commonplace routine of their daily lives--if you only want to know how destiny is dealing with them, what bitter-sweet emotion is being distilled from their souls in some quiet hour that is pregnant with vital meaning--then you will pass over, like the musician, every detail that seems to you unimportant, and concentrate yourself on that supremely fateful hour. You will not depict anything happening, because it is not the event that is the essential thing, but the soul-states that are born of the event. To Maeterlinck, as to Wagner, the "purely human"--the whole man, the essential man--lies deeper than what is "merely explicable to abstract reason." "A new, indescribable power," he says, in speaking of Ibsen's _Master Builder_, "dominates this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and reveals the source of an unknown life. And if we are bewildered at times, let us not forget that our soul often appears, to our feeble eyes, to be but the maddest of forces, and that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence."

For these obscure perceptions of the soul, words alone are plainly an inadequate mode of expression. Hence both Wagner and Maeterlinck feel that some more direct kind of utterance is required, some more immediate means of communication between the feeling of the artist and the feeling of the auditor. Wagner finds this in music, which substitutes a direct appeal for the indirect appeal of the ordinary poet. The dramatic poem must be drafted "in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken _thought_ entirely dissolves into the _feeling_." Not that there is to be any surrender of that grip upon the inner life that is the essence of thoughtful drama. On the contrary, Wagner maintains, after the manner of Maeterlinck, that it is only when the soul is set free from the disturbing accidents of the temporary life that it can see clearly into the movements of the universal life. Wagner holds that in the Beethoven symphony, for example, a world-view is presented, quite as philosophical, quite as logically connected, as any that can be put together in words. "In this symphony, instruments speak a language whereof the world at no previous time had any knowledge; for here, with a hitherto unknown persistence, the purely musical expression enchains the hearer in an inconceivably varied mesh of nuances; rouses his inmost being to a degree unreachable by any other art; and in all its changefulness reveals an ordering principle so free and bold that we can deem it more forcible than any logic, yet without the laws of logic entering into it in the slightest; nay, rather, the reasoning march of thought, with its track of causes and effects, here finds no sort of foothold. So that this symphony must positively appear to us a revelation from another world; and in truth it opens out a scheme of the world's phenomena quite different from the ordinary logical scheme, and whereof one foremost thing is undeniable: that it thrusts home with the most overwhelming conviction, and guides our feeling with such a sureness that the logic-mongering reason is completely routed and disarmed thereby."

Now set beside this view of the relations of the musical drama to the poetical drama Maeterlinck's comparison of his own dramatic ideals with those of the "active" poet. The latter passes unthinkingly over many of the feelings that give to a tragic event its real significance. Why should not these feelings, the essential core of the drama, be given fuller play, and the mere incidents be looked upon as either superfluous or purely ancillary? He too, like Wagner, wants to show the heart of a tragic situation without the customary tedious cataloguing of all its limbs. He wants the spiritual essence of drama, and the essence alone, not the crude material facts from which this essence has to be distilled. The whole of Maeterlinck's magnificent passage must here be quoted: "The mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious of within us, though by what tokens none can tell--do not all these underlie _King Lear_, _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_? And would it not be possible, by some interchanging of the _rôles_, to bring them nearer to us, and send the actor farther off? Is it beyond the mark to say that the true tragic element, normal, deep-rooted, and universal--that the true tragic element of life only begins at the moment when so-called adventures, sorrows, and dangers have disappeared?... When we think of it, is it not the tranquillity that is terrible, the tranquillity watched by the stars? And is it in tumult or in silence that the spirit of life quickens within us? Is it not when we are told, at the end of the story, 'They were happy,' that the great disquiet should intrude itself? What is taking place while they are happy? Are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness, in a single moment of repose, than in the whirlwind of passion? Is it not then that we at last behold the march of time--ay, and of many another on-stealing besides, more secret still--is it not then that the hours rush forward? Are not deeper chords set vibrating by all these things than by the dagger-stroke of conventional drama? Is it not at the very moment when a man believes himself secure from bodily death that the strange and silent tragedy of the being and the immensities does indeed raise its curtain on the stage? Is it while I flee before a naked sword that my existence touches its most interesting point? Is life always at its sublimest in a kiss? Are there not other moments, when one hears purer voices that do not fade away so soon? Does the soul flower only on nights of storm? Hitherto, doubtless, this belief has prevailed. It is only the life of violence, the life of bygone days, that is perceived by nearly all our tragic writers; and truly may one say that anachronism dominates the stage, and that dramatic art dates back as many years as the art of sculpture."

He places the spiritual purposes of painting and music on a higher plane; "for these," he says, "have learned to select and reproduce those obscurer phases of daily life that are not the less deep-rooted and amazing. They know that all that life has lost, as regards mere superficial ornament, has been more than counterbalanced by the depth, the intimate meaning, and the spiritual gravity it has acquired. The true artist no longer chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the Duke of Guise, as a fit subject for his art; for he is well aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, an open door at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest, and by these simple images will add to our consciousness of life, which is a possession that it is no longer possible to lose."

III

The excellence and the wisdom of these thoughts need no pointing out. What is the defect in them--or, rather, wherein are they incomplete?

This may be seen, in the first place, by playing off Maeterlinck's theory against that of Wagner. It is quite true, as Wagner says, that his kind of music-drama has one great advantage over the poetical drama: that by surrendering certain outlying interests it can concentrate all its power on the central interest--giving full play, as Wagner would express it, to the inner motives of the dramatic action. But, on the other hand, music must, from its very nature, fail to touch a score of ideas and passions that are within us, and for whose expression we are compelled to go to poetry that is unhampered by music. Thus there are certain mental states with which music can have practically no communion. The girl can sing, as Ruskin has told us, of her lost love, but the miser cannot sing of his lost money-bags. For a study of the miser, then, and of all the shades of character that resemble his, we must look, not to music, but to poetry or prose. Again, any one who has seen Verdi's _Otello_ on the stage must have been struck with the relative feebleness of the character-drawing of Iago. A monster of this kind, made up entirely of cunning and deception, is a concept almost entirely foreign to the art of music, which does indeed give a heightened value to the primary emotions, but, on the other hand, has difficulty in reaching beyond these. One frequently finds it hard to believe that Wagner's Mime, who sings such pleasant music, is really a hateful character, owing to the difficulty music has in expressing the mean and despicable. It can render, mainly by physical means, the horrible and the terrible, but the contemptible, the abortive, are practically beyond its sphere.

Nor, again, even in the field where music and poetry meet, does music so far cover the ground, as Wagner would contend, as to make non-musical poetry a superfluity, a mere echo of what can be heard in fuller tones in the drama that is a blend of poetry and music. For the sheer emotional beauty of pity, for exquisite tenderness and complete consolation, nothing, in any art, could surpass certain portions of _Parsifal_. But it is essentially _emotion_ here, not thought; it is wholly esoteric; it achieves its miracle by withdrawing into its own lovely atmosphere the crude, hard facts of the world, and there transforming them. If we want an expression of pity that shall bear more closely on our real life, give us the emotional balm at the same time that it allows free play to our philosophic thought, we must go to poetry. Look at the colloquy of the pots in the Rubaiyat, in which the humanist Omar empties the vials of his compassion upon the marred and broken beings of this world:--

"Said one among them--'Surely not in vain My substance of the common Earth was ta'en And to this Figure moulded, to be broke, Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'

Then said a Second--'Ne'er a peevish Boy Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy: And He that with His hand the Vessel made Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.'

After a momentary silence spake Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make; 'They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?'"

There is not here the sensuous anodyne of Wagner's music, but there is something equally precious; the thought is farther flung; it brings more elements of reality back with it to be bathed and softened in emotion; it stirs the more vital philosophic depths. As one reads the verses, one thinks sadly of all the bruised and broken beings of the world, the poor misshapen souls who carry within them, from no fault of their own, the seeds of the things that are to blight or slay them--the men afflicted with incurable vices of body or mind or will, the criminals, often more sinned against than sinning, upon whom society wreaks its legalised vengeance. We have not merely a warm wave of pity passing through us, as in the case of _Parsifal_; the exquisite art of the thing is strengthened by the closeness of its association with innumerable problems of theology, of philosophy, and of social science. So, again, with the line Maeterlinck himself places in the mouth of old Arkel, after one of the most terrible scenes in _Pelleas and Melisanda_: "If I were God, how I should pity the heart of men!" Music, in its grave, wise speech after a dire catastrophe, may almost compass some such wealth of ethical significance as this; but there is in Maeterlinck's line a peculiar fulness of divination that can be conveyed to us only in words. Numberless other instances might be cited, all proving this existence of a philosophic sphere to which even the greatest music can, by reason of its indefiniteness, never have access. Matthew Arnold may have been a prejudiced witness, being a poet himself; yet one feels that he has the right with him in that passage, in his _Epilogue to Lessing's Laocöon_, in which he points out how the painter and the musician excel respectively in expressing "the aspect of the moment" and "the feeling of the moment," but that the poet deals more philosophically with the total life and interlacement of things:--

"He must life's movement tell! The thread which binds it all in one, And not its separate parts alone. The movement he must tell of life, Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife; His eye must travel down, at full, The long, unpausing spectacle; With faithful unrelaxing force Attend it from its primal source, From change to change and year to year, Attend it of its mid career, Attend it to the last repose, And solemn silence of its close."

Arnold's expression might perhaps have been a little more artistic, but there is no controverting the general truth he voices--that poetry looks before and after in a way that music cannot possibly do; is wider in its philosophic sweep than music, clearer in its vision, making up for its weaker idealism by its sympathetic evocation of a hundred notes that are denied to music.

IV

And just as we pass from music to poetry to reach certain emotions that are not to be found in the more generalised art, so we pass from Maeterlinck's æsthetic world to that of the cruder realist, in the search for certain further artistic satisfactions. Mysticism has this in common with music--that it gives voice to the broader, more generalised feelings of mankind, and hesitates to come into contact with the less ecstatic faculties that are exercised upon the harder facts of life. Maeterlinck, like Wagner, tries to lay hold upon the universal in art; but he does so simply because, again like Wagner, he is comparatively insensitive to other stimuli. And as Wagner's æsthetic holds good for the most part only of those who, like him, apprehend the world through music, so Maeterlinck's theory of drama is completely valid only for those who share his general attitude toward life and knowledge. If it is really the mystics who have the key to the knowledge of things; if, as Maeterlinck himself says in his introduction to Ruysbroeck's _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles_, "toute certitude est en eux seuls," and that "les vérités mystiques ont sur les vérités ordinaires un privilège étrange--elles ne peuvent ni vieillir ni mourir"; if in the hypnotic semi-swoon of the faculties before the abyss of the universal we come closest to the real secret of things, then is there nothing to be added to or taken from Maeterlinck's statement of the essence of drama. If, on the other hand, the evolution of the more acutely specialised perceptions in us points to man's need of a mental system that shall embrace ever more and more of the phenomena of the world, then must we have an art that can shape these perceptions too into a beauty of their own. Did we all apprehend the universe as Maeterlinck and the mystics do--through a kind of sixth sense that is an instantaneous blend of the ordinary five; could we all arrive at his serenely philosophical outlook, and be content with so much understanding of the world as came to us in immediate intuitions--we should then see in his kind of art a mode of expression co-extensive with all that we could know or feel. But since we do not all look at life with the semi-Oriental fatalism of Maeterlinck, in whose soul the passive elements seem to outweigh the active, we have to turn to other types of dramatic art for the satisfaction of our cravings. "The poet," he says in one place, "adds to ordinary life something--I know not what--which is the poet's secret: and there comes to us a sudden revelation of life in its stupendous grandeur, in its submissiveness to the unknown powers, in its endless affinities, in its awe-inspiring misery." Well, for a great many of us there are moments when "submissiveness to the unknown powers" does not express the be-all and the end-all of life--more vivid moments of revolt, of struggle with uncertainties, of passionate assertions of personality, that have little kinship with the grey resignation of the mystic. If life is ugly and bitter, there is an art that can interest us deeply in this bitterness and ugliness, because it ministers to that deep-seated need of ours to leave no corner of life and nature unexplored. This art of the mercilessly real may not be so "philosophical" as Maeterlinck's; it may not speak to us so clearly of the "mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon," for these voices can make themselves heard only in a wider, serener, less turbid space than ours. But just as the poet foregoes some of the formal perfection of the musician, finding his compensation in his power to touch a wider range of things, so the realist finds in the bracing, ever-interesting contact with the cruder facts of life something that compensates him for missing the broader peace of the mystic--a sense of energetic personality, of struggle with and dominion over inimical forces, that the languor of mysticism cannot provide. "No human reason," says Maeterlinck, in our actions, "no human reason; nothing but destiny." Well, thought and action, to the mystic, may be only the children of illusion; but may there not be as much illusion in passivity, in the ecstatic collapse of the intellect under the pressure of an incomprehensible world? In the Maeterlinck drama, beautiful as it is, we cannot all of us find complete satisfaction. To quote the words that he himself has used in another context: "Here we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life. We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure--that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we _have_ crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us; just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy. Formal perfection, absolute homogeneity, are obtainable in an art only when we abstract it from outer incident and long reflection. Music comes before poetry in this respect, poetry before the drama, the drama before fiction. Take, from a master of reticence, an example of apparent dissipation of artistic force that Wagner would have held to prove his own theories. It is the scene in _Madame Bovary_ where Léon, expecting to see Emma, is detained at dinner by Homais. "At two o'clock they were still at table, opposite each other. The large room was emptying; the stovepipe, in the shape of a palm tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where, in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides." "Watercress! asparagus! quails! three torpid lobsters!" Wagner would have said, "what have these to do with art? Music's manner of describing the impatience of two separated lovers is that of the mad prelude to the duet in _Tristan_. Here we have all the essential soul-states, without the admixture of crude external realities." Yet there is something in Léon's impatience that music cannot express--the dreary boredom inflicted by his companion, the helpless wandering of the mind over the insignificant uglinesses of his surroundings. This also is part of human psychology, and a part that can find expression only in words. In consideration of the wider sweep of the artistic net, we gladly abate our demands for perfection of quality in the yield; for the phenomena of the extensive and the intensive are meant to be compensatory, the one taking the burden upon itself where the strength of the other fails. Wagner erred in thinking that the union of all the arts in music-drama could render each separate art superfluous; Maeterlinck errs in thinking that the mystic, in his withdrawal to the centre of consciousness, can tell us all we desire to know of the outer circle.[58]

FOOTNOTES:

[56] I am compelled to draw attention to the words "æsthetic _systems_" because, on the appearance of this article in _The Atlantic Monthly_, a not unkindly reviewer took me to task for asserting, as he thought, that the art-_work_ of Wagner was akin to that of Maeterlinck; he pointed out, quite rightly, that César Franck's work lies closer to Maeterlinck's than does Wagner's. But of course I had never asserted that Wagner and Maeterlinck spoke to us in the same language or of the same things. I was only concerned to prove that underlying the so very different practice of the two men was a curious similarity of æsthetic theory.

[57] Compare Amiel's saying--"Action is but coarsened thought."

[58] It is interesting to note that many things in Maeterlinck either move us, by their very vagueness, just in the way that music does, or else seem like a fragment from a libretto, needing to be set to music before they can attain their full significance. Of the former class the reader will remember such things as the conclusion of _Alladine and Palomides_. To the latter class belong many of those curious scenes in which the characters keep on reiterating apparently insignificant words, to the intense annoyance of the Man in the Street, who cannot see the meaning of it all. In _Aglavaine and Selysette_ there are many passages that seem, without music, to be only the skeleton, the scaffolding, of an emotional effect. There is a salient example of the same thing in _Joyzelle_:

_Joyzelle._ Je t'embrassais la nuit, quand j'embrassais mes rêves....

_Lancéor._ Je n'ai pas eu de doute.... _Joyzelle._ Je n'ai pas eu de crainte....

_Lancéor._ Et tout m'est accordé....

_Joyzelle._ Et tout me rend heureuse!...

_Lancéor._ Que tes yeux sont profonds et pleins de confiance!...

_Joyzelle._ Et que les tiens sont purs et pleins de certitudes!...

_Lancéor._ Comme je les reconnais!...

_Joyzelle._ Et comme je les retrouve!...

_Lancéor._ Tes mains sur mes épaules ont le geste qu'elles avaient quand je les attendais sans oser m'eveiller....

_Joyzelle._ Et ton bras sur mon cou reprend la même place....

_Lancéor._ C'est ainsi qu'autrefois tes paupières se fermaient au souffle de l'amour.

_Joyzelle._ Et c'est de même aussi que les larmes montaient dans tes yeux qui s'ouvraient....

_Lancéor._ Quand le bonheur est tel....

_Joyzelle._ Le malheur ne vient pas tant que l'amour l'enchaine.

_Lancéor._ Tu m'aimes?...

_Joyzelle._ Oui....

It reads almost exactly like a libretto without its music.

_To SIR EDWARD ELGAR_

RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

I

Two or three years ago Richard Strauss was practically unknown in this country. A few people had heard works of his abroad; a few more had bought his complex scores and worried through them as best they could, mostly deriving from them only the impression that Strauss was getting madder and madder every year. From other and happier climes, where the demand for music is almost as great as the supply, there came weird stories of this new art. One thing was universally admitted as being beyond dispute--that Strauss was a master of orchestral effect such as the world had never seen; but all the rest was pure legend. In 1897 _Also sprach Zarathustra_ was played at the Crystal Palace; old Sir George Grove, in a private letter, expressed what was probably the opinion of most of the people who sat it out: "What can have happened to drag down music from the high level of beauty, interest, sense, force, grace, coherence and any other good quality, which it rises to in Beethoven and also (not so high) in Mendelssohn, down to the low level of ugliness and want of interest that we had in Strauss's absurd farrago ...? _Noise_ and _effect_ seems to be so much the aim now." It was the old, old story. The man who listens to a new art and is momentarily revolted by it never thinks that the deficiencies may be not in the art but in himself; with sublime arrogance he disposes in half-an-hour of a work that perhaps took a brain three times the weight of his own half a decade to write. There was some excuse for Grove; he was nearly eighty years old, and _Also sprach Zarathustra_ may well have sounded to his venerable ears like chaos come again. Other people had not the same excuse. In any case, an isolated performance of so complex a work as this was hardly the way to educate the musical masses up to the new evangel. The Strauss-flower languished decidedly for some time after in England. It is true that one could occasionally hear, either in London or in the provinces, _Till Eulenspiegel_, _Don Juan_, _Tod und Verklärung_, and a song or two, but this was all. Now and then there was a little wrangle in the press over the merits and tendencies of Strauss. One courageous group of critics dared to say that here was a composer likely to be the next big figure in musical history after Wagner; another group, equally courageous, was steadily occupied in laying up material for the laughter of future generations. Some of these latter gentlemen had already firmly secured their place in history by their opposition, two or three decades ago, to Wagner. Now, with undiminished zeal and energy, anxious to achieve a plural immortality, they industriously plied their mops against the oceanic tide of Strauss. A third group followed the banner of the ingenious gentleman who "hedged" by declaring that Strauss's music was still _sub judice_--as if _all_ musicians were not continually _sub judice_. But while it was very gratifying to behold this contest--all fighting being a testimony to life--what was all the strife about? Merely, for the most part over _Don Juan_, a comparatively early work of Strauss, in no way representative of the possibilities of his methods or of the stage of evolution at which he had even then arrived. The real Strauss was to be seen not in _Don Juan_ but in _Don Quixote_, _Also sprach Zarathustra_, and _Ein Heldenleben_. Yet the flower of the intelligence of England was wrangling noisily over three works of the composer's youth--_Till Eulenspiegel_, _Tod und Verklärung_, and _Don Juan_! It was as if, in 1881, just before the production of _Parsifal_, the English champions of the rival schools had been slaying each other over the question as to whether Wagner had not gone a little too far in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Verily England was asleep.

Then Strauss himself came twice to the metropolis, first to conduct some miscellaneous works, then to produce his latest tone-poem _Ein Heldenleben_, for the first time in England. Now the interest, or at any rate the curiosity, of London was stirred a little. An abstract, disinterested passion for music itself, a cultivated desire for new things as distinguished from the merely circus interest in new performers, seems beyond the powers of all but a few souls in that vast population. Organised discussion of a new composer only comes into being when he himself happens to be in the city. As Sir Thomas Browne has it, "Some believe the better for seeing Christs sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle." As it was, it is questionable whether so large an audience would have flocked to hear--or to see--Strauss on the _Heldenleben_ occasion, if that concert had not also happened to be the first at which Mr. Henry Wood appeared after a long illness. When, some six months later, a three days' Strauss Festival was given at St. James's Hall, with the fine Amsterdam orchestra that plays him so intelligently, and with Mengelberg and Strauss himself as conductors, but this time without a convalescent Mr. Wood, the general public showed disgracefully little interest in the thing. However, the seed had been sown, and its growth has been fairly rapid. We have not yet heard in England the latest work of Strauss--the _Symphonia domestica_--and _Don Quixote_[59] has not been repeated since it was given its solitary English performance at the Festival. But _Ein Heldenleben_--the terrible _Ein Heldenleben_, the bugbear, the bogey of a couple of years ago--has become astonishingly popular. It is played quite frequently; young ladies barely out of their teens study the score and discuss the love-music appreciatively. _Till Eulenspiegel_, _Tod und Verklärung_, _Don Juan_,--these we hear so often that one no longer gets a shock when one sees them on the bills; even _Also sprach Zarathustra_ is occasionally given. _Aus Italien_ has had several performances, and the youthful Symphony in F minor (op. 12) has been played once at least. The violin concerto, the violin sonata, the 'cello sonata, and the piano quartet may all be heard from time to time. So that at last the reproach of total ignorance of Strauss is taken away from us, even if we do not hear so much of him, especially of his very latest works, as we would like.

It is a pity we cannot get more performances of his bigger works, for the amateur who does not hear him often on the orchestra, and who tries to get a knowledge of him from the easier things that can be played at home, is likely to get a very false impression of him. He has passed through so many stages of artistic development that we have only to pick up an early work of his here and there to be capable of a dogmatism concerning him that is ludicrously wrong. I can recall no example in musical history of a man with such native strength and such pronounced individuality suggesting, in his youthful works, so many other musicians of note who have gone before him. You will find in the earlier Strauss abundant traces of Mozart, of Haydn, of Beethoven, of Wagner, of Schumann, of Brahms, of Liszt. Yet the curious thing is that nowhere do we feel that Strauss has been, even for a little time, wholly under the influence of any one of these; he is always himself, though he unaccountably lapses at times into the most distinct reminiscences of the manner of other men. No one but he could have penned the vigorous Piano Sonata (op. 5); in the first movement, for example, not only the _mâle_ _tristesse_ of the mood, but the firm and flexible handling is indubitably his. Yet in this same movement, with its modern atmosphere, its modern force, and its modern audacity, he must needs insert passages here and there that go right back to the eighteenth century, in their form, their speech, and their psychology. Something of the same phenomenon meets us again in his Symphony in F minor (op. 12). The singular thing is that he has never had a real Beethoven epoch, or a real Schumann epoch, or a real Wagner epoch; but that he seemed to fall quite naturally, at times, into bygone modes of feeling and utterance, like a man whose prose style had an unaccountable tendency to lapse, every now and then, into reminiscences of the authors he read most in his youth. The _Guntram_ (op. 25) may have looked very Wagnerian when it first appeared; but as we read it now, in the light of Strauss's later work, it is clear that Wagner does not enter into a twentieth part of the opera. People could pick out the passages that resembled Wagner--particularly that extraordinary reminiscence of _Tristan_ which Strauss seems to use so unconsciously--and sum the whole opera up as the work of a mere disciple of Wagner. It was hard in those days to grasp the significance of the more individual parts of _Guntram_, or to frame to oneself a connected scheme of what the composer's psychological processes were. But we can see it all now, after _Also sprach Zarathustra_, _Don Quixote_, _Enoch Arden_ and the songs; and it is evident that _Guntram_ never owed its origin to Wagner, but to a mind of quite a different type from his. It is not Wagner's texture, it is above all not Wagner's world-view; it comes from a brain of a different outlook, making its own terminology for itself as it goes along, and only occasionally dropping into the idiom of Strauss's great forerunner. So again with the much-cited influence of Liszt upon him. That the flower of Strauss's achievement has grown up from the soil Liszt watered is unquestionable. But no one work, no section of one work, can be quoted that sounds as if it came direct from Liszt. With the exception of some half-dozen of the juvenile writings, there is nothing of Strauss that does not, in spite of its suggestions of this or that predecessor, belong as completely to him as _Orfeo_ does to Gluck or _Lohengrin_ to Wagner; while in the work of the last few years, the years of attained maturity and full self-consciousness, he stands proudly, loftily alone, unique among musicians long before he had reached his fortieth year. Yet the tradition that he is merely an artificial blend of Wagner and Liszt will probably hold the field for a long time to come.

So great, again, is the distance between his earlier and his later work that one who only knows him from the efforts of his adolescence is certain to misconceive him. The present Strauss commands respect even from those who think he is merely using his great gifts to achieve perversity and ugliness; but we may go through page after page of his earliest work and yet hardly once come across anything that would make us believe we were face to face with genius. Some of it, like the _Fünf Klavierstücke_ (op. 3) and the _Stimmungsbilder_ (op. 9), is quite mediocre at times, commonplace in rhythm, weak in structure, and decidedly cheap in melody. Even where his early work was most excellent--and some of it was admirable--it was impossible to say from it that the composer was one of the predestined spirits of music, fated to remove landmarks, to explore undiscovered countries. Clearly it was not a common talent; even in those days it was generally vigorous, audacious, self-confident; but it rarely flamed up into incandescence. In those years of apprenticeship Strauss was quietly and almost unconsciously evolving a musical bias that was to re-mould the æsthetics of music--doubtful yet as to whither his own ideals were drawing him, and no doubt puzzled at times at his failure to get precisely the picture he would have liked, but still remaining autonomous, a new and vigorous force aiming at an idiom of its own. We see now how hopelessly absurd it is to judge the composer of _Also sprach Zarathustra_ by any of the standards of the past--that the man's whole mind is unique, seeing things in music that no one ever saw before, and taking the most direct, even if most perilous, path to the expression of them. It took him a long time to learn that he had no great faculty for abstract beauty, for weaving the impalpable stuff of a vision into something that lives and shall be immortal, like the sculptor's work, by virtue of the sheer harmony of every element of its being. The great test of the existence of this order of beauty in a musician is to be had in his slow movements. Mere vigour of rhythm and intensity of colour here go for less than anywhere else: in this ideal, abstracted world, where the soul listens darkling, brooding upon the mystery of things like the dove upon the waters, the musician's sense of sheer self-existent beauty must be at its finest; and the complete absorption in pure tone that such a mood demands is the quality of the absolute rather than of the poetic musician. I am not for a moment, of course, denying that Strauss has written some slow passages which are surcharged with emotional beauty--such as the "Redemption" theme at the end of _Tod und Verklärung_, the noble _mit Andacht_ section at the beginning of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the pathetic death-music in _Don Quixote_, or the end of _Ein Heldenleben_. What I mean is that his is not the order of musical mind to which the extended formalism of the symphony, with its intentness on architectonic effect, is the most propitious. His genius is for the literary rather than for the architectural or sculpturesque.

Look, for example, at his songs. If his gift were for sheer musical beauty, the melody that sings from pure joy in itself, it would certainly appear here if anywhere. Yet among all his songs I cannot recall more than one or two that seem to be written out of the mere heart of lyrism itself; while in all the really great ones the magic and the power come not from pure melodic or harmonic loveliness, but from the sense they give us of absolute emotional veracity--as it were a man speaking upon a lofty subject very gravely and with intense conviction, and so attaining, not the rapturous abandonment of poetry, but an eloquent, impassioned, heart-searching prose.

Strauss is perhaps not a great melodist, if we restrict that term to the meaning it has acquired in the absolute music of the past. Only once, I think--in the slow movement of the Piano Quartet (op. 13)--does he sing himself into that ideal world of ecstasy and enchantment in which the older musicians spent their most golden hours. Here, indeed, he loses sight of that real world of men and things which it has been his glory to make musical for us in his later work; here, indeed, he is content to sing in rapt absorption, content to pour out a flood of tone that shall be all it is meant to be if it is divine, merely "a wonder and a wild desire." This movement stands unique among Strauss's work, both in its pure beauty and in its æsthetic purpose. For once in his life, at all events, the great realist has had his honeyed hour of idealism. But the very qualities of alertness, of quick interest in life, which have gone to make Strauss, in his later music, the symbol of a new era of æsthetics, have prevented him from falling often into that ecstatic, clairvoyant swoon from which the music of the great dreamers has been born. A melody, with him, is not something irresponsibly beautiful, as sheer a delight to the ear as the flight of a bird or the play of sunlight on the water are to the eye, but a commentary upon a character or a situation, aiming at veracity in the first place rather than at self-existent beauty. Hence that impression of tortuous, huddled drawing which we get at times in a work like _Guntram_, where his hand has not yet learned to follow the inward vision with complete fidelity. Hence also the feeling given us occasionally, by some of his melodies, that they are bordering perilously on the commonplace or the obvious--as in the cadence of the charming little folk-song with which _Till Eulenspiegel_ ends, or in one or two portions of the finale of _Tod und Verklärung_. The closer a musician comes to pure simplicity the more difficult is it to achieve verisimilitude without dropping into bathos. If Strauss has now and again made us feel that it is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, it behoves us to remember also that no musician has ever been so triumphant in his handling of the simplest material--as in some passages of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the ending of _Ein Heldenleben_, the Sancho Panza music in _Don Quixote_, or the music of the children in _Feuersnot_. If Tchaikovski brought the last new shudder into music, Strauss has endowed it with a new simplicity. It is this, indeed, that makes him Strauss; for paradoxical as it may seem, this builder of colossal tone-poems, this wielder of the mightiest orchestral language ever yet spoken, this Mad Mullah of harmony, is what he is because he has dared to throw over almost all the conventions that have clustered round the art in the last two hundred years. He is complex because he is simple; he appears so wildly artificial because he is absolutely natural; he is called sophisticated because he casts aside all artifice and speaks like the natural musical man. To establish which position, let us digress for a moment into a discussion of æsthetics.

II

Of all the arts, music is the one whose ideal of form is the loftiest, the most exacting, the most imperative; the art in which we are least willing to tolerate any defection from the highest we can conceive. This, indeed, has been the cause both of the rapid development of music in comparison with the other arts, and of the frenetic warfare of the schools in one generation after another. The intensity of the great musician's desire for ideal perfection in his art leads to his carrying it, within a few years, over a curve of evolution that it takes a century for the other arts to describe. This æsthetic concentration gave us the Beethoven symphony and the Wagner music-drama--each the most perfect thing of its kind, each the most perfect expression of the musical needs of the generation that brought it into life. At the same time this principle of evolution has caused the world, when it discovered how absolutely complete was the musician's achievement of the particular thing he had aimed at, to desire to rest permanently in that form, to regard it as the final word in music. It was so with the symphony according to Beethoven, and with the opera according to Wagner. Now what we have to recognise in the case of Richard Strauss is that he is the destroyer--or at any rate, the symbol of destruction--of all previous values, as Nietzsche would say, and the creator at once of a new expression and a new form.

Music could no more stop at Wagner than it could stop at Bach, Gluck, or Beethoven. The expansion of manner which music underwent at the hands of each of these men, be it noted, was the fruit of a correlative expansion of the mental world of the musician--not the individual musician, but the type. The great interest of Wagner for many of us is that with him, for the first time, music aimed at becoming co-extensive with human life. (So much, I think, may be broadly postulated without entering on very contentious grounds, if we complete the proposition by saying that Berlioz and Liszt--the Liszt of the twelve symphonic poems, the _Dante_ symphony and the _Faust_ symphony--are to be understood as subsumed under Wagner.) But the very element in his work that made Wagner an unquestionable evolution from Beethoven--the clear perception that in the symphony pure and simple you could never, do what you would, advance entirely out of the decorative into the human, that to concern herself more pointedly with man and the world, music must call in the aid of poetry, with its wider and deeper associations with human life--this was at the same time, curiously enough, the element that marked the limits of the opera and foretold its ultimate passing away. Opera, it is now evident, is _not_ the form of either the present or the future. It was once the revolutionary form, and under its red banner men imbrued their hands with the gore of their fellow-men; now it is a classic, and in twenty years we shall have a school that quotes its Wagner against the new troublers of our musical conventions as a former school quoted Mozart and Beethoven against Wagner. And why is the opera now beginning to be recognised as a limited form, instead of the universal form which Wagner fondly hoped to make it? Simply because it has now become clear to us that the admixture of the human voice in music really limits the range of the art as much as the absence of it formerly limited the symphony. What the old music needed was fertilisation by speech, as Wagner never wearied of telling us; what music at present needs is emancipation from the tyranny of speech. A glance at the æsthetic of the art will make this seem less paradoxical than it sounds at first.

As I have tried to show in another essay in this volume, the people who despise programme music as a derogation from the high nature and pure origin of the art are labouring under a delusion. Music, they say, ought to be able to stand alone, in splendid isolation as it were; and they regard it as a sign of musical weakness when a composer, associating himself with the literary element of poetry, "calls in to his aid a foreign art," as they express it. All this is based upon a misunderstanding of the real essence of music, and a faulty analysis of the psychological states from which it has sprung. From the very infancy of the art, there have been two main impulses stimulating the musician--the abstract and the human, the decorative and the poetic. The fact that these two are almost always interblended, in one proportion or another, in the actual music we know, does not in any way upset the analysis. Broadly speaking, the revolution effected by Wagner was precisely an infusion of a greater human pre-occupation into an art that had previously been over-intent on the architectural or decorative. He saw that it was impossible for a modern man to say all he wanted to say in a form that attributed relatively too much importance to the propriety of the pattern, and left too little opportunity for the sleuth-like tracking of thoughts as fluid, as complex, as evasive as life itself. On the one hand the transition had to be made from inarticulate to articulate tone, from music as a generalised expression to music as a particularised expression of life; and this could only be done by conquering for her, by means of speech, a new territory of human interests in which she was to be supreme. On the other hand, there had to be a general break-up of the older official form, and a general discarding of useless garments in order that the limbs of this fresh young art might move more freely. What Wagner's achievement was we know. Apart from his stupendous musical gifts, he will live by the closeness of the bearing of his thought upon actual life; for he was searchingly real, albeit in his own semi-romantic way.

But the impetus given to music by Wagner could not end where he desired it to end. Already, in his own lifetime, Berlioz and Liszt had hit upon a form of symphonic poem, which, had it not been for the overwhelming vogue of Wagner's operas, would probably have come to be recognised as the pre-eminent form of the nineteenth century. It must always be remembered that Liszt was no mere imitator of Wagner, but that they worked separately for many years on much the same general æsthetic lines--Liszt being, if anything, the one of the twain who saw first the new possibilities of modern music. Now that Wagner's work is done and become a thing of the past--the art-form which he perfected having died with him, so far as we can see at present--the long-submerged trail of Liszt is making its reappearance. Despised as a composer in his own epoch, he is now having a posthumous and vicarious justification in Richard Strauss. Like the river Arethusa, that was lost in one place and came to light again in another, the peculiar psychology of the symphonic poem according to Liszt re-emerges in _Tod und Verklärung_ and _Also sprach Zarathustra_, after having been hidden for half a century by the more lyrical, less "representative" art of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_. The strong point of Strauss is just that he has shown how often speech can with the greatest advantage be discarded in music, because speech, while a fertilising element up to a certain point, becomes a positive obstruction when once that point has been passed. Where there are words there is necessarily a human voice, and where there is a voice you are necessarily bound by the limitations of the voice, and shut out from one-half of the circle of life. You can, of course, accept these limitations as far as the voice itself is concerned, and leave to the orchestra the portrayal of things that are too vast, too mysterious, or too terrible to be sung--which was the method of Wagner. But the success of this system depends upon the quality of your subject; and when you come to the big modern material, and desire to look through music at the life and the philosophy of your own day, you will find that the voice is, as often as not, a hindrance. A subject like _Also sprach Zarathustra_, for example, neither demands nor would tolerate the human voice in a musical setting of it. Nietzsche's book is not lyrical, not dramatic; it is--or purports to be--a piece of philosophy, a reflection upon the cosmos as it appears to a bitter, disillusioned modern man. In weaving music into a gigantic scheme like this, the tiny egoistic tinkle of the human voice would be a ludicrous descent into bathos.[60] We have only to look round at the music of the past hundred years to see that, as its psychology extended, it first of all required speech to gain it access to one new territory, and then had to throw over speech in order to secure entrance into a territory still more remote and more mysterious. This is the environment towards which Strauss has had to feel his way through one experiment after another.

Now just as Wagner's music, though more complex than the old art in certain respects, was simpler than the old in that it substituted a natural for a stilted form of operatic speech--a revolution similar to that effected in English poetry by the lyrical writers of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries--so Strauss represents yet another movement towards naturalness, when compared with contemporary music-makers like Brahms or even Tchaikovski. The proof of this is writ large over almost all his music, from opus 5 onwards; it is visible everywhere, in his melodies, his rhythms, his harmonies, his _facture_. Now and again, of course, there is a lapse into the polite formalities which come so fatally easy to the musician of all artists. But on the whole Strauss gives one the impression of a singularly fresh and unconventional temperament, whose new mode of vision spontaneously generates its own new manner of utterance. The peculiar quality of his mature style is its absolute _Selbstständigkeit_--its entire independence, throughout its whole texture, of any laws but its own. I need not speak of his marvellous orchestration, for his overlordship there is unquestionable. But we need only look at his harmonies--those harmonies which are the horror of a great many people who are by no means academics--to see how supremely natural, how infinitely remote from the mere desire to stagger humanity,[61] is the style of Strauss even in its most defiant moments.[62] What was said of old of the harmonies of Wagner is now being said of the harmonies of his successor. I will frankly admit that there are certain things among them which are a cruel laceration of our ears--things at which we can only cross ourselves piously, as at the profanity of the natural man at the street corner, and hurry on our way. These deviations from the normal are mostly to be seen in his songs, where he permits himself a much broader license than in any of his other works. For the rest, it will be found that, a few eccentricities apart, our first prejudice against most of his novel harmonies and progressions is due simply to their unexpectedness, and that as soon as we have grown accustomed to them they seem quite logical and inevitable. Undoubtedly our palate for harmony has been cloyed by too much of the saccharine; the tonic, astringent quality of the discord has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by any musician but Strauss. Like all other superstitions, the harmonic superstition cannot survive the bold experimenter. One's faith in the malign powers that dog the footsteps of him who walks under a ladder, or spills the salt at table, receives a rude shock when we find a man tempting Providence in this way and coming to no particular harm; and many things in music that we would _à priori_ pronounce impossible look quite simple and natural when they are actually done. To end a big orchestral work with reiterated successions of the chord of B natural followed by the tonic of C natural seems like a device of Colney Hatch; but it is strangely suggestive and hugely impressive in _Also sprach Zarathustra_. Of course the invention and elaboration of a new technique are very difficult matters; and it is only to be expected that here and there Strauss should give us the impression of not being quite at home even in his own territory. Nothing could be more audacious, or, as a rule, more successful, than his bland persistence in a certain figure or a certain sequence when the chances are all in favour of the thing toppling down like a house of cards long before he can reach the summit; there is something positively grim and eerie, at times, in the _nonchalant_ way Strauss steers his bark through all the dangers of the musical deep. In the lovely song _Ich schwebe_ (op. 48, No. 2), for example, one is alternately astonished and amused at the freedom of the harmonic sequences; one hardly knows whether to be angry at the cool unconventionality with which we are being treated, or to chuckle with delight at the sheer impudence of the performance. Strauss seems to think it a fallacy to look upon chords as being built up from a certain base. In a way, his system is a reversion to the view of the old contrapuntists, that music is a matter of a series of horizontal lines, not of the vertical lines into which the thoughts of the modern harmonist have come to flow. Substitute horizontal figures or groups for horizontal lines, and we have the distinction between the harmonic Strauss in his more daring moments, and, say, the harmonic Tchaikovski. A certain sequence of chords has to be carried through, willy-nilly, in one part of the piano or of the orchestra; another and quite independent sequence has to be carried through, willy-nilly, in another part. They are heard against each other at every point of their career. If they blend, according to the current notions of harmony, well and good; if they do not, equally well and good. You are only shocked for the moment, says Strauss, because your ear has become sophisticated, artificialised, by dwelling too long in the conventional harmonic atmosphere that has been manufactured for you; you must learn to breathe a new atmosphere, to take delight in a new type of musical sequence, wherein opposing notes or opposing chords go each to its own appointed end, regardless of isolated harmonic effects, or of certain cramping formalities known as "resolutions." We have to learn to think horizontally. In musical matters, however, it takes even the most advanced of us a little time to readjust our point of view; and whether it is that we are not yet quite worthy of the light of the new dispensation, or whether the voice of the prophet fails him at times and his speech becomes a little thick and his thought a trifle incoherent, it is certain that Strauss now and again tries our patience somewhat. Here and there in _Ein Heldenleben_ and some of the maddest of the songs we feel that no amount of familiarity with the music will ever make us like certain effects--or defects--of harmony; and even in a great song like the _Traum durch die Dämmerung_ (op. 29, No. 1) we have an uneasy feeling, at more than one point, that instead of Strauss being the master he has become the servant of his material. There is just a suspicion, here and there, that he is working his pre-ordained sequence a shade too rigidly, and that he would have gained by relaxing it a little. In any case, as I have already remarked, it is generally in his songs--which, beautiful as they are, are not the most important part of his work--that his harmonic system is most apt to take our breath away; though I cannot agree with a recent writer that the harmonies are merely "wild experimentation." In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they seem to me perfectly spontaneous, even when they are most trying; I think Strauss writes precisely as he feels, without any mere attempt, in cold blood, to achieve the unexpected or the impossible. One frequent cause of the novelty of his harmonic progressions is that he resolves the constituent tones of his chords in any part of the gamut he chooses. This, of course, is only a continuance of a tendency that has been going on in music for the last hundred years; and Wagner and Liszt have made certain resolutions of this kind so familiar to us that they now excite no comment. In another half-century the majority of the new harmonies and new resolutions of Strauss will probably be part of the common vocabulary of every musical penny-a-liner.

Whatever may be thought, however, of the sincerity or artificiality of his harmonies, there can be no question that in his melodies and his rhythms he is pre-eminently natural and unforced. Once he had got rid of the suspicion of mediocrity that hung about him in his earlier works, owing to his having momentarily taken up with the wrong artistic company, he made rapid progress along a line that was peculiarly his own. No one can listen to _Don Juan_, for example (op. 20), without feeling how exquisitely fresh is the work, how absolutely adolescent in the best sense. Here for the first time we have a revelation of what the future Strauss was to be--the writer of a new music, in which the expression and the technique shall follow the poetic idea with an unquestioning, unswerving fidelity. He is now acquiring an instrument of speech that, in its power to bite into the essentials of an object, reminds us of the consummate style of Flaubert or Maupassant; the realist Strauss is coming into view. All the previous works of any importance--the Symphony in F minor (op. 12), the String Quartet (op. 13), the _Wanderers Sturmlied_ (op. 14), _Aus Italien_ (op. 16), and the Violin Sonata (op. 18)--had been preliminary studies for this. In these works we see Strauss finally emerging from the slough of polite acquiescence in the manners of his forerunners which had been now and then painfully evident in the _Fünf Klavierstücke_ (op. 3) and the _Stimmungsbilder_ (op. 9), and even at times in the virile, breezy Piano Sonata (op. 5). He gradually forms a musical style of his own, in which the idiom is extraordinarily spontaneous and forceful. The melody becomes more serpentiform, more flexibly articulated, more and more independent, in its rhythm, of the four or eight-bar props upon which composers generally find it so convenient to lean. I do not refer so much to the mere crossing or interlocking of rhythms which the _Wanderers Sturmlied_ and _Also sprach Zarathustra_ exhibit here and there, for this is more or less an affair of merely conscious technique, which may, as is frequently the case in Brahms, exist rather on paper than in actuality, and make more impression on the eye than on the ear. The rhythmical interest of the juvenile works of Strauss lies rather in the growing sense of perfect freedom and naturalness in the trajectory of the melodies. All the new qualities of the works that lie between opus 12 and opus 18 come to their fine fruition in _Don Juan_, which is the first work of Strauss that shows in something like its entirety the true psychology, æsthetic and moral, of the man.

III

Upon some features of that psychology--its sincerity, its originality, its artistic fearlessness--I have already touched. Strauss, however, is an epoch-making man not only in virtue of his expression and his technique, but in virtue of the range and the quality of his subjects. He is the first complete realist in music. The Romantic movement came to a somewhat belated head in Wagner, who had been the chief master of the ceremonies at the prolonged funeral of the classical spirit. The Romantic movement persisted longer in music than in any of the other arts; and even in our own day it still makes an occasional ineffectual effort to raise its old head, ludicrous now with its faded garlands of flowers overhanging the wrinkled cheeks. But it has done its work, and the future is with the men who live not in that old and somewhat artificial world of gloomy forests, enchanted castles, men that are like gods and gods that are like men, impossible maidens, and superannuated professors of magic,[63] but in a world recognisably similar to that in which we ourselves move from day to day. We like our art to have a rather more acrid taste, and to come to closer quarters with reality. Even the apparatus of the Wagnerian opera seems to us a trifle _vieux-jeu_ in these days. Strauss has wisely recognised that the operatic form, at its worst a ludicrous parody on life, is at its best only a compromise, limited in its choice of subjects no less than in its structure. Much greater freedom is to be had in the symphonic poem, or in other purely instrumental modern forms, because here we have at once a wider range of subjects open to us, and a medium of expression into which the voice, with its limiting associations, does not enter. Nothing but the freest, most expansive of forms could be suited to the peculiar temperament of a realist like Strauss, and fine as his own opera work is, bubbling over, as _Feuersnot_ is, with life and humour, it is not there that we see the essential Strauss.

For it is as a realist that he is most remarkable. He is not a dreamer, nor a philosopher, except in so far as philosophy--in Mr. Meredith's sense of the term--is at the centre of every great artist's vision of life. He is at his best in studies of character in action, as in _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Don Quixote_; and he follows his trail with the most cheerful disregard as to whether his work is or is not formal music in the older acceptations of the word. Further, his interest is in human life as a whole, not in the one wearisome episode of the eternal masculine and the eternal feminine. Strauss's is the cleanest, most sexless, most athletic music I know. Just as it is the easiest thing in the world to make love, so is the making of love-music the easiest part of the musician's trade. It is one other sign of the death of the Romantic spirit and the revival of realism in Strauss that he should have thrown over almost all the old erotic tags of the musician--though he can be passionate enough upon occasion--in order to tell the story, in the true modern spirit, of other elements in human life that also have their poetry and their pathos. One refreshing characteristic of the earlier works--such as the Piano Sonata, the Violin Sonata, and the Piano Quartet--was their unclouded virility, their total freedom from those phantasms of sex that have been hovering over so much of our music during the past century. The adolescent work of Strauss is proud, vigorous, uncontaminated, Greek in quality. Even in the _Don Juan_, it may be noted, his interest is in another aspect of the story than the blatantly erotic; and the music itself is plainly not the work of a Romanticist but of a realist and humanist. The love-themes in _Don Juan_ are not sexual in the way that Wagner or Tchaikovski, for example, would have made them. Even in his songs his love-making is grave and philosophical, with none of the feline sex-element showing through it that is so prominent in Wagner; Strauss is untroubled by the _hysterica passio_ of the tiles. For this generation, at all events, the last word in mere sex-music has been said in _Tristan and Isolde_; and instead of imitating his weaker brethren, who occupy themselves energetically in vending the spilth of Wagner's wine, Strauss has turned his eyes upon other elements than the erotic in the human composition. Hence the cosmic magnificence of conception of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the graphic humour of _Till Eulenspiegel_, and the supreme humanity of his greatest work, _Don Quixote_.

I call this his greatest work, because it is the one in which his qualities of realist and humanist come to their finest flower. It has all the fervour of _Don Juan_, and all the humour of _Till Eulenspiegel_, with a technique still more amazing than that of either of these works, and that riper feeling that could only come to him with the process of the years. I would rank the _Don Quixote_ higher even than _Also sprach Zarathustra_, because of this sensation that it gives us of the enormous fund of sincere emotion that underlies all Strauss's audacity and cleverness, and that never leaves him even in his moments of most reckless humour. Certainly _Also sprach Zarathustra_ is a marvellous work; no such overwhelming picture of man and the universe has ever before been unfolded to our eyes in music; it almost makes the world-philosophy of Wagner seem, in comparison, like the bleat of evangelical orthodoxy. But it is in the _Don Quixote_ that Strauss is most really and truly himself and most thoroughly human. It is here also that every trace of other men's style has definitely disappeared, for even in _Also sprach Zarathustra_ we seem at times to catch the voice of Liszt. The _Don Quixote_ marks the final rupture of the realist and the romantic schools in music. I say nothing here of its technique, though that alone is sufficient to make one ask oneself whether it is possible for music to develop further than this. Nowhere, outside the work of glorious old Bach, is there such a combination in music of inexhaustible fertility of imagination and the most rigid austerity in the choice of material. Description would avail nothing for these aspects of _Don Quixote_; every student must revel in the riches of the work on his own account. But when we consider its more human qualities, the _Don Quixote_ must be pronounced an epoch-making work, both in its form and its psychology. It is not a symphonic poem, but a series of variations upon practically three themes--Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea; and for wit, humour, pathos, and humanism there is nothing like it in the whole library of music. Certainly to any one who knows Strauss's music of _Don Quixote_, the story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story itself, indeed, has not half the humour and the profound sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. We have had our immortal lyrists, our sculptors, our dramatists, our builders of exquisite temples; we now come to the writers of fiction, to our Flaubert and Tourgeniev and Dostoievski. And here we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody is now seen to be not a failing but a magnificent gift. It is the prose of music--a grave, flexible, eloquent prose, the one instrument in the world that is suitable for the prose fiction in music that it is Strauss's destiny to develop. His style is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect compromise, of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. "I can conceive," says Flaubert in one of his letters, "a style which should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days, in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations, modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were, in a boat with a good wind aft. It must be said that prose is born of yesterday; verse is the form _par excellence_ of the ancient literatures. All the prosodic combinations have been made; but those of prose are still to make."

No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to the realistic suggestion of character and _milieu_ which is his mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner _manqué_ nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings. Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the main sign of new and independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us on to fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology, and of form.

IV

It is not difficult to understand the attitude of musical purists towards Strauss, and of many others who are not altogether purists. There is something provocative, defiant, almost repellent, in the power of the man's genius. He is so enormously strong, so proudly self-confident, that he joys in flouting the world in the face as it has never been flouted before. His whole career is a testimony to how far courage and resource can carry a man. According to all known precedents, he ought to have struggled for years, vainly endeavouring to get a bare hearing; when he was actually performed he should have been crushed under critical ridicule and poisoned with critical venom; he should have had a ceaseless fight with singers, with players, with opera-houses, with publishers, with concert-givers, and have perished miserably, a martyr to an impossible ideal. For sheer indifference to other people's opinion, for sheer determination to go his own way without regard for all the time-honoured conventions, there is simply nothing like him in the history of music. Yet his career has been one of unbroken triumph. At the age of forty he is not only recognised as the most astonishing of European musicians, but there is no demand of his, no matter how imperious, that people do not gladly hasten to fulfil. In _Zarathustra_ he apparently reaches the limits of what can be demanded from a human orchestra; yet in _Don Quixote_, and again in _Ein Heldenleben_, he strains their breaking sinews to a still higher tension; while in the _Symphonia domestica_ he treats them and us with a superb, tyrannic insolence. Never before has an orchestra of sixty-two strings, two harps, a piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, an oboe d'amore, a cor anglais, five clarinets, five bassoons, four saxophones, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, a bass tuba, four kettledrums, a triangle, a tambourine, a glockenspiel, cymbals, and a big drum, been required to describe a day in the life of a baby; never before have the energies of over a hundred able-bodied men been bent to such a task. He tunes his strings below the normal limit just as he likes; he employs obsolete instruments, and others that are never used in concert-orchestras; he multiplies difficulties, and, by reason of the many rehearsals required, makes performances of his works enormously expensive affairs. Yet he does it all with sublime impunity. An Oriental potentate riding his horse contemptuously over the prostrate bodies of a half-adoring, half-resentful populace, is the only image that will justly describe him in his forceful, irresistible career. The gods have indeed smiled on Strauss. Much of his success, or of his power to command success, may no doubt be due to financial causes; he has never had to fight the world with an empty purse and empty stomach. But still he is the most remarkable phenomenon the musical world has ever seen; no composer ever insulted us one quarter so much without having the life drubbed out of him.

He is evidently a man of enormous nervous energy. You can see it, for one thing, in the style of his melodies. They are remarkable for their huge leaps, the great arcs they traverse, the wide distances between their parts--all pointing to great waves of nervous energy that cannot be confined within the narrow bounds of the ordinary melody. Occasionally it does him rather a disservice; it becomes his master instead of his servant. There is really no need for this incessant piling-up of more and more sound in the orchestra; its one sufficient condemnation is that frequently no result comes out commensurate with the huge means that have to be employed. Thousands of pages of our modern music would be equally great, equally moving, with a vastly smaller expenditure of effort. A man like Strauss takes an exuberant joy, the joy of a healthy athlete doing difficult feats, in weaving a musical texture that is a marvel of ingenious technique. It looks, and really is, wonderful on paper; but there is no gainsaying that precisely the same effect could often be achieved by much simpler means. Now and again we find ourselves saying that line after line might have been struck out of the score without any of the final effect being lost. Nay, Strauss's absorption in the pure joy of scoring occasionally leads him into errors of technique that a smaller man would have escaped. In the dance in _Zarathustra_, for example, his excessive subdivision of the strings merely results in the waltz-theme coming out far too feebly. His own specification at the beginning of the score is for sixteen first violins (to consider this section alone). In the waltz he divides them into (1) first desk, (2) second, third, fourth, and fifth desks. Then he divides the first desk again, giving part of them an arpeggio figure, and the remainder a theme in two parts, involving a further subdivision of this small remainder. The result is that the melody is shorn of all its power. He has marked it _forte_, but a _forte_ is impossible, even with the proper toning down of the rest of the strings. There is no earthly need for such a page as this. The whole strength of the strings is frittered away upon things that do not come out, and would be quite unimportant if they did come out; and the really important theme is shorn of all its impressiveness. There is really no necessity for a great deal of the orchestral complexity in which Strauss now and then delights. It is not essential to the proper presentation of his ideas; it puts an unnecessary strain on the time and the nerves of the orchestra; and it tempts young admirers to go and do likewise, with results absolutely fatal to their chance of getting a performance from any conductor.

It may be that we are only beating the air in calling Strauss's attention to facts like these; it may be that without his defects we should not have his qualities, that the turbulent flood of energy that leads him into occasional extravagances of scoring is only part of the greater flood that makes his inspiration the colossal, overwhelming thing it is. All through the man's brain there is a touch of disorder, a strain of something or other abnormal, that makes it hard for him to work at anything for ten minutes without an irresistible desire surging up in him to deface it. He works at the picture like the soul of inspiration itself; then suddenly a saturnine whim shoots along his nerves, and he makes a long erratic stroke with the brush that comes perilously near to destroying the harmony of the whole thing. An able critic once expressed it to me, after a performance of _Ein Heldenleben_, that Strauss as a composer was something like Rubinstein as a pianist--he cannot go through anything of any length without doing at least one foolish thing in it. Roughly speaking he was right. Shall we say that in every great musician there is a flaw in the mental structure that has to show in one way or another, and that those are lucky in whom it does not show in their music? So much folly, that is, is given to each of them, and it has to come out somewhere. In Wagner it came out in the prose works; they were a beneficent scheme of Providence for sweeping the brain free of its cobwebs, and leaving the purified instrument in all the better condition for its music. Beethoven's madness came out in his private life, again leaving the brain working in music in perfect ease and balance. Strauss does not write prose works like Wagner, and does not, like Beethoven, pour the water all over himself when he is washing his hands, or use a lady's candle-snuffers as a tooth-pick. He is distressingly normal in these respects; and lacking such safety valves for the little bit of folly there is in him, it unfortunately comes out in his music. In the earlier days he could give full rein to his humour, his power of characterisation, with the minimum of desire to irritate his hearer for the pure love of the thing; in _Till Eulenspiegel_, for example, it is almost all pure delight, a flow of wit and humour that only for a moment or two is interrupted by the antics of the mischievous schoolboy. But after that the tendency grew seriously on Strauss to mar his picture by some piece of malicious folly, to thrust his head through the canvas and grin at the public, or to place his thumb to his nose and extend his fingers at them in a derisive flourish.

It is in _Ein Heldenleben_ that this tendency is seen at its worst. With all its great beauties and its titanic powers, it remains finally less satisfactory than it easily might have been. It is not all bathed in the one light; the picture has been seen disconnectedly; it is an attempt at the marriage of contrarieties. The great question is, What does _Ein Heldenleben_ purport to represent? Is it meant for a purely objective painting of a hero--a representation, as it were, of the hero, _per se_--or is it intended, in parts at least, to draw the hearer's attention to the personality of Strauss himself? The official explanation of the work--authorised, we are told, by the composer--is that _Ein Heldenleben_ is meant as a kind of pendant to _Don Quixote_. There he had sketched an individual figure, "whose vain search after heroism leads to insanity." Here he was concerned to present "not a single poetic or historical figure, but rather a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism"; and the idea that the hero of the poem is anywhere Strauss himself is scouted vigorously.

Now, as regards the general handling of the music, it is, I think, because Strauss has had this generalised picture in his mind that he has here come to grief. _Don Quixote_ is such a masterpiece of humanism precisely because Strauss has confined himself to a strictly human figure. You can psychologise both broadly and minutely about a human character, but it is extremely difficult to make a pure abstraction interesting. At every step you are likely to fall into either the bombastic or the commonplace. Especially in music should an abstraction be treated as broadly as possible; the only hope of salvation lies in avoiding an absurd contrast between the particular and the general. This is precisely what Strauss, with all his genius, has not succeeded in avoiding; and when we come to examine his scheme a little more closely, we have every reason to be dissatisfied with the authorised version of its purport. In the first place, this hero in the abstract, this representative of "a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," becomes less and less a generalised type as the work goes on, and at last--in spite of what the inspired commentators may say--strikes a great many of us as being nothing more nor less than a musician--rather a singular narrowing, surely, of the conception of a hero; and this musician has a curious resemblance to Strauss himself. No official disclaimers can get rid of those twenty or twenty-five quotations from Strauss's own earlier works which figure as "the Hero's Works of Peace" in the authorised analysis. The ingenious remark of the analyst, that "quoting salient features from his most important works, he lets us see that the experiences of the hero have also been his own," is really the idlest trifling. When a man sets out to describe a typical hero, a "general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," he does not, as a rule, give as samples of that universal hero's activity a bunch of quotations from almost every work he himself has already written. To have done this seriously would have argued a ludicrous egoism in Strauss; and, in spite of the official story, I prefer to believe that he was not quite so absurd as this. We are here face to face with that curious muddling of the purpose, that perverse desire to stick his own head through the canvas, that is occasionally so characteristic of him. He cannot resist the impulse at once to exhibit his marvellous technique, and to fling a pot of paint in the public's face, as Ruskin said of Whistler; and the result is this wonderfully clever but psychologically unjustifiable rhapsody upon himself, inserted in the middle of what is meant to be a purely objective portrait of a hero. It is not easy, again, to understand the significance or see the appropriateness of the section entitled "The Hero's Battlefield." If ever there was anything in music that could be said to aim at suggesting, crudely and melodramatically, the horror and the nervous excitement of a physical conflict between armed hosts, it is this section, with its appalling and hideous racket, that sounds like strenuous boiler-riveting. But _musicians_ do not fight battles of this kind, surely; and a scheme that represents a hero whose "works of peace" are purely intellectual becomes nonsense when it depicts him fighting like a Hooligan among Hooligans, bludgeoning and being bludgeoned.

It is all due, of course, to this muddling up of the two plans--that of a very definite hero whom Strauss knows very well, and that of a generalised and indefinite hero whom he finds himself compelled to describe in the biggest superlatives. The two conceptions will not equate, will not blend; the one is always trying to destroy the other. All through the work one is dimly conscious of an absence of homogeneity, of failure to make the general scheme as coherent and convincing as it might be; though the man's genius is so titanic that it almost kills our criticism while we are listening to the work. It is a pity, too, that he should sacrifice for a moment the nobility of the general scheme in order to turn aside for a trifling _jeu d'esprit_, in the notorious section that treats of the hero's antagonists. There is cleverness in the characterisation; Strauss is painting the portraits of individual critics who have annoyed him, and those who have seen him, at rehearsal, suggest to the eyes of the players the different types he is satirising, must needs laugh even against their own will. But the section as a whole is a monstrosity; and it is lamentable to see a great genius turn aside from that mighty statue that he has just begun to carve, in order to vent his personal feeling against his personal antagonists. It is simply a crime against art.

V

It is in _Ein Heldenleben_, more than anywhere else, that we have the defects of Strauss's qualities. He is of the type that, masterly as its self-control generally is, cannot refrain at times from becoming defiantly extravagant. It all goes along with his enormous vital energy, that energy which is met with in only one or two men in every century, and that invariably prompts its possessor now and then to the commission of something or other we would rather have had left undone. There is in Strauss something of the _débordement_ of Rabelais, a lust of existence and of apprehension too big to be kept within normal bounds. There is something in him, too, of Hokusai--that colossal genius whose eager spirit seemed to try to fill every corner, every crevice, of the visible world; something of the Japanese artist's interest in all forms of life, something too of the same occasional corruption of the imagination--as in the unfinished series of prints entitled _The Hundred Tales_, where the artist, out of the very excess of his power and ardour, turns life into a hideous, terrifying mockery of itself. Strauss is cosmic in his understanding and his sympathies, but not as men like Goethe and Leonardo are, whose vision is always clear, and whose energies are always held in check by another energy higher than themselves; like Rabelais, like Hokusai, like Goya, there come to him moments when the flood of life within him overflows, and he is hardly master of the strange shapes that issue from his brain. A positive artistic rage seizes him, and he embraces life with an ardour that is cruel, brutal--a passion that has a touch of Sadism in it.

If this enormous sensitiveness to everything that goes on in the world, and this quickness of reaction of the imagination upon it all, are answerable for Strauss's occasional lapses from good taste, they account also for the profounder and more vital qualities of his art--his humour and his humanism, the qualities that make _Feuersnot_ so delightful and _Don Quixote_ so exceedingly great. London treated the latter work unkindly at its solitary hearing of it; it is, indeed, too vast, too many-sided, to be understood at first acquaintance. One critic called it "ugly, laboured, and eccentric"; another wrote that it "contains more sheer ugliness than any other score written by any responsible person of whom we have ever heard, or whose work we have ever studied.... Everything seems in _Don Quixote_ to be discordant for the sheer sake of discord.... We condemn that work from every musicianly point of view; the thing is an artistic arrogance, an attempt to make the best out of the worst, ... utterly and completely a failure; it has no recommendation of beauty, not even the recommendation of fine construction; it is a hopeless piece of exaggerated and intentional cleverness." Well, a significant thing happened on the very night on which _Don Quixote_ created such heartburning. This frightfully complex work, which was absolutely unknown to more than perhaps ten people in the audience, and was consequently misunderstood almost from first to last, was followed by the much earlier _Tod und Verklärung_, a work which itself, a few years ago, was looked upon as perilously near folly and ugliness. Anyone who now thinks _Tod und Verklärung_ a tough nut to crack is looked upon as a hopeless Conservative in music, so very quickly does the world move in these matters. Even the _Times_ said that after _Don Quixote_ the _Tod und Verklärung_ sounded quite sane and normal, or words to that effect. We know how _Also sprach Zarathustra_ was received in 1897, and how accustomed we have grown to it since then, on the strength of some three or four performances; we know how many people who shied nervously at the first performance of _Ein Heldenleben_ now take it as easily as a cat laps milk. In the face of facts like these, is it not somewhat hasty to bespatter the _Don Quixote_ with opprobrious epithets on the strength of just one performance? People have blundered over Strauss before, and been compelled to eat their words when they came to know him better; they have run away from the ogre like frightened children, only to discover long after that the supposed ogre was a kindly and well-disposed person, of something more than ordinary human build perhaps, but still on the plane of normal, not sub-normal nor super-normal, humanity. I say with confidence that they will in time admit that they have gone grievously astray over _Don Quixote_. It lies on the mere surface of the matter that some parts of it are ravishingly beautiful; you have only to play for yourself on the piano the death music, or the Don's long eulogy of the knightly life, to feel the very heart leap within you. If this is not surpassingly great music there is no music in the world worthy of the name. Of other parts the beauty will be perceived when the work is better known; and the _Don Quixote_ will then be recognised to be in some ways the profoundest, noblest thing Strauss has ever done. It is, of course, extraordinarily realistic in its imitations at times, and I can imagine how the sheep and the wind-machine jar on the nerves of ordinarily sensitive people. But you must just laugh at these things and pass them by, take them as a piece of deliberate musical impertinence, and laugh with the composer, not at him. It is really a gratuitous assumption that Strauss is a fool because he has given free wing to his _diablerie_ here and there; he knows as well as any one the precise value of all this kind of thing, but he apparently claims that once or twice in a lifetime it is worth doing for the pure fun of it. We must first of all get the right point of view if we are to understand _Don Quixote_. It is all set in a strange, mad atmosphere; the folly that hovers round it is part of the psychology of the piece; and it is the perfect transmutation of the mental processes of Quixote into tone that makes the work so wonderful, so unique. If a man is not smitten through and through by the pathos of section after section of the piece, I can only say, for my part, that he has not grasped the real significance of the work. Frequent hearing of it will make the extraordinarily original musical tissue quite familiar to men's ears, and when this has been done there will be no bar to the comprehension of the profoundly human psychology of a masterpiece that only Strauss could have written. The score is a treasure-house of true and noble things, which only come to you in full force when you have steeped yourself in its strange atmosphere. Take, for example, the variation immediately preceding the Finale, representing the weary homeward ride of Quixote and Sancho after the Don's defeat by the Knight of the White Moon. In these long descending wails of the orchestra you have all the anguish, all the disillusionment of the poor knight painted with an expressiveness, a fidelity, that sets one thinking of visual as well as auditory things. He illustrates the scene as consummately as a pictorial artist could do, and at the same time throws over it the melting melancholy that music alone among the arts can express. You can see these poor broken creatures, with bowed heads, pacing wearily along on steeds no less sorry, no less bruised than themselves. The whole thing breathes physical and mental fatigue and moral despair. The score of _Don Quixote_ is full of a human quality that we rarely get to such perfection anywhere else, even in Strauss; and London lost a golden opportunity in not taking the work to its heart at once. As it was, the more obvious bits of realism in it revolted a good many people, and left them with insufficient patience to seek beneath the better kind of humour for the pathos that underlies it; while the extraordinary complexity of the musical tissue was all against a comprehension of the work at a first hearing.

What makes the _Don Quixote_ so great a work is, in a word, the wise and tender humanity of its humour. We can put aside, if we like, all the wonderful witchery of its technique, its extraordinary graphic power, its exhilarating and amusing imitations of reality--for there is here a descriptive sense surpassing in its manifestations _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_ at their best. The wise man, who accepts with thankfulness all that music can give him, will not reject all this with a sneer and a condescending remark about music "confining itself to its proper province." The day has gone by for primitive academic æsthetics of that kind. But I do not want to lay stress upon this side of _Don Quixote_, simply because there is infinitely more in the work than this. It represents musical character-sketching brought to a finer point of perfection than can be met with anywhere outside the magic world of Wagner. But it differs from Wagner's drawing in that it is less opulent, more concise, more sharply conceived; it is wholly appropriate to the sketching block upon which the characters are drawn, just as Wagner's heroic figures depend upon and are justified by the huge canvas and the gorgeous range of colour that he is able to devote to them. The _Don Quixote_ puts us in mind of first-rate book-illustration; we could hardly see the characters more distinctly, both in themselves and in relation to their surroundings, if they were set before us in black and white.

And how tender the drawing is, how exquisitely human is the feeling for these two poor tragic-comic actors! It is this that finally makes the work so precious--its unfailing pity, its intuitive avoidance of anything that would make it simply unthinking comedy. Strauss's Sancho is very humorous, but your laughter at him is always softened with tears; while the portrait of Quixote has an added touch of pathos in that it invariably suggests the spare, worn frame of the poor, middle-aged knight. It is true in this as in every other respect. His love-singing is that of a middle-aged man; the pitiful sorrow that envelops the ride homeward after his defeat is that of middle-age; the knight is broken, disillusioned, as only men can be whose physical as well as mental forces have passed their prime. For my part, I can no longer think of Cervantes's story without Strauss's music, just as I cannot think of Goethe's _Erl King_ without the music of Schubert, or of the _Lorelei_ without the music of Liszt.

"The German literary laugh," says Mr. Meredith, in his _Essay on Comedy_, "like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to." So much may be said, I think, of some of Strauss's laughter. Here and there--in _Ein Heldenleben_, for example--it seems to come from the dry and wizened throat of the "little earthman"; it is not yet broadly and deeply human, not yet cosmopolitan in its appeal. His humour on occasions like this is very like Jean Paul's; you hardly know whether he is laughing with you or at you--perhaps he does not quite know himself. But in _Don Quixote_ you have the philosophic laughter of the great humanist. It is not to be found there only among Strauss's works. It gave warmth and pathos to _Till Eulenspiegel_--for wonderful humoresque as that is, its informing spirit is something much more complex and much more pity-moving than the idly humorous. We have assimilated only half of _Till Eulenspiegel_ if we see nothing but _diablerie_ in it. But it is in _Don Quixote_ that the blending of tears and laughter is most perfect; and I, for my part, would gladly sacrifice _Ein Heldenleben_ for this, were I compelled to make the choice, just as I would relinquish the epic and dramatic grandeur of _Die Götterdämmerung_ if I might have left to me _Die Meistersinger_, with its perpetual truth, its perpetual sanity, its perpetual appeal to real men and women in a real world.

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It will be seen from page 252 that the foregoing essay was set up in type before the _Symphonia domestica_ was produced in London in February last. That performance threw a new light on Strauss and his art, and calls for some few words of comment. We need not here go very deeply into the question of how much or how little programme there is in the work. There is a strain of foolishness in Strauss that always prompts him to go through the heavy farce of mystifying his hearers at first. He tells them he prefers not to give them the clue to his literary scheme, but wants them to accept the work as absolute music; this was his tactic, for example, with _Till Eulenspiegel_. All the while he gives one clue after another to his personal friends, till at length sufficient information is gathered to reconstruct the story that he had worked upon; this gradually gets into all the programme books, and then we are able to listen to the work in the only way it _can_ be listened to with any comprehension--with a full knowledge of the programme. So it is now with the _Symphonia domestica_. He has told us that "he wished the work to be judged as absolute music"; he has also told us that "he had in his mind a very definite programme when composing the symphony." Some of his admirers, with a canine fidelity that is positively touching, have tried to reconcile these contradictory positions by ingenious dialectic. That, however, is taking Strauss's whimsies just a little too seriously; it suggests the Shakespearologists of the George Dawson type, who used to tell us that even "if there is anything you do not understand or which you think is wrong in Shakespeare, you may safely conclude that he is right and you are wrong." We need not discuss Strauss's self-contradictions as if they were æsthetic antinomies that could be resolved by an Hegelian dialectic in a more profound harmony; the real explanation is simply that we are dealing with a man of erratic nerves, a musician not very well used to consistent thinking, whose sense of humour sometimes skittishly takes a turning along which it is hardly worth our while to follow it. There is not the faintest doubt that the whole symphony is founded on a very definite programme, and that we shall know it all one of these days, as we now know the minutest details of the programmes of _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_.

Then the question arises, is the programme of the _Symphonia domestica_ intrinsically interesting? It avowedly illustrates a day in the composer's family life, "and we are told"--to quote Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, the authors of the admirable Queen's Hall analytical book--"that it illustrates such everyday incidents as a Walk in the Country, the Baby's Evening and Morning Bath, the Striking of the Clock, the Yawns of the Parents when awakened by the Child, and so on." They will have it, however, that there is more in the work than this, and that underneath this "trivial subject" there is "one of far deeper and wider import"--_i.e._ "not so much a day in the life of a particular family as a realisation of the joys and griefs of motherhood and paternity, the gradual growth of the child-soul, and the mutual relationship of children and parents...." But this exalted theory soon comes to grief. It is quite clear that the striking of seven in the evening and again in the morning confines the time of the drama within twelve hours; and on these lines indeed there is some sense in the programme. That is, we see in the first section the parents and child; in the second (the _scherzo_) the joys and diversions of the group, the lullaby, the striking of 7 P.M., and the putting of the child to bed; in the third (the _adagio_), the parents' love-scene and the striking of 7 A.M.; in the fourth (the _finale_) the morning wakening, and--in the double fugue--the dispute between the parents as to the future of the child. This is not a very great scheme, but it is at least comprehensible; mix Teutonic moonshine up with it and it becomes nonsense. Thus Messrs. Pitt and Kalisch, trying to put the best face possible on that stupid noise that is meant to illustrate "the energetic protests of the child when it is first brought into contact with the alien element of cold water" (by the way, _are_ babies usually dumped into cold water?) remark that "if the more idealistic method of interpretation be adopted, it may be taken as a very uncompromising musical picture of the earliest struggles of a new-born soul." But this "idealistic method" will not work. The episode in question occurs just before the clock strikes 7 P.M. It occurs again just before the clock strikes 7 A.M. Are we to understand, then, that the "new-born soul" is born once in the evening and again next morning? This is being "born again" with a vengeance--quick work even in these days of Welsh revivals and Torrey-Alexander missions! No, we must reject the "idealistic method of interpretation," and just settle down to the plain fact that Strauss is painting nothing more ideal than the baby squalling in its bath (hot or cold), just as in other works he has painted Till's death-rattle, the dying shudder of Don Juan, the windmill and the sheep of Don Quixote, and the braying of Sancho Panza's donkey--all frankly realistic things, which we do not attempt to gild with idealistic interpretations.

I lay stress upon these trivial points because it is important that we should know exactly what Strauss's intentions were, for only with a knowledge of them can we judge his symphony as a work of art. It is quite clear then that he has thought it worth while to put about a hundred people to a great deal of trouble and expense in order to suggest the imbecile spectacle of a baby shrieking in its bath; and I think it is time the world protested against so much of its leisure and its funds being taken up with sheer inanities of this kind. In Strauss's previous works there are at most only two or three passages of realism at which I would shy; they have generally been saved for us by some touch of beauty, or humour, or technical cleverness. But the baby episodes in the _Symphonia domestica_ are too great a demand on our indulgence, and one is bound to say that there is something physically wrong with a brain that can fall so low as this. I hold him to be a man of enormous gifts, a magician, a wonder-worker of the first rank. But he can do nothing now on a large scale without deliberately spoiling it at some point or other out of pure freakishness--a freakishness that has ceased to be humour, and is merely the temporary lapse into silliness of a very clever man.

It goes without saying that if there is this degeneration--temporary or permanent--of the artistic sense that I suppose to be now going on in Strauss, it will show in other departments; and I think it shows pretty evidently in the music of the symphony as a whole. To my mind there is not a memorable theme in it; neither the theme of the husband, of the wife, nor of the child has anything like the quality that will entitle it to rank with the pregnant melodies of Strauss's other work. Think of the countless felicities of _Ein Heldenleben_, and you will realise at once the comparative poverty of the _Symphonia domestica_. Further, he is getting too fond of working upon mere snippets of phrases, instead of the great soaring, sweeping melodies of his earlier days; these tiny figures will of course go contrapuntally with almost anything--which is probably one reason for his using them--but for that same reason their perpetual chattering in the orchestra becomes in the end rather tiresome. I am not denying, of course, that at times the music rises to great heights; the scene of the parents playing with the child is exquisitely beautiful; there are fine moments in the love-music; and the fugue simply picks one up and carries one away, so broad and healthy is its heartiness. There is again much of that old technical mastery that makes slaves of us even where our soul revolts against the actual message of the composer. But on the whole I do not see how the new work can stand comparison with _Ein Heldenleben_ in any way. It looks far more impressive on paper than it actually sounds; it is grossly overscored, a good third of the notes being perfectly superfluous, as anyone can discover for himself by following it with the score. The mania is growing on Strauss for filling the music-paper with something or other, it matters not what; he has a lust for ink; it positively afflicts him to see an empty bar for any instrument. Master of orchestration as he is, there is page after page in the _Symphonia domestica_ containing the grossest of miscalculations; time after time we can see what his intention has been and how completely it has been frustrated by his own extravagance. He wants to wear all the clothes in his wardrobe at once. The same tendency is noticeable in his thematic work. When he has a good theme now he cannot leave it alone; he must fumble and fuss all round it till he has blurred its outline and stifled half its expression; the pleasant little lullaby, for example, would have been three times as effective without that jerky counterpoint against it in the oboe d'amore, bassoon, and viola, which simply gives the impression that somebody or other is always coming in at the wrong place, and quite disturbs the atmosphere of the lullaby itself. Altogether I am inclined to think that the new work as a whole shows a decided falling-off. And the reason? Well, is it not very likely that there has at last happened what some of us prophesied some two or three years ago? No artist can put so great a physical and mental strain upon himself as Strauss does and still keep his brain at its best. With all his many duties and occupations, his conducting and his constant travelling, it is a wonder he has any strength left to compose. For years he has been wearing his sensitive nervous system down to the very edge; and I should not be surprised to find that in doing so he has injured a good deal the delicacy of its tissue. It is said that he lives the busy life he does in order to make enough money to give up all public work and devote himself entirely to composition; but before that time comes he will probably, if he is not careful, have lost more of the divine fire than he can ever replace. The _Symphonia domestica_ I take to be the work of an enormously clever man who was once a genius.

FOOTNOTES:

[59] It is put down for a performance in London this spring.

[60] It is worth noting how Berlioz justified his own setting of some passages in _Roméo et Juliette_ orchestrally instead of vocally. "If," he says, "in the celebrated scenes of the garden and the cemetery, the dialogue of the two lovers, the _a parte_ of Juliet and the passionate outbursts of Romeo are not vocalised, if, in short, the duets of love and despair are confided to the orchestra, the reasons for this are numerous and easy to grasp. First, because we are dealing with a symphony, not with an opera. Secondly, duets of this nature having been treated vocally a thousand times, and by the greatest masters, there was both prudence and curiosity in trying another mode of expression. It is, moreover, because the very sublimity of this love made the painting of it so dangerous for the musician, that he had to give his imagination a latitude which the positive connotations of chanted words would not have permitted him, by resorting to the instrumental language--a language richer, more varied, less restricted, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in cases of this kind."

[61] The reader will, of course, remember that I am here speaking only of the _tissue_ of Strauss's work. In the intellectual part of it, as I shall show later, he sometimes does things with the deliberate intention of startling us. See Section IV. of this essay.

[62] Perhaps I ought to except such things as the passage in _Ein Heldenleben_ (page 50 of the full score), where the strings and oboe run up in sevenths, instead of the sixths we expect--an agonising thing that always sounds as if somebody in the orchestra had made a mistake. Either Strauss wrote it so out of pure devilment, with his tongue in his cheek all the time, or it may answer to some subtle harmony in his brain that ours are incompetent to grasp. There can be no doubt that his ear must be vastly more acute than the normal organ. As Mr. James Huneker puts it in a brilliant article in his _Overtones_: "His is the most marvellous agglomeration of cortical cells that science has ever recorded. So acute are his powers of acoustical differentiation that he must hear, not alone tones beyond the base and the top of the normal scale unheard of by ordinary humans, but he must also hear, or rather overhear, the vibratory waves from all individual sounds. His music gives us the impression of new over-tones, of scales that violate the well-tempered, of tonalities that approximate to the quarter-tones of Oriental music."

[63] In _Feuersnot_, it may be said, Strauss himself goes back for a moment to something like that old world. But he does not take it seriously; the quaint mediæval story is only a background against which he can display his passion, his humour, his irony. Wagner would have made a portentous thing of the _Feuersnot_ subject; he would have discovered the profoundest philosophy and ethic in it. Strauss behaves towards it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral.

APPENDIX

WAGNER, BERLIOZ, LISZT, AND MR. ASHTON ELLIS

The passage on page 6 seems to have roused the ire of Mr. Ashton Ellis, who devotes some seven and a half strenuous pages of the fifth volume of his "Life of Wagner" partly to childish personal abuse of myself, partly to an attempt to discredit my arguments. Over Mr. Ellis's mixture of clumsy rudeness and heavy Teutonic facetiousness we need not linger; these things have no novelty for Wagner students who have sojourned long in the Elysian fields of controversy. Nor need we turn aside to follow Mr. Ellis in his wild attempt to make it appear that I had relied solely on a passage in Tiersot's _Berlioz et la société de son temps_, when my remarks on Hueffer's translation of Wagner's word "Geschmacklosigkeiten," as applied to _Faust_, might have shown him that I knew both Hueffer's volumes and the German original. These things are entertaining but irrelevant. Let us rather get to the real business--the guilt or innocence of Wagner.

Let me, for clearness' sake, summarise the main facts again.

(1) In 1848, Liszt, having become all-powerful at Weimar, began to make valiant efforts on behalf of modern composers. He did much for Wagner, especially by his performances of _Lohengrin_. He also revived Berlioz's opera, _Benvenuto Cellini_. Wagner fully agreed with _Lohengrin_ being given, but not so fully with the revival of _Benvenuto Cellini_. He told Liszt he did not see what great good could come from this, though all the time anxiously protesting that his feeling towards Berlioz was of the kindest.

(2) Writing to Liszt on 8th September 1852, disparaging Berlioz's _Cellini_ and his _Faust_, he speaks of the latter as the "Faust Symphony."

(3) The use of the term "symphony" is _à priori_ evidence of Wagner's ignorance of the work.

(4) No evidence can be brought to show that he knew either _Cellini_ or _Faust_, while everything indicates that he could not know them. Wagner was not in Paris in 1838 and 1846, when they were respectively given; nor could he have known them from the scores, which were not published till after 1852--the date of the letter to Liszt.

(5) In Hueffer's translation of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, of which the second edition is "revised and furnished with an index by W. Ashton Ellis," the word "symphony" is deliberately omitted, thus hiding from the reader the one word that might set him doubting whether Wagner really knew the work he disparaged.

(6) In the third volume of Mr. Ellis's "Life of Wagner," which deals with this correspondence of 1852, the whole sentence referring to the "Faust Symphony" is omitted. Wagner is thus made to appear a perfect angel of goodwill towards Berlioz, without any such qualification as the letter as a whole suggests.

Mr. Ellis is first of all very angry with me for dragging him into the matter at all. Then he gets more angry with me for failing to see what is clear enough to him, that Wagner was invariably and inevitably right in everything he did or said--as it were the "Archibald the All-right" of music. Finally, he produces what he takes to be conclusive evidence in Wagner's favour. Let us look into these matters in a calm and friendly way.

(1) It cannot be disputed that Hueffer's omission of the word "symphony" from his translation of Wagner's letter to Liszt of 8th September 1852 was deliberate. Now in his preface to the volumes he goes out of his way to plume himself on the perfect fidelity of his translation to the original. "There are things in the letters," he says, "which are of comparatively little interest to the English reader." "There is no doubt that judicious omissions might have made these pages more readable and more amusing." But the book "is almost of a monumental character, and his deep respect for this character has induced the translator to produce its every feature.... Not a line has been omitted." And again: "To sum up, this translation of the correspondence is intended to be an exact facsimile of the German original." As we have seen, these statements are not true; Hueffer suppressed a vital word. The only reason we can imagine for his doing so was the knowledge that the inclusion of the word might make people suspect that Wagner did not know the work he miscalled a "Faust Symphony."

(2) A second edition of Hueffer's translation was brought out, "revised, and furnished with an index, by W. Ashton Ellis." Mr. Ellis now indignantly points out that in his preface he distinctly stated that "in view of the admirable nature of Dr. Hueffer's work, revision was unnecessary save in the case of a few misprinted words and dates." Very good. Did Mr. Ellis compare Hueffer's translation with the original? Then he should have detected and rectified Hueffer's suppression of the word "symphony." Did he not compare the two? Then he had no right to certify Hueffer's work as so "admirable" that "revision was unnecessary." In this one point, at any rate, it was decidedly not admirable; it evidently stood more in need of Mr. Ellis's revision than Mr. Ellis's certificate.

(3) Mr. Ellis can say nothing better in defence of his own omission of the whole passage from the third volume of his "Life" than that, as he was writing a life not of Berlioz but of Wagner, he had no space for "a dissertation on so entirely distinct a theme as the _Faust_ of Berlioz." No one expected from him a dissertation on _Faust_. All he was expected to do was to find space, in a voluminous biography that takes about 1800 pages to tell the story of the first forty-two years of Wagner's life, for five or six lines of a letter that threw an important light on Wagner, especially as Mr. Ellis was actually quoting from the letter in question.

Here is the passage in the original:--

"Glaub mir--ich liebe Berlioz, mag er sich auch misstrauisch und eigensinnig von mir entfernt halten: er kennt mich nicht; aber ich kenne ihn. Wenn ich mir von Einem etwas erwarte, so ist dies von Berlioz: nicht aber auf dem Wege, auf dem er bis zu den Geschmacklosigkeiten seiner Faust-symphonie gelangte--denn geht er dort weiter, so kann er nur noch vollständig lächerlich werden. Gebraucht ein Musiker den Dichter, so ist diess Berlioz, und sein Unglück ist, dass er sich diesen Dichter immer nach seiner musikalischen Laune zurechtlegt, bald Shakespeare, bald Goethe, sich nach seinem Belieben zurichtet. Er braucht den Dichter, der ihn durch und durch erfüllt, der ihn vor Entzücken zwingt, der ihm das ist, was der Mann dem Weibe ist."

Hueffer's translation of it as follows:--

"Believe me, I _love_ Berlioz, although he keeps apart from me in his distrust and obstinacy; he does not know me, but I know him. If I have expectations of any one it is of Berlioz, but not in the direction in which he has arrived at the absurdities of his _Faust_. If he proceeds further in that direction he must become perfectly ridiculous. If ever a musician wanted the poet it is Berlioz, and his misfortune is that he always prepares this poet for himself, according to his musical whim, arbitrarily handling now Shakespeare, now Goethe. He wants a poet who would completely penetrate him," &c.

Mr. Ellis, in his "Life" (vol. iii. pp. 336, 337), deals with the passage thus:--

"Believe me,--I _love_ Berlioz, however mistrustfully and obstinately he holds aloof from me; he does not know me,--but I know him. If there is one man I expect something of, it is Berlioz.... But he needs a poet who shall fill him through and through," &c.

Mr. Ellis, it will be observed, is not using Hueffer's translation; and as the passage does not occur in Glasenapp's "Life of Wagner" at all (which puts out of the question any translation from a mutilated version), it is clear that Mr. Ellis has translated direct from the German original. When he tells us that he had no design of concealment in omitting the phrases about the "Faust Symphony" we are, of course, bound to believe him. But it is unfortunate that in his sudden and most unusual passion for economy of space he should stop just short of the word that is so awkward for Wagner. And one would rather he had not given a factitious air of sequence to the clauses of his quotation by removing the "but" from its proper position (after "If there is one man I expect something of, it is Berlioz"), endowing it with a capital letter, and making it the commencement of a new sentence. The English reader will see what has happened by looking at Hueffer's version: everything from "not in the direction" to "now Goethe" has been omitted, and the "but" carried down from its proper place after "it is of Berlioz," and improperly made to begin another sentence. The German reader will see that the "nicht aber" (not however) of the sentence "nicht aber auf dem Wege, auf dem er bis zu den Geschmacklosigkeiten seiner Faust-symphonie gelangte" has been shelved, and a fresh "Aber" called from the void and made to preface the sentence "Er gebraucht den Dichter," &c.

Let us now examine the _Benvenuto Cellini_ case. The passage in Wagner's letters to Liszt of 13th April and 8th September 1852 run thus (Hueffer's translation):--

"What is this you have heard about me in connection with your performance of _Cellini_? You seem to suppose that I am hostile to it. Of this error I want you to get rid.... In the consequences which, as I am told, you expect from the performance of _Cellini_ I cannot believe, that is all."--"B. (Bülow) has shewn quite correctly where the failure of _Cellini_ lies, viz., in the poem and in the unnatural position in which the musician was forcibly placed by being expected to disguise by purely musical intentions a want which the poet alone could have made good."

Unable to give a jot of evidence that Wagner could possibly have known _Cellini_, Mr. Ellis guesses that he was condemning the work not on the score of the music, but on the basis of "a libretto or second-hand report." Even if this were so, it would not justify Wagner's remarks. What would _he_ have said of any one who ran down _Tristan_ without knowing any more of it than "a libretto or a second-hand report," and on the strength of this threw cold water on a theatrical manager's scheme for performing it? But there is no reason to believe that Wagner had even so much as a libretto. Liszt's tone to Wagner throughout the correspondence is that of a man fully acquainted with _Cellini_ at first hand to a man who is only repeating current tittle-tattle about it. The reason Wagner gave for objecting to the revival of the opera was that he had heard that Berlioz was "recasting" it, and that it would become him much better to write a new work than to touch-up an old one. On the 7th October 1852 Liszt, after agreeing that "the weakness of Berlioz's mode of working" comes from his poem, goes on to say, "but you have been erroneously _led to believe_ that Berlioz is writing his _Cellini_. This is not the case; the question at issue is simply as to a very considerable cut--nearly a whole tableau--which I have proposed to Berlioz, and which he has approved of.... If it interests you _I will send you the new libretto together with the old one_, and I think you will approve of the change...." Is it not clear that Liszt assumes as a matter of fact Wagner's complete ignorance of the work? In an earlier letter, dated 23rd August, Liszt tells him that in November he is expecting Berlioz, "whose _Cellini_ (with a considerable cut) must not be shelved, for _in spite of all the stupid things that have been set going about it_, '_Cellini_' is and remains a remarkable and highly estimable work. _I am sure you would_ _like many things in it._" The latter of the two passages I have here italicised shows once more that Liszt speaks to Wagner as to a man who does not know the opera; and the former passage indicates that there was a good deal of stupid and malevolent gossip afloat concerning it among people who also were ignorant of it. Moreover, on the 31st October 1853, Liszt again assumes Wagner's ignorance: "For this work I retain my great predilection, which you will not think uncalled for when you know it better." Mr. Ellis, indeed, practically admits that all Wagner had to go upon was a report of Bülow's in the _Neue Zeitschrift_ of April 1852. (See, above, Wagner's letter to Liszt of 8th September 1852: "B. (_i.e._ Bülow) has shewn quite correctly where the failure of '_Cellini_' lies, viz., in the poem," &c. It will be noticed that the letter in which Wagner first sniffs at _Cellini_ is dated the 13th of this same month of April.) What would Mr. Ellis say of any anti-Wagnerian who should criticise _Tristan_ not even from the libretto, but from the second-hand idea of it derived from some one else's article on it?

Mr. Ellis's plea that Wagner was talking of _Cellini_ not publicly, but in a private letter, is irrelevant. A public article would have been read by a few curious people and forgotten; in throwing cold water on Liszt's revival of the opera, Wagner was in danger of doing Berlioz a serious injury. For about fourteen years after its first failure _Cellini_ had not had a performance anywhere. There was only one man in Europe who combined the qualifications of knowing the opera, admiring it, being able to conduct it, and having at his own disposal an opera house where the work could be given. That man was Liszt; upon him, and him alone, it depended whether Berlioz should have a chance of showing that _Cellini_ had been unjustly condemned in 1838. Had Liszt been weak enough to have been privately influenced by Wagner, Berlioz would have undoubtedly suffered far more than he could have done from a public article.

Now for the _Faust_ affair. Wagner was not in Paris in 1846, when _Faust_ received its two performances. Mr. Ellis, however, sagely opines that "it is not absolutely impossible (!) that Wagner should have heard fragments (!) either of the earlier _Huit Scènes_ (_i.e._ the eight numbers referred to on p. 95 of the present volume), or the _Damnation_ itself." This invocation of the aid of the "not-absolutely-impossible" does not help us very much, I am afraid. "But for argument's sake," continues our intrepid apologist, "let us say he had not; about the work he must have heard, or he could not know of its existence." (Here, at any rate, Mr. Ellis's penetrating intelligence has struck home. Even _I_ am compelled to admit that Wagner must have heard about the work, or he could not have known of its existence.) "And if about it, why should the general outline of common artistic repute (Wagner still maintaining desultory correspondence with old Paris friends of good art-judgment, as we know) not be enough to furnish him with grounds for deploring its scheme in a private letter?" I have already dealt with the contention that Wagner was justified in running down works he did not know so long as the running-down was done privately. For the rest, the argument is just our old friend the "not-absolutely-impossible" again. It is not absolutely impossible that Wagner should have known some one who heard the work in Paris six years previously; it is not absolutely impossible that Wagner should have corresponded with this friend on the subject of _Faust_; it is not absolutely impossible that this friend should have been a man "of good art-judgment." Such a string of "may-have-beens" may be confidently left to its fate. But once more, if any one had disparaged a work of Wagner's on the strength of such dubious information, what would Wagner have said of him then, and what would Mr. Ellis say of him now?

But even Mr. Ellis, I imagine, does not take these phantom speculations of his very seriously. From his own point of view, indeed, there was never any need for him to indulge in them, so confident is he that in his closing paragraph he has a piece of evidence, that is shattering in its conclusiveness. He will not have it that to call _The Damnation of Faust_ a symphony is to betray ignorance of it. Was not Berlioz's _Romeo and Juliet_ a "dramatic symphony"? It was indeed; but in the first place, Berlioz himself called _Romeo and Juliet_ a symphony, whereas he never applied that title to _Faust_; and in the second place, _Romeo and Juliet_ really _is_ a symphony, in the sense that time after time the work is carried on by means of orchestral movements pure and simple--while _Faust_ is not a symphony in any sense, and could hardly have been called one by any one who knew it. Mr. Ellis is "credibly informed" that it was called a symphony "in Paris at the time." I take leave to doubt it; but in any case, Mr. Ellis's credible informant might have given him some evidence that it was so called by any one who had heard it. Adolphe Adam, for example, writing about it to a friend on the morrow of its performance, calls it "a kind of opera in four parts" (see J. G. Prodhomme's _Hector Berlioz_, p. 278). Berlioz himself, as Mr. Ellis notes, styled it a "Legend" or "Dramatic Legend." Uninformed gossip no doubt gave it the title of "symphony," in the years after 1846, from a vague idea that it must necessarily have been of the same type of structure as _Romeo and Juliet_. Gossip may have had something else to go upon too. In 1829 Berlioz had really thought (as we see from a letter to Humbert Ferrand quoted in Adolphe Jullien's _Hector Berlioz_, p. 182) of writing a "symphonie descriptive de _Faust_." Shortly before that he had tried to get a commission from the Opera for a ballet on the same subject. These facts may have lingered in the air for years, and in the general vagueness upon the matter after 1846 it may well be that Berlioz's name was often associated with a _Faust_ "symphony." It was apparently this ill-informed gossip that Wagner was repeating. Fragments of _Faust_, by the way, were given at some of Berlioz's Russian and German concerts, and there was a complete performance of it at Berlin in 1847. Wagner, of course, was in Dresden at that time. There is hardly the slightest likelihood, again, that he had a score of the _Huit Scènes_, a few copies of which Berlioz had rashly had engraved at his own expense in 1829, and published at 30 francs; and even if Wagner _did_ know these eight fragments, that would not justify him in criticising _The Damnation of Faust_ without knowing it. I repeat that the only conclusion we can come to is that he called it a symphony because he was ignorant of it.

But now Mr. Ellis's great discovery comes in. He quotes from a letter of Liszt to Breitkopf and Härtel, the music publishers, of 30th October 1852: "I am expecting M. Berlioz here ... and on the 21st the symphonies of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Faust_ will be performed, which I proposed to you to publish." Here Mr. Ellis imagines me crying out, "It is all that wretched Wagner's fault; he had put the word into Liszt's innocent head six weeks before." "But Berlioz," Mr. Ellis goes on to say, "arrives at Weimar, conducts les 2 premiers actes' of his _Faust_ at one concert with his _Romeo_, and behold--no longer innocent, Liszt writes Professor Christian Lobe, editor of the _Fliegende Blätter für Musik_, May 1st 1853: 'The German public is still unacquainted with the greater part of Berlioz's works, and after many enquiries that have been addressed me in the past few months, I believe a German translation of the catalogue might have a good effect; perhaps with division into categories, _e.g._ OVERTURES, _Francs Juges_, &c.... SYMPHONIES, (1) _Episode_, (2) _Harold_, (3) _Romeo and Juliet_, (4) _Damnation of Faust_; VOCAL PIECES, &c. &c.'"

Alas! Mr. Ellis is no happier here than in his other attempts to get out of the difficulty. It is not clear, to begin with, why he should suppose that Liszt's or any one else's knowledge of _Faust_ should prove Wagner to have known it. But putting that aside, what seems to have shaped itself in Mr. Ellis's mind is some such ramshackle syllogism as this: "If Liszt, who knew the _Faust_ so well, wrongly calls it a symphony, the use of the erroneous title by Wagner makes it possible that he too may have known it." It all looks promising enough; but it has one fatal flaw, one point upon which Mr. Ellis, in his hurry to whoop, forgot to make quite sure. His confident assumption that Liszt _did_ know _Faust_ is unjustified.

My previous point that people who did not know the work had got into the habit of calling it a symphony is proved by other letters of Liszt in which he thus speaks of it. On the 4th September 1852, for example, he writes to Cornelius: "On the 12th November I expect a visit from Berlioz, who will spend a week at Weimar. Then we shall have _Cellini_, the symphony of _Romeo and Juliet_, and some pieces from the _Faust_ symphony." Mr. Ellis may think this confirms his own theory. But it is worth while looking again at the above-quoted letter of Liszt of 30th October 1852 to Breitkopf and Härtel, and the circumstances that called it forth. On the 7th June Berlioz had written to Liszt that he was going to give a concert in Paris, at which he would perform some fragments of _Faust_. "_I am truly sorry_," he says, "_that you do not know this work._ I cannot get a publisher to take it; they find it too big to engrave (_trop riche de planches_). I must apply to Ricordi of Milan.... In any case, if you were to find a daring German publisher capable of undertaking this rash act, you can tell him that _Faust_ has been well translated into German." It is evident that after receiving this letter, Liszt wrote to Breitkopf and Härtel recommending them to publish the work; this is the proposal he refers to in his letter of 30th October 1852. So that the very letter of Liszt's which Mr. Ellis quotes triumphantly for its use of the term "Faust Symphony" was prompted by a letter from Berlioz, in which he distinctly says that Liszt does not know the work!

Bearing this in mind, let us follow up the subsequent course of events, and see whether Liszt knew it _after_ Berlioz's visit to Weimar--whether, that is, he was not still in much the same state of ignorance about it when he wrote the letter of 1st May 1853 to Lobe. It can be shown that Liszt had nothing to do with the performance of the first two acts of _Faust_ at Weimar; that Berlioz brought the score and parts with him from Paris and took the rehearsals and the concert himself, whereas Liszt himself took charge of _Cellini_. On the 10th October 1852 Berlioz writes to Liszt in terms that once more place the latter's complete ignorance of the work beyond dispute. Berlioz has actually to tell him the number and quality of soloists to engage. "I will leave here for Weimar on the 12th November, certain. I will arrive on the 15th, and can stay in your neighbourhood eight days, but no more.... Now tell me by the next post if it is necessary for me to send you the vocal parts of _Faust_, or if it will suffice that I should bring them with me. The soloists and chorus would in that case have to learn in four or five days the fragments to be given at the concert. Only a tenor and a bass (_soli_) are needed for these fragments of _Faust_, Marguerite appearing only in the last two acts." Berlioz would not tell an elementary fact like that to a man who already knew the work.

Then, on the 6th November, he writes: "I send you to-day the parcel containing the _Faust_ vocal parts, the choruses, the rôles, and a German libretto ... and the vocal score (for sixty-three people). The orchestral parcel is too large; I will bring it myself. It would be of no use to you before my arrival." Clearly Liszt was not even going to conduct the rehearsals, which would not be begun until Berlioz arrived at Weimar. (The _Faust_ fragments were evidently rehearsed hurriedly; there is a letter of Frau Pohl's extant describing the success of the performances, and saying how amazing it was that so much should have been accomplished in so short a time.) Berlioz's further remarks once more show that he assumes Liszt's complete ignorance of the work: "It is not difficult; only the chorus and the principal parts are dangerous. We will announce for the concert the first two parts only, for which no Marguerite is required. You will need a tenor (Faust), a deep bass (Mephisto), and another bass (Brander). It will last an hour." All this, pointing conclusively to Liszt's total ignorance of the work, is in the identical letter which Mr. Ellis actually cites in another connection!

Even after the Weimar concert, which took place about the 20th November 1852, Liszt knew no more of _Faust_ than what he had heard there. It is clear from a letter of his to Radecke of 9th December 1852, and one of 27th February 1853 to Schmidt, that the parcel containing the score and the parts was sent on to Berlioz in Paris a few days after the concert. Liszt, in fact, though he looked after _Cellini_ and the other works, had practically nothing to do with _Faust_. Berlioz brought the score and parts with him, conducted the rehearsals, conducted the concert, and then on his departure left the parcel with Liszt, to be forwarded to him in Paris. Moreover, we may be pretty sure that all he took with him was the score of the first two parts--all that were given at the concert. The bulky manuscript score, now in the Conservatoire library at Paris, is bound up in three (or four) volumes--I forget which at the moment. If any one should conjecture that Berlioz might have taken with him the score of the whole work to show to Liszt, that supposition is disposed of by a letter of Berlioz, dated Dresden, 22nd April 1854. The complete _Faust_ had just been given there. Berlioz wishes Liszt had been present: "I regret that you could not have heard the last two acts, _which you do not know_." Everything points to the fact that even Liszt's knowledge of _Faust_ was limited to a hearing of the first two acts at the Weimar concert. There is plenty of subsequent correspondence with Berlioz, but it is all about _Cellini_, which Liszt had produced and knew thoroughly. In after years people used to write to him--people who were compiling books on Berlioz, or trying to get hold of his correspondence, or investigating the history of the Weimar theatre--and ask Liszt to tell them something of his relations with Berlioz. Liszt's reply is always the same; he is proud of having refloated _Cellini_, but he does not mention _Faust_. Even when he tells the Grand Duke Carl Alexander that Berlioz gave three concerts in Weimar, there is still no mention of the _Faust_ fragments, which apparently had been no affair of his.

In 1853 and 1854 he calls the work a symphony, knowing no better, having neither seen the score nor heard a complete performance of it. But in 1854 the score is published, and a copy sent to Liszt. In December of that year he writes two letters on the same day. In one of them, to Mason, the old habit is still too strong for him, and he speaks of the "dramatic symphony of _Faust_";[64] in the other, to Wasielewski, he refers to it as _Faust_ only. Thereafter, so far as I can discover, he never speaks of it as a symphony. See, for example, his letters of 9th February 1856 to Edward Liszt, 19th February 1856 to Brendel, 3rd January 1857 to Turanyi, 16th September 1861 to Brendel, March 1883 to Vicomte Henri Delaborde, 12th September 1884 to Pohl, 1st January 1855 ("Do you know the score of his _Damnation de Faust_?"), and 24th December 1855 to Wagner.

So much for the question of Liszt and _Faust_, which Mr. Ellis dragged in so gleefully to help his own case and Wagner's. In the absence of any new facts, I contend that it is abundantly clear that Liszt too called _Faust_ a symphony only because he did not know it. If Wagner is to be whitewashed at all, it must be by a less brittle brush than this. As regards his disparagement of both _Cellini_ and _Faust_, the defence seems to me to have broken down completely; he knew nothing of either of them. E. N.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[64] It should be borne in mind that Liszt himself was writing a "Faust Symphony" during the period covered by this controversy. He speaks of having finished it, in fact, in the letter to Wasielewski of this very date, 14th December. His constant use of the term to describe his own work might easily account for his transferring it unconsciously to that of Berlioz.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. In those cases the variant more frequently used was retained.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.