VIIIEPILOGUE: THE MEANING OF MUSIC
In the foregoing studies we have been considering, first, certain fundamental principles of musical effect in the light of which alone all special contributions to music, however various, can be understood, and second, the particular contributions of half a dozen of our contemporary composers, in which we have seen those principles exemplified. We have assumed, all along, that music is of undeniable interest to us, that it has something to say, that it is of sufficient human value to be worth studying. But now, before closing, it will be well to examine for a moment the grounds of that tacit assumption, to ask ourselves what, after all, is the reason of our interest in music. Why do we care for it? What does it mean? To such questions thereare doubtless many answers. Doubtless different hearers take different kinds of delight in it, and its modes of appeal are as various as their temperaments. Yet music has one sort of appeal which is deeper than all others, which indeed acts universally, and which depends on its extraordinary power to tranquilize the heart, to instil a peace quite magical and beyond explanation. It soothes while it excites; and more wonderful than its ability to stimulate our emotions is its power to reconcile and harmonize them. And this it does without the aid of any intellectual process; it offers us no argument, it formulates no solacing philosophy; rather it abolishes thought, to set up in its stead a novel activity that is felt as immediately, inexplicably grateful. To suggest how the combination of sounds can have upon us so profound an effect will be the object of this final paper.
Mortal life, as we become acquainted with it in experience, unshaped by any philosophic or artistic activity, is complex, confused, and irrational. From our babyhood, when we put our fingers in the pretty fire and draw them forthcruelly burned, until the moment when a draught of air or the bursting of a blood-vessel suddenly arrests our important enterprises in mid-course, we constantly find our faculties, both animal and divine, encountering a world not kindly adjusted. On the material plane we find drought, frost, and famine, storm, accident, disease. On the plane of feeling and sentiment there are the separation of friends, the death of dear ones, loneliness, doubt, and disappointment; in the world of the spirit are sin and sorrow, the weakness and folly of ourselves and of others, meaningless mischance, and the caprice of destiny. In such a world, good fortune must often seem as insulting as bad, and happiness no better than misery. Where all is accidental, how can aught be significant? When our highest interests are defenceless against the onslaught, not of grave evil but of mere absurdity, how is it possible to live with dignity or hope?
Nevertheless, men have, by various means, fought sturdily against the capriciousness of life and the despair it engenders. All practical morality, to begin with, is one form of defence—comparatively a low form, but still of use. Themoral man, facing the universe undaunted, asserts his own power to develop in it at least his personal particle of righteousness. As much strength as he has shall be spent on the side of order. If the world be unjust, he at least will love justice. If every one else be ruled by chance, he at least will be ruled by reason. If wicked men pursue evil, he will pursue good. From the earliest to the latest times literature has recorded such resolve. The letters of Stevenson no less than the journal of Marcus Aurelius relate the purpose of the brave individual to graft, to impress—yes, to inflict—human meaning upon an untamed universe. The stoic faith has always built on the practical power of the single man; a phrase of Thoreau's might serve for its motto: «In the midst of this labyrinth let us live athreadof life.»
The intellect is more ambitious than the moral sense. Not content with the degree of unity a man can develop in the seething world by his single action, philosophy seeks to prove that the world itself, as a whole, deriving its nature as it must from mind, is orderly. Constructive idealism, beginning with the argument that a subject cannot truly know an object unless bothare included in a higher mental organism, deduces from the common facts of consciousness the real existence of an all-inclusive Spirit. Furthermore, one of its ablest modern exponents, Professor Josiah Royce, has worked out the ethical implications of the doctrine in a way that concerns us here. He shows that the apparent irrationality of our world proceeds from the fragmentariness of our finite view, and that God, who sees his universe as a whole, must find it rational; so that «our chaos is his order, our farce his tragedy, our horror his spirituality.» Were our span of consciousness widened until we could perceive the whole of existence in one thought, we should find the deep organic beauty that now we yearn for in vain. Philosophy, then, assures us both of the fundamental perfection of the world as a whole and of the inaccessibility of this perfection to us. Deeply satisfying because so sure and so ultimate, it tells us nothing of details, it has no direct word for the sorrows and the perplexities of our daily lives. It leaves us often longing for a warmer, nearer assurance of the rightness of things.
And so, to many, human love first revealsthe divine unity all are seeking. The lover reasons little about consciousness; he knows, directly and overpoweringly, that his one need is to serve the beloved. This commanding aim employs all his impulses and appetites, and he finds in pure disinterested service a peace that his own warring desires cannot invade. He comprehends for the first time his own true identity, he becomes integral and serene. Furthermore, as his love grows deeper, as it spends its inexhaustible wealth more widely, learning to take for object not only the human beloved, but all virtue and beauty, his spiritual life becomes daily larger and surer, it unifies an ever complexer body of thought and deed in its perfect organism. It acquires an alchemy with which it can dissolve even the stubborn externalities of fate; for fate itself cannot take away the power to serve, and in service love finds its joy. Renunciation, even, it never enters upon except to gain a higher good, and that essence in the soul which makes a sacrifice is one with that which in happier circumstances would enjoy. Love thus shares already the nature of religion, and confers the same benefits. In exacting entire self-surrender it bequeaths superiority to accident,an unassailable serenity. Indeed, religion is but love expanded and made universal.
Religion, then, man's final means of reading rationality in the countenance of an irrational world, is the culmination toward which the other three naturally tend. It is the natural goal of love, because he who loves the divine in one person must soon love it in all. It is the goal of science and philosophy, because these place the heart open-eyed upon the threshold of the radiant reality, where it cannot but worship. It is the natural outcome of morality, too; for the moral man, seeing others eager for goodness, learns that the divine virtue is everywhere. And religion retains in itself the character of all these tributary insights. Like morality it prompts devotion of personal strength to the good cause; like philosophy, it affords clarity and breadth of vision; it is animated by the same pure, deep passion that is at the soul of love. It offers man a code of conduct, a cosmology, and an object of devotion. Surely, one would think he could ask for nothing more.
But, alas! we are not perfect creatures, capable of living always on these heights. Hoursof weariness and confusion overtake us, our glimpses of the shining cosmos fade away, and we are left groping in a formless world. The universe does not change, but our faculties become jaded, we cannot keep them at the necessary pitch. The moralist knows moods of discouragement, when his power is at ebb, and the forces of evil press him sorely, entering even his own heart in the forms of temptation, sloth, and despair. The scientist encounters facts which his schemes cannot embrace, and for the moment interprets his own limitation as a disorder in nature. The philosopher often finds the universe more than a match for his synthetic powers of thought. Love has its tragedies, and faith its hours of eclipse. Even Christ must cry out, «My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?» The world, in a word, is too big for us. Facing its vast whirl and glitter with our modest kit of senses, intellect, and spirit, we are blinded, deafened, dizzied, completely bewildered. And then, recalling with wistful regret our partial insights, we fancy them gone forever and ourselves wholly lost.
It is just at these moments, when the mindmomentarily fails in its unequal struggle with reality, that we discover the deep meaning and the supreme service of Art. For Art is the tender human servant that man has made himself for his solace. He has adjusted it to his faculties and restrained it within his scope; fashioning it from the infinite substance, he has impressed upon it finite form. It is a voice less thunderous than nature's, a lamp that does not dazzle like the great sun. It simplifies the wealth that is too luxuriant, and makes tangible a fragment of the great ethereal beauty no mortal can grasp. Thus art is visible and audible rightness; it is the love of God made manifest to the senses, a particular symbol of a universal harmony. When we are too weary to be comforted by the remote, abstract good that religion promises, art comes with its immediate, substantial, caressing beauty. Seeking to prove nothing, making no appeal to our logical intellects, requiring of us no activity, saying nothing of aught beyond itself, it is supremely restful. Finding us defeated in our search for rationality, it says, «Search no longer, puzzle no more; merely listen and look; see, here it is!» Its beauty answers our problemsnever directly, but by gently making them irrelevant.
Art, then, differs from morality, philosophy, love and religion, in that it presents directly to sense the variety in unity which they manifest only to the mind and spirit. Like them, it deals with life, but the unity that it attains by selection and exclusion is unlike their unity in being tangible. Made by man, it has this one supreme advantage, that it is adapted from the outset to his needs. What it cannot unify it can exclude. Though nature care nothing for the peculiarities of the eye, a landscape painter can omit a tree that upsets the balance of his composition. Actual men and women present all sorts of incongruities of figure, but the sculptor can suppress the stooping shoulders, the knobby hips, and the bandy legs. Language bristles with trivial and vulgar words, but no poet except Walt Whitman thinks it necessary to write about hatters, who cannot, according to Stevenson, «be tolerated in emotional verse.» Out of the infinite number of sounds that besiege our natural ears, musicians have selected about ninety definite tones, preordained to congruity, with which to weave their marvelousfabric. That is ever the method of art; it excludes the irrelevant or the discordant, in order to secure a salient and pure integrity. By sacrificing something of the richness of experience, it gains a rationality unknown in experience. Browning's Pippa is a gentle, noble soul, bringing goodness everywhere; in real life she would be a poor mill-girl insulted by a thousand sordid and accidental details. Shelley portrays Beatrice Cenci in the transfiguring light of poetic truth; actual experience would show her tortured by a sinister and ignoble fate. No Greek youth could have matched the perfect plastic beauty of the Disk-thrower, and no Italian woman ever symbolized cruel, sphinx-like loveliness as does the Mona Lisa. Corot's nature is grayer and softer and more harmonious than ever existed on earth. And such songs as Schumann's «Ich Grolle Nicht» and Tschaïkowsky's «Nur Wer die Sehnsucht Kennt» pulsate with a passion as intense but far less torn and fragmentary than that by which they were inspired. This serene perfection, which wraps like a mantle all works of genuine art, results from harmonious organization, and is attained only by excluding the irrelevancies alwayspresent in nature. Whistler is wise as well as witty when he exclaims that «to ask the painter to copy nature as he sees it is to invite the pianist to sit on the keyboard.» Were there, to be sure, a perfect adjustment between nature and our faculties, were we able to discern the unity that must exist even in the infinitely complex Whole of the world, then such a dictum would be outgrown, and selection would cease to be the procedure of art. But until we have grown to possess universal synthetic power art will have its solacing mission and its selective method as now.
Meanwhile it will have also, of course, its inevitable limitations. If it be more orderly than nature, it will be far less rich and various; effects that nature presents in a bewildering drench of experience, a work of art will have to isolate and develop alone. A pictured landscape, however perfect, is but one phase of the reality; in nature there is ceaseless play and change, mood succeeds mood, and the charm is more than half in the wayward flux and transformation. A portrait shows but one character; a human face is a whole gallery of personalities. The wealth of experience excites even while itbewilders us, and when we turn to the work of art we unconsciously adopt a narrower standard. Primitive art especially impresses us as bare and denuded, because the primitive artist has neither technical skill nor synthetic power of thought to combine more than a few elements. Thus early painting and sculpture, in dealing with the human figure, carry delineation little further than to show man with head and body, two legs and two arms. Refinements of contour and proportion are left to be observed by later artists. Similarly the folk ballads in which poetry takes its origin confine themselves to elementary incidents and emotions. In general, rudimentary art is always so far behind nature as to seem to have hardly any connection with it at all.
As time goes on, however, art passes through an evolution, becoming gradually more potent in its treatment of reality. Its progress takes the form of a curious zigzag, the resultant of two alternating tendencies; what happens is something like this. For a while it develops its power of synthesis (a power dependent both upon technical skill in handling material and on organizing force of thought)until it is able to present a few simple factors of effect in clear, salient unity. This is what is called a period of classicism. Then, dissatisfied with its attainment, desiring a richer reflection of the great whirl of experience, it reaches out after novel effects; its vision is for a while more extended than clear, and, presenting many effects which it cannot yet unify, it becomes brilliant, suggestive, fragmentary, turgid, inchoate. There has been a sacrifice of the old simple clarity for a richer chaos, or, in the trite terminology, a romantic movement. Now, however, technical skill and synthetic power of thought again advance, and a new and complexer order supervenes on the temporary confusion. Unity of effect is regained, art is classic once more (but with increased wealth of meaning), and the time is ripe for another burst of romanticism. By this alternation of impulses art grows, and when either tendency is defective we have a diseased art. If there be no romantic movement, if art remains contented with its acquired scope, there is stagnation, pedantry, academicism; if there be no classical period of assimilation, we have vagueness and turgidity, qualities even more fatal, since, as we have seen,the justification of art is its power to clarify. The general formula for wholesome artistic advance might, then, run thus: «Increase in the variety of the selected elements, without loss of the ideal unity imposed upon them.» And the ideal goal of art is a representation of the whole of life, stamped with complete unity.
Turning now to music, we must point out that, although it has in a general way undergone a development like that of the other arts, made up of alternating classic and romantic movements, it has had from the first certain advantages over them in the struggle for richness and clarity, advantages proceeding from its fundamental nature. For tones are unique in our mental experience as being at once more directly expressive of the emotional essence of life than any other art-material, and more susceptible of orderly structure.
That music is beyond all the other arts directly expressive of man's deeper passional life scarcely needs theoretic proof; the fact is in the experience of every one who has listened to a military band, to a homely song lovingly rendered, or to a ragged Hungarian with a violin. These things take a physical grip upon our emotions,they stir our diaphragms, galvanize our spines, and compel us to shiver, laugh or weep. Combined with such physical affections, moreover, are ideas of indescribable vividness and poignancy. Joy and grief, hope and despair, serenity, aspiration, and horror, fill our hearts as we listen to music. They come in their pure essence—not as qualities of something else. And this is what is meant by the familiar statement that the other arts are representative while music is presentative. Poetry, painting, and sculpture show us things outside ourselves, joyful or grievous things perhaps, hopeful or desperate or beautiful or ugly things, but stillthings. But music shows us nothing but the qualities, the disembodied feelings, the passional essences. Let the reader recall for a moment the effects of painting or of poetry, the way in which they present emotion. Is it not always by symbolism, by indirection? Does not the feeling merely exhale from the object instead of constituting the object as it does in music? In looking at a pastoral landscape, for instance, do we not first think of the peaceful scene represented, and only secondarily feel serenity itself? In reading «La Belle Dame sans Merci» is itnot only by a process of associative thought that we come to shudder with a sense of unearthly and destructive passion? Yes, in the representative arts emotion is merely adjective; in music alone is it substantive. We see in a portrait a lovely woman; we behold in marble a noble youth; we read in poetry a desperate story; in music, on the contrary, we hear love, nobility, despair. And since this emotional life is the deepest reality we know, since our intuitions constitute in fact the very essence of that world-spirit which is but projected and symbolized in sky, sun, ocean, stars, and earth, music cannot but be a richer record of our ultimate life than those arts which deal with objects and symbols alone. It is the penetration, the ultimacy, of music that gives it such extraordinary power. The other arts excel it in definiteness, in concreteness, in the ability to delineate a scene or tell a story; but music surpasses them all in power to present the naked and basic facts of existence, the essential, informing passions.
A secondary and subordinate advantage of music proceeds from the nature of its material. Tones, produced and controlled by man, are farmore easily stamped with the unity he desires than the objects of external nature. These are stubborn outer facts, created without regard to the æsthetic sense, and in a thousand ways unamenable to it. The great dazzle of sunlight is too keen for human eyes, which perceive better on dim, gray days; many of nature's contours are larger than we can grasp. Every painter will tell you that there are inharmonious colors in the sunset, and one daring critic has gone so far as to impugn the «vulgarity of outline» of the American hills. It matters not whether the maladjustment indicate a fault in nature or a limitation in man; the point to note is that the representative arts deal with a material less pliable than tones. Words, the material of poetry, occupy in this respect a curious intermediate position. Like tones, they are man-made, but, like outer objects, they are «given,» fixed and indocile to man's æsthetic needs. (We remember the example of the «hatter.») Though made by man, in fact, they are made not by his æsthetic but by his practical energy. They were devised, not for beautiful adjustment, but to convey thoughts, and when the poet comes and uses them to make an art he finds themalmost as perverse as the painter's trees and hills. Tones, however, have no practical utility whatever; not only do they not exist outside of music, but they would be of no use if they did. Hence they may be chosen and grouped by the free æsthetic sense alone, acting without let or hindrance, except what is imposed by the thing to be expressed. For hundreds of years man has been testing and comparing, accepting and rejecting, the elements of the tonal series, with the result that we have to-day the ladder or scale of ninety-odd definitely fixed tones, out of which all music is composed. And though the series has been developed wholly by instinct, and it is only within the last half-century that the natural laws underlying it have been discovered, yet it has been built up so slowly and tentatively, and with so sure and delicate a sense of its internal structure, that it is an unsurpassable basis for complex and yet perfectly harmonious tone-combinations. In a word, the material of music is by origin self-congruous, fitted to clear structure, preordained to an order at once rich and transparent.
Preordained to beauty, then, is the musician's material: and yet the musician is not exemptedfrom the difficulties of his brother artists. If they work in a less plastic material, he has to govern subtler and more wayward forces. He can attain a wonderful perfection, but only through unremitting labor. His task is to embody the turbulent, irrational human feelings in serene and beautiful forms. He is to master the dominating, to reconcile the warring, to impose unity on the diverse and the repellant. Mozart and Haydn might handle their art with ready ease, because their emotions were naïve; but Beethoven, who essayed to look into the stormy and tortured heart of man, found himself involved in a travail Titanic and interminable. Nevertheless he did succeed in harnessing the vast forces with which he deals, and his success is as conclusive a vindication as we could desire of music's power to deal with its profound verities. When we think of Beethoven's immortal works, immortal both by their strength and by their beauty, can we doubt that music expresses our deepest emotional nature with unrivalled fullness, and yet so reconciles it with itself as to symbolize our highest spiritual peace?
From the swelter and jungle of experiencein which it is our lot to pass our mortal days, days which philosophy cannot make wholly rational, nor love wholly capable of service, nor religion wholly serene, we are thus privileged to emerge, from time to time, into fairer realms. Tantalized with an unattainable vision of order, we turn to art, and especially to music, for assurance that our hope is not wholly chimerical. Then
«Music pours on mortalsIts beautiful disdain.»
Disdainful it is, truly, because it reminds us of the discord and the rhythmless onmarch of our days. It voices the passions that have torn and mutilated and stung and blinded us; we meditate the foolishness, the fatality, of our chaotic lives. But beautiful it is also; and it has been wisely said that beauty offers us «a pledge of the possible conformity of the soul with nature.» Music, at once disdainful and beautiful, shows us our deepest feelings, so wayward and tragic in experience, merged into ineffable perfection.
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