III
Difficult to make, and dangerous when made, as are sweeping generalizations about so many-sided a matter as the expressive character of whole schools or eras of art, there seem to be generic differences between classical and romantic expression which we can hardly avoid remarking, and of which it is worth while to attempt a tentative definition, especially if we premise that it is to be suggestive rather than absolute. The constant generality of classical expression, and the objectivity of attitude which it indicates in the worker, cannot but strike the modern student, especially if he contrasts them with the exactly opposite features of contemporary art. The classical masters aim, not at particularity and minuteness of expression, but at the congruous setting forth of certain broad types of feeling. They are jealous of proportion, vigilant to maintain the balance of the whole work, rigorous in the exclusion of any single feature that might through undue prominence distort or mar its outlines. Their attitude toward their work is detached, impersonal, disinterested—a purely craftsmanlike attitude, at the furthest pole from the passionate subjectivity of our modern "tone-poets." J. S. Bach, for example, the sovereign spirit of this school, is always concerned primarily with the plastic problem of weaving his wonderful tonal patterns; we feel that what these patterns turn out to express, even though it be of great, and indeed often of supreme, poignancy, is in his mind quite a secondary matter. The preludes and fugues of the "Well-tempered Clavichord" are monuments of abstract beauty, rather than messages, pleas, or illustrations. And even when their emotional burden is so weighty as in the B-flat minor prelude or the B-minor fugue of the first book, it still remains general and, as it were, communal. Bach is not relieving his private mind; he is acting as a public spokesman, as a trustee of the emotion of a race or nation. This gives his utterance a scope, a dignity, a nobility, that cannot be accounted for by his merely personal character.
Haydn and Mozart illustrate the same attitude in a different department of music. Their symphonies and quartets are almost as impersonal as his preludes and fugues. The substance of all Haydn's best work is the folk-music of the Croatians, a branch of the Slavic race; its gaiety, elasticity, and ingenuousness are Slavic rather than merely Haydnish. It is true that he idealizes the music of his people, as a gifted individual will always idealize any popular art he touches; but he remains true to his source, and accurately representative of it, just as the finest tree contains only those elements which it can draw from the soil in which it grows. Mozart, more personal than Haydn, shares with him the aloofness, the reticence, of classicism. What could be more Greek, more celestially remote, than the G-minor Symphony, or the quintet in the same key? What could be less a detailed biography of a hero, more an ideal sublimation of his essential character, than the "Jupiter Symphony"? And even in such a deeply emotional conception as the introduction to the C-major quartet, can we label any specific emotion? Can we point to the measures and say, "Here is grief; here is disappointment; here is unrequited love"?
In Beethoven we become conscious of a gradually changing ideal of expression. There are still themes, movements, entire works, in which the dominant impulse is the architectonic zeal of classicism; and there is the evidence of the sketchbooks that this passionate individualist could subject himself to endless discipline in the quest of pure plastic beauty. But there are other things, such as the third, fifth, and ninth symphonies, the "Egmont" and "Coriolanus" overtures, the slow movement of the G-major concerto (that profoundly pathetic dialogue between destiny and the human heart), and the later quartets, in which a novel particularity and subjectivity of utterance make themselves felt. In such works the self-forgetful artist, having his vicarious life only in the serene beauty of his creations, disappears, and Ludwig van Beethoven, bursting with a thousand emotions that must out, steps into his place and commands our attention, nobly egotistic, magnificently individual. And then there is the "Pastoral Symphony," in which he turns landscape painter, and with minutest details of bird-notes and shepherds' songs and peasants' dances delineates the external objects, as well as celebrates the inner spirit, of the countryside. These things mark the birth of romanticism.
For romanticism is, in essence, just this modern subjectivity and individualism, just this shifting of the emphasis from abstract beauty, with its undifferentiated expressiveness, to personal communication, minute interest in the uttermost detail, impassioned insistence on each emotion for itself rather than as a subordinate member in an articulate organism, and, in extreme cases, to concrete objects, persons, and scenes in the extra-musical world. Musicians since Beethoven have inclined to exploit more and more that aspect of their art which is analogous to language, even when this means neglect of the other aspect, the nearest analogue of which is to be found in sculpture, architecture, and decorative painting. The modern watchword has come to be initiative rather than obedience, originality rather than skill, individuality rather than truth to universal human nature. It is, after all, one impulse, the impulse toward specialization, that runs through all the various manifestations of the romantic spirit, and may be traced alike in the lyricism of Schubert, the fanciful whimsicality of Schumann, the picturesqueness of Mendelssohn, the introspection of Chopin, and the realism of Berlioz and Liszt.
In Schubert, the first of the out-and-out romanticists, and the eldest of them all in point of time (his birth date falls in the eighteenth century), we find a curious grafting of a new spirit on an old stem. Brought up on the quartets and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, making his first studies in boyishly literal imitation of them, he acquired the letter of the classical idiom as none of the others save Mendelssohn ever did. His works in sonata form, written up to 1816, might well have emanated from Esterhaz or Salzburg; the C-major Symphony, so far as general plan is concerned, would have done no discredit to Beethoven. Yet the spirit of Schubert is always lyrical. It was fated from his birth that he should write songs, for his was a typically sentimental temperament; and when he planned a symphony, he instinctively conceived it as a series of songs for instruments, somewhat more developed than those intended for a voice, but hardly different in kind. As a naturalist can reconstruct in fancy an extinct animal from a fossil jaw-bone, a musical historian might piece out a fair conception of what romanticism is, in the dearth of other evidence, from a study of "Erlkönig," or "Ständchen," or "Am Meer"; and the ideas he might thus form would be extended rather than altered by acquaintance with the "Unfinished Symphony" or the D-minor Quartet. The lyrical Schubert contrasts always with the heroic and impersonal Bach or Beethoven, much as Tennyson contrasts with Shakespeare, or Theocritus with Sophocles.
Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable youthful enthusiasm, whimsicality, a richly poetic fancy, and a touch of mysticism. His songs are even more personal than Schubert's, and his piano pieces, especially the early ones, bristle with eccentricities. The particularity, minute detail, and personal connotation of the "Abegg Variations," the "Davidsbündertänze," the "Papillons," the "Carnaval," the "Kreisleriana," are almost grotesque. He confides to us, through this music, his friendships, his flirtations, his courtship, his critical sympathies, his artistic creed, his literary devotions. Never was music so circumstantial, so autobiographic. In later years, when he had passed out of the enchanted circle of youthful egotism, and was striving for a more universal speech, his point of view became not essentially less personal but only less wayward. Till the last his art is vividly self-conscious—that is his charm and his limitation. No one has so touchingly voiced the aspirations of the imprisoned soul, no one has put meditation and introspection into tones, as he has done in the adagio of the C-major Symphony, the "Funeral March" of the Quintet, the F-sharp major Romance for piano.
If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling of a sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in temperament,—correct, reserved, dispassionate,—is nevertheless also romantic by virtue of his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the pageantry of life, his delicate skill as an illustrator of nature and of imaginative literature. His "Songs without Words" reveal a strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or reckless, he never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far removed from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and Schumann. He was, in fact, by tradition, training, and native taste, a classicist; the exhibition of deep feeling was distasteful to his fastidious reticence; and he is thus emotionally less characteristic of his period than any of his contemporaries. But for all that he shows unmistakably in the felicity of his tone-painting the modern interest in picturesque detail, in the concrete circumstance, the significant particular. Illustration rather than abstract beauty—that is one of the special interests of the new school. No one has cultivated it more happily than the composer of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, the "Hebrides Overture," and the "Scotch" and "Italian" Symphonies.
Chopin presents an even more singular instance than Schumann affords of what introspection can make of a composer, of how resolute self-communion can individualize his work until its intense personal savor keeps little to remind us of other music. All Chopin's tastes were so aristocratic that the exclusiveness of his style seems a matter of course, and was probably to his mind a supreme merit. And if it debarred him from some musical experiences, if it made his music sound better in a drawing-room than in a concert hall, it certainly gave it a marvellous delicacy, finesse, originality, and fragile beauty. It is, so to speak, valetudinarian music, and preserves its pure white complexion only by never venturing into the full sunlight. Here, then, is another differentiation in musical style, a fresh departure from the classic norm, due to the exacting taste of the mental aristocrat, the carefully self-bounded dreamer and sybarite.
Markedly specialized as the expression is, however, in Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, and strikingly contrasted as it is with the serene generality of the classical music, the two schools after all differ rather in the degree of emphasis they lay on the various elements of effect than in kind. Both, we feel, are using the same means, though to such different ends. But with Berlioz and Liszt we pass into a new world, in which not only emphasis and intention, but the actual materials and the fundamental principles of art, have undergone a change. These men have pushed the romantic concreteness even beyond the range of sentiments and emotions, to invade that of facts and events. They are no longer satisfied with the minutiæ of feelings; they must depict for us the external appearance of the people who feel, give us not only heroes, but these heroes' coats, with the exact number of buttons and the proper cut, according to the fashion of the particular decade. If Schumann and his fellows are the sentimental novelists of music, the Thackerays and the George Eliots, here are the naturalists, the scientific analysts, the "realists" with microscope and scalpel in hand, the Zolas and the Gorkys.
This insistence on the letter is quite instinctive with Berlioz. In the first place, he was a Frenchman; and the French have a genius for the concrete, and in music have shown their bias by approaching it always from the dramatic, histrionic point of view. Opera is the norm of music to the Frenchman. For him, music originates in the opera-house, quite as inevitably as for the German it originates in the concert room. Berlioz's "symphonies," therefore, as a matter of course, took the form of operas, with the characters and action suppressed or relegated to the imagination.
In the second place, the active impulses in Berlioz's personal temperament predominated over the contemplative to a degree unusual even in his countrymen; he conceived a work of art in terms not of emotion but of action; and his musical thinking was a sort of narration in tones. He accordingly wrote, with ingenuous spontaneity, in a style that was, from the German standpoint, revolutionary, unprecedented, iconoclastic—a style the essence of which was its matter-of-fact realism. His "Symphonie Fantastique," which Mr. Hadow calls his most uncompromising piece of program music, sets forth the adventures of a hero (whose identity with the composer is obvious) in five movements or acts, and with the most sedulous particularity. We first see him struggling with love, tormented by jealousy, consoled by religion; then in a ball-room, pausing in the midst of the dance to muse on his beloved; then in the country, listening to idyllic shepherds and hearing the summer thunder. He dreams that he has murdered the beloved, that he is to be beheaded at the guillotine; he is surrounded by witches, his mistress has herself become a witch, the Dies Iræ clangs its knell of death across the wild chaos of the dance....
Now in all this the striking point is the concreteness of the imagery, the plenitude of detail, the narrative and descriptive literalness of the treatment—and above all the subordination of the music to a merely symbolic function. Berlioz here brings into prominence for the first time the device, so frequent in later operatic and program music, of treating his themes or motives as symbols of his characters, associated with these by a purely arbitrary but nevertheless effective bond. When we hear the melody we are expected to think of the character, and all the changes rung on it are prompted not by the desire for musical development, but by psychological considerations connected with the dramatic action. Thus, for example, in this symphony the motive known as "l'idée fixe" represents the beloved; its fragmentary appearances in the second, third, and fourth movements tell us that the thought of her is passing through our hero's mind; and in the last movement, when she endues the horrid form of a witch, we hear a distorted, grotesque version of it sardonically whistled by the piccolo. Highly characteristic of Berlioz is this use of melodies, so dearly valued in classic music for themselves alone, as mere counters for telling off the incidents in the plot, or cues for the entrances of the dramatis personæ.
Liszt, a man of keener musical perception than Berlioz, placed himself also, in obedience to his strong dramatic sense, on the same artistic platform. In such a work as the "Faust Symphony" we discern a more musical nature producing practically the same kind of music. There is the same narrative and descriptive intention; the three movements take their names from the chief characters in the action, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles; and though the second is more general in expression than Berlioz ever is, the other two are good examples of his method. There is also the same machinery of leading motives and their manipulation according to the requirements of symbolism, even to the parodying of the Faust themes in the "Mephistopheles" section. In the symphonic poem, "Les Préludes," however (and in the "Dante Symphony" and other compositions), Liszt shows his German blood in a treatment more imaginative, the actuating subjects being often not persons and events, but emotional and mental states. But the fact that many of the transformations of the themes are from the musical standpoint travesties, justified only by their psychological intention, shows that the attitude even here is still that of the dramatist, not that of the abstract musician. The art, in a word, is still representative, not presentative and self-sufficing. Again, the representative function of music for Liszt is shown by his tendency to approach composition indirectly, and through extraneous interests of his many-sided mind, instead of with the classic single-mindedness: his pieces are suggested by natural scenery, historical characters, philosophic abstractions, poems, novels, and even statues and pictures.
In all these ways and degrees we see exemplified the inclination of the nineteenth-century composers to seek a more and more definite, particular, and concrete type of expression. Subjective shades and nuances take the place of the ground-colors of classicism; music comes to have so personal a flavor that it is as impossible to confound a piece of Chopin with one of Schumann as it is difficult, by internal evidence alone, to say whether Mozart or Haydn is the author of an unfamiliar symphony; ultimately, insistence upon special emotions opens the way to absorption in what is even more special—individual characters, events, and situations,—and on the heels of the lyrical treads the realistic. The artistic stream thus reverses the habit of natural streams: as it gets farther and farther from its source it subdivides and subdivides itself again, until it is no longer a single large body, but a multitude of isolated brooks and rivulets. Our contemporary music, unlike the classical, is not the expression of a single social consciousness, but rather a heterogeneous aggregate of the utterances of many individuals. What is most captivating about it is the sensitive fidelity with which it reflects its composers' idiosyncrasies.