The Criers of the Musical Shop

Nil admirari prope res est una — And Horace was spared a number of things. Even in his day, no doubt, Alexandria had filled Rome with curiosities of decadence. Many an anointed Greek would tear his soul to tatters in the Forum for a denarius nummus. But though decadent criticism of art and literature was known, it had not yet got into the warp and fibre of current life. And Horace could have counted on an answering smile from the friend who had brought the latest gem out from the city for a moment of satiric joy over goblets of Lesbian wine in the long siesta of the afternoon. Their eyes might have wandered over the Sabine slopes a bit sadly, perhaps, at the thought of Rome behind. But even then, with Rome simmering beyond the horizon, he could have counted on an answering smile.

As for us, however — Yesterday I culled this passage from a eulogy of Wordsworth: —

‘ The unsophisticated perceptions and thoughts of children, and of the peasantry, of half-witted human creatures, and of the animals that are nearer to the earth than we, lent him a more companionable guidance [than his reason and intelligence] and to these spiritual directors he submitted his heart in humble reverence and gratitude.’

There is no responsive smile; our faces are solemnly impressed.

The other day it was an appreciation of Matisse: —

‘His glory is to have thrown over everything that could be taught, to have rid himself of experience, of tradition, of learning, of all the distorting veils of cultivation, and to have seen with his pure spirit, without a preconception, as a child might see, or a primitive savage, or better, the first man without an ancestor to catch an atavistic predilection from.’

And to-day a eulogy of Richard Strauss: —

‘ Cacophony rules . . . this episode is repulsive in its aural cruelty. . . . Often we cannot hear the music because of the score. . . . Richard Strauss is the musical enchanter of our day. . . . What a gorgeous, horrible color-scheme is his! He has a taste for sour progressions, and every voice in his orchestral family is forced to sing impossible and wicked things.’

The sober implication is that poetry is great in the measure of its childish, half-witted, and bestial inspiration, painting great for its barbarous crudity, and music great for its cacophony, its aural cruelty, its ‘ sour progressions.’ These passages are from books published by reputable houses. One was written by an Oxford professor. Two of them I have seen in learned libraries, dog-eared with sedulous perusal. And the thing is, that such utterances meet with response. Wild as they are, they would seem to be of a piece with the current sense of the arts, and this, curiously enough,—and alas! — at a time when the arts are cried up as the stuff of culture. The case has its humors.

Not to bend too solemn a brow upon it, lest the comic spirit find its perch there instead of on the situation, I yet propound that it is time for the general intelligence to step in and take the word from the appointed appreciators and eulogists. For the state is lost when authority slips from the civil to the military; and life goes to pieces when the specialists drown the voice of the general intelligence.

What we like to call the life of the spirit is modernly parceled out and hedged in by the technicians. The large coördination of it is suffering — if not dead and beyond suffering. The play of the discursive reason, with its large perspective and sense of proportion, seems latterly to have gone out and to have left, as our eulogist says of Strauss’s music, ‘an entirely new scheme of orchestration, the basic principle of which is individualism of instruments, the pure anarchy of the entire orchestral apparatus.’ We are going a little mad from too much centrifugal advice, cried us at from a hundred shops like bewildered wanderers in an Eastern bazaar.

Learning is guilty enough: witness, in passing, the swelling strut and mouthing in front of the psychological shop. Learning, however, has the eternal check of reality to tug at its flapping coat-tails. And reason is there to protest. But art is the perennial prey of the mountebanks. The arts spring, at their best, from the mystery of genius, and appeal to the eager senses and willing emotions. They live to please, and a dash of mystery, a touch of extravagance, are spice to the palate. They escape thus the natural drag of obvious reality, and the natural ridicule of obvious common sense. They are the privileged, the concessionnaires of the bazaar. And, catching us at a moment when general guides are in disrepute, they have launched their licensed criers at us. We are beset with their seductive antics. And lo, not a smile! The criers are taken at their word, greeted with sober faces, quoted, retailed. Antic extravagance out-tops antic extravagance.

‘We catch glimpses,’ calls our musical crier, in hushed tones, thumb over shoulder toward the musical shop where the wizard is about to begin, ‘of vast vistas where dissonance is king; slow iron twilights in which trail the enigmatic figures of another world; there are often more moons than one in the blood-red skies of his icy landscapes.’

Still not a smile. Humor is born of perspective. The crier begins to take himself as he sees himself in the eager, solemn eyes of the crowd. He doffs cap and bells, dons the frock coat and the professorial eyeglass, climbs down from the gilded box, and walks up and down in the earth like his prototype. Or he appears in blue with the gilt license tag of a reputable publisher, to catch the ear of those who have not wandered to the bazaar for the frank, abandoned pleasure of being duped. He has caught the general ear. His talk has got currency. Really, it is time for the general intelligence to step in, and nail to the door of the shop of the arts its ninetyfive theses against further indulgences.

And especially to the door of the musical shop. For music has out-topped the other arts in a certain kind of insidious extravagance. Architecture, when it strays too far, is brought back to sanity by its alliance to vulgar usefulness. Sculpture may go a little mad, but it is still responsible to something outside itself. Painting may have periods when it out-Hamlets Hamlet — is indeed passing through a period when the wind is far from south. But it too has an external check, an anchor in reality, and is safe to come back eternally in its lucid intervals. Music, however, is free, is responsible to nothing. It is a closed circle, not accountable even to that most irresponsible of sciences, æsthetics. It is trite to allude to Chinese music, but Chinese music holds a Chinese audience spellbound, and carries to Western ears the blunt, disillusionizing message that music is, after all, a matter of taste in noises, and that one may come to like almost any kind of noise. And to those of us who would like to feel that in melody and rhythm and harmony there lies something in the ‘nature of things,’ something that might bring us into closer touch with the mystery of life, or even some correspondence with the human spirit whereby developing music might open up new recesses of the soul, probe to new depths, the disillusionment is great. The criers make much, indeed, of such mystic promises, and hail each new school of music, and each new meteor in the musical sky, as a discoverer of new revelations of the spirit, as a scientist uncovers new truths and enlarges the scope of knowledge.

But those magic promises are illusory — mystic bait for the credulous. We need no allusion to Chinese music. Our own, eschewing rhythm, disdaining melody, enthroning dissonance, is moving in the same direction, and assuring us that we can come to like any noise, genuinely like it, and respond to it with our emotions. But the emotions are the old emotions, the spirit the old spirit, dulled perhaps to old noises and eager for new stimulants, but with no new powers and no new scope. There is nothing outside the voices of the criers themselves to make us believe that we have ampler spirits than the old Greeks, for all their simple music; or that Beethoven was of a poorer spirit than Humperdinck.

Change and decay! We like the new sounds, or we do not; and our emotions respond to what we like. Music is simply a pleasure in sounds. But music has the strongest hold on our mystic credulity, for it lays the surest hands on our intangible feelings. And it is at the door of the musical shop that I should like to make a few protests, not against music, but rather in its defense against the excesses of its criers in the marketplace.

It is on the word of the criers that music has been taken with solemnity into the body of that curious thing called culture. And the particular note that recurs in cultural circles is that music has something to impart, some content — ‘ message ’ is the word that will be recognized both by those who talk of culture, and by those who shudder at it. At all events, this content is a part of the serious regard in which music is held. It is reasonable, therefore, to inquire into the nature of those impartations, — to search for ‘messages’ among the musical, in programmes, and in those thumbed octavos that attest the seriousness of the cult. But a wide perusal ends in mystification.

‘The quaking swamps echo with the shriek of flaming death,’ interprets one crier.

If this is the type — and it is the type reported — one is tempted to ask, Why say it? Or what is the good of being told so, or led to fancy it so ?

‘Wagner first set the fevers of the flesh to music. ... In the music of Strauss the Germans have discovered the fevers of the soul. And that is indeed what Strauss has tried to interpret.’

So writes another crier in the marketplace. Whether music can do such things is another question. But if it does — I speak the blunt language of common sense and provocative thesis — is there not some room for doubt as to its health, even its sanity?

There are indeed other ‘messages’ more sane revealed by the interpreters, — sunny meadows that comport themselves more seemly, moods that are unmorbid, active impulse that moves with the stride of untainted purpose. But a search among appreciators and programmes fails to give up anything that in speech would seem more than elementary. Compared with subtleties from the pen of the simplest writer, the reported messages of music are something barren. Oftener they are gross.

‘And such an exposition,’ comments a crier on the composer’s orchestration of his ‘snarling, sorry crew of critics,’ ‘it is safe to say has never been heard since saurians roared in the steaming marshes of the young planet, or when prehistoric man met in multitudinous and shrieking combat.’

And yet we are asked to associate such matter with the gentler amenities of culture! It is one of the curiosities of the current vogue of the criers that they report no messages which bear in themselves the high seriousness or the deep penetration that are the mark of the noblest expression.

I am comforted on behalf of the more genuine culture, however, by one reflection. Music cannot say those things. There is danger, I know, of over-solemnity in chipping at this crystallized metaphor of a content in music. It will have a tendency to run fluid again. But that music can speak, that it can convey a thought, that it has a content., is, in the moving eloquence of the criers, the lamp that lights its entry into the preserves of culture. And the lamp is not left dull for lack of rubbing.

‘The conception is breath-catching,’ writes a crier of his hero, ‘for it is the chant of the Ego, the tableau of Strauss’s soul exposed as objectively as Walt Whitman’s when he sang of his Me.’

Our light-hearted crier admits the next moment, indeed, that this objective exposure cannot be understood by listening to the music, but ‘ it may be child’s play to the next generation.’ ‘This kind of music,’ writes another, ‘adds to our knowledge of men and of the world as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoi.’

‘Why cannot music express philosophy?’ Strauss himself asks. ‘If one wishes to approach the world-riddle perhaps it can be done with the aid of music.’

Deliquescence of thought to meet more than half way the proclaimed potency of music! And part, no doubt, of the musical illusion is due to the kind of iridescent haze that goes, to the criermind, by the name of thought. It is said, indeed, — and here is an illustration happily to hand, — that ‘music is another language, addressed to the soul,’ a thing ‘so subtle that speech can never more than dimly render it, its very essence lost, in translation.’ Such words may have a meaning vaguely illuminating their misty volume, but I think that it is only such meaning as is explicit in the parallel statement that the smell of the rose is addressed to the soul. No language can dimly render the smell of the rose. The senses are beyond translation into speech. And yet even in the common vernacular there persists a distinction between soul and sense.

The great tactical mistake of the criers is that they are not content with their radiant nebulæ; they insist on defining. And their definitions are not far remote from soul-curdling melodrama, disordered dream-stuff, chaos, and old night. And as for the explicit content of music, its thought, it is significant that no composer has orchestrated a definite statement of the musical valiance in this direction, to lay the natural doubts of the common sense. The criers themselves are forced to use speech to put its claims — to say what music means — to say that it means anything. And M. Rolland writes the ten volumes of his Jean-Christophe — that noble work marred by the musical illusion — and writes it in words.

After all, it is only language that can convey ideas. For conveyance implies not only utterance on the one side, but comprehension on the other. When Jean-Christophe in his old age came back to Paris, he found a new generation growing up around him, and a new school of music. It was a little naive to have pictured him, as M. Rolland has done, going on uttering tremendous things which no one but he himself could ever understand. In uttering particular sounds one is likely to be meaningless unless the hearer is let into the secret of them beforehand. It is just because in language one is let into the secret of every articulate element beforehand that the meaning ‘comes across ’ — to use the expressive language of Broadway. Any one who knows the pains of search for the right word, and the trembling lest its secret be not understood with nice precision beforehand, will know the hard truth of this particular assertion. It is not made plain how music, selecting its sounds for their tone-value, can arrive with a meaning. And there comes to mind the picture of Flaubert: —

‘Possessed of the absolute faith that there exists but one way of saying one thing, one word to express it, one adjective to qualify it, one verb to animate it, he gave himself over to the superhuman labor of discovering for each phrase just that word, just, that epithet, just that verb. . . . To write was therefore, for him, a redoubtable thing, full of torments, of perils, of fatigues. He would set himself at his table with the fear and the desire of that beloved and torturing quest, and remain there hour after hour, immovable, desperate over his frightful task, the task of a colossus, patient and minute, building a pyramid of the marbles of childhood.’

When one compares with the significance of this picture the vague approximations of music — its utter uncertainty that any two auditors should conceive from its expression the simplest objective ‘idea’: —

its utter inability to mention names, or utter a thought: —

its impotence to reason or to state a fact or truth: —

— when one compares the thinker searching for sounds of conventional value with the musician searching for sounds for their sensuous tone-value, he may well despair of finding here the clue to the illusion of musical content. We may ourselves blush to have hunted the poor game in so empty a field.

I know that I am wholly beside the point in these animadversions of common sense, for thought and music are incommensurate. The point lies, after all, not in the province of thought, but in the province of emotion and fancy. It is the gift of the senses that they touch the emotions with no uncertain hand — beautiful faces loosing the pent yearnings of years, faint odors calling back for magic moments the lucid purity of childhood wonder and content, and sounds potent in their infinite variety of pitch and timbre, rhythm and succession and harmony, to stir the subtlest motions of the heart. And the quickened feelings teem with imagery to match the blended colors of the mood.

Fine Gallic distinctions among the mental faculties are not at present fashionable, but it is hardly a Gallic or a fine distinction to declare that imagery and emotion are not thought. They may accompany thought — indeed, in the noblest expressions of it they do. One recalls — extreme example — Arnold’s apostrophe to Oxford:—

‘ Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!

‘There are our young barbarians, all at play! And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, — to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?’

There is emotion here, and imagery. But music would try in vain to convey just those images, just that emotion. For the musical mode reverses the literary, and in just the element that conveys the thought and adjusts the feeling to it. The user of speech puts his thought first and the feeling flows from the idea; the user of tones rouses the feelings first, but the thought that follows — if it does follow — is the irresponsible stuff of dreams.

One may guess, then, in this region of fluid values, the submerged and slippery road over which has come the common saying that music, if not parallel with prose, is parallel with poetry. It is, indeed, possible to find poetry without thought; there is a school of futurist poets. But poetry, like prose, presents its ideas or its imagery first; they are its only sure substance of conveyance. And if emotions do arise they flow from the idea, secondary and incidental. To find music in poetry and to miss the ideas there, is hardly basis for the belief that music is therefore potent to express thought.

All this, however, is still beside the point. There lingers yet the mystic faith that in those subtle leapings of the heart that respond to the discourse of sounds something momentous must be meant, ‘something that slips by language and escapes.’ We are in a region of susceptibilities. To feel deep emotion — emotion that in normal life springs from touching and deep meanings in experience or thought — to feel such emotion is the conviction that something is meant. In the marketplace are persuasive voices crying that something is meant. And the culture of the polite world, with its chagrins for those who give signs that they do not belong, has added the sanction of its social tyranny.

‘Certain poets,’ remarks that charming old humanist, La Bruyère, ‘are given in their dramas to long passages of pompous verse, which seem powerful, elevated, and full of grand sentiments; the people listen eagerly, eyes lifted, mouths open, and they believe themselves pleased, and in the measure of their incomprehension admire the more. ... I believed at one time, and in my early youth, that those passages were intelligible to the actors, to the pit, and to the balcony; that their authors understood them themselves, and that with all the attention that I could give to them I was in the wrong not to understand them. I have been undeceived.’

We were questioning the source of the musical illusion. I am not sure but that here, under the tutelage of fashion, and under the sanct ion of that curious mélange of preciosities called culture, the credulity of the emotions has been carried away to believe that music does mean something to the performers, to the pit and the balcony, and that the composers understand what they mean themselves. And they have not yet been undeceived.