II
Just as the average programmist is, on the whole, more generous in his appreciations than the average absolutist, so he has done more to clear up the darkness that envelops too much of the subject. From this side there has come some good æsthetic discussion; from the other side there has come little but dogged and tiresome repetition of old catch-words, without any serious attempt to grapple with the psychology of the question as a whole. In the latest edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music, Mr. Fuller Maitland gives us an example of this method of "killing Kruger with your mouth." "It is only natural," he says, "that programme music should for the time being be more popular with the masses than absolute music, since the majority of people like having something else to think of while they are listening to music." The last clause I take to be purely random assertion; there are millions of people—even among the masses—who prefer abstract ear-tickling that saves them the trouble of thinking of anything else while they are listening. Nay, one of the complaints of the untutored amateur against programme music is that it is so hard to follow—that he cannot sit quietly in his seat and just listen to the music as it comes, but must needs first read and pre-digest a long story out of the analytical programme. Minds of this kind—and I have met with many of them—protest simply because they have to think of something else while the notes are being poured into their ears. This rather lame device is one way of disparaging programme music—the device of implying that it is most popular with the "masses," with people, that is, of limited musical culture—which is of course not true. The other way of denigrating it is the time-honoured one of an appeal to the past; it is the æsthetic equivalent of the frequent appeal to the Agnostic to remember what he "learned at his mother's knee." "In the great line of the classic composers," Mr. Maitland tells us, "programme music holds the very slightest place; an occasional jeu d'esprit, like Bach's Capriccio on the Departure of a Brother, or Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony, may occur in their works, but we cannot imagine these men, or the others of the great line, seriously undertaking, as the business of their lives, the composition of works intended to illustrate a definite programme. Beethoven is sometimes quoted as the great introducer of illustrative music, in virtue of the Pastoral Symphony, and of a few other specimens of what, by a stretch of terms, may be called programme music. But the value he set upon it as compared with absolute music may be fairly gauged by seeing what relation his 'illustrative' works bear to the others. Of the nine symphonies, only one has anything like a programme; and the master is careful to guard against misconceptions even here, since he superscribes the whole symphony, 'More the expression of feeling than painting.' Of the pianoforte sonatas, op. 90 alone has a definite programme; and in the 'Muss es sein?' of the string quartet, op. 135, the natural inflections of the speaking voice, in question and reply, have obviously given purely musical suggestions which are carried out on purely musical lines."
To all this there are a good many objections to be raised. (1) In Bach's time programme music, as we understand it, simply could not be written. There was not the modern orchestra with the modern orchestral technique; you could no more delineate Francesca da Rimini with the instruments of Bach's time than you could adequately suggest a rainbow with a piece of paper and a lead pencil. Further, for the expression of a number of things that we now express in music, there were needed (a) the modern enlargement of the musical vocabulary, and (b) the "fertilisation of music by poetry," on which Wagner rightly laid such stress. But in any case Bach's neglect of programme music is no argument against the form. We might as well say that the fact that he wrote no operas is a proof of the natural and perpetual inferiority of opera. (2) Mr. Maitland passes over the fact that, imperfect as their means of utterance were, many old composers were frequently obsessed by the desire to write something else than absolute music. He says nothing of the attempts of Muffat, of the composers represented in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, of Jannequin, of Buxtehude, of Frescobaldi, of Hermann, of Gombert, of Carlo Farino, of Frohberger, of Kuhnau, of Couperin, of Rameau, of Dittersdorf, and others, of some of whom I shall speak shortly. [19] There has always been a strong desire to write "illustrative" music, but for a long time it was checked by the imperfection of the media through which it had to work. (3) He ignores Haydn's excursions into "illustrative" music in the Creation and the Seasons—the representation of chaos, of the passage from winter to spring, of the dawn, of the peasants' joyful feelings at the rich harvest, of the thick clouds at the commencement of winter; he says nothing of the "illustrative" symphonies or parts of symphonies and other works of Haydn—"the morning," "midday," "the evening," "the tempest," "the hunt," "the philosopher," "the hen," "the bear," and so on. (4) He says nothing of the manner in which the overture, both operatic and non-operatic, became more and more "illustrative" at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century; he does not refer to the works of Beethoven in which the "illustrative" function is very apparent, such as the Battle of Vittoria, the Leonora overtures, the Egmont, the Coriolan, the Ruins of Athens, the King Stephen, and so on. (5) He blindly accepts Beethoven's nonsensical remark about the Pastoral Symphony being "more the expression of feeling than painting." The imitations of the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the quail may or may not be a Beethoven joke; but if they are not specimens of "painting" in music it is difficult to say what deserves that epithet. If the peasants' merrymaking, again, the brawl, the falling of the raindrops, the rushing of the wind, the storm, the flow of the brook—if these are not "painting" but merely the "expression of feeling," well, so is the hanging of Till Eulenspiegel, the death-shudder of Don Juan, and the battle in Ein Heldenleben. (6) Even supposing that Beethoven's words could be taken literally, even supposing that in his music he had not given them contradiction after contradiction, still this would not settle the matter. Music did not end with Beethoven, and he might have detested "illustrative" music to his heart's content without that fact being an argument against the writing of it by other people. It is curious that the men who always tell admiringly the stories of Beethoven breaking through the fetters in which his contemporaries would have bound him, should try to use the same Beethoven as a barrier against all future innovations. He was great because he refused to write in any way but his own; we are to be great by submitting our convictions to those of a hundred years ago. With all respect, and without any irreverent desire to pluck the beards of our fathers, we are unable to regard the question as finally settled by what Beethoven said. He himself would surely have been the last man to play the ineffective Canute, and dictate to the art the exact spot on the beach to which its flood might rise. There is no evidence that he meant his words to be a judicial condemnation of anybody or anything; there is no evidence that he had ever given much critical thought to the question; and it is quite certain that no matter how much he had thought about it he could not have seen in it all that we, with our later experience, can see.