IV
The late Sidney Lanier, a critic of unusual sanity and freshness of vision, contended that so far from being a late and excrescent growth, programme music is "the very earliest, most familiar, and most spontaneous form of musical composition." We need not go quite so far as this, for it seems to me that it is impossible to date either kind of music first in order of time. Just as one early man placed straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the eye by their mere formal harmony, while another placed them in such relations that they pleased by suggesting some aspect of man or nature, so did early music spring with one musician from the mere pleasure in the successions and combinations of tones, with another from the desire to convey in sound a suggestion of the thoughts aroused in him by his intercourse and his struggles with his fellow-men and with the world. Lanier's statement is evidently a slight exaggeration; but I think he has invincible reason with him when he goes on to ask, "What is any song but programme music developed to its furthest extent? A song is ... a double performance; a certain instrument—the human voice—produces a number of tones, none of which have any intellectual value in themselves; but, simultaneously with the production of the tones, words are uttered, each in a physical association with a tone, so as to produce upon the hearer at once the effect of conventional and of unconventional sounds. [22]... Certainly, if programme music is absurd, all songs are nonsense." This, I think, is the key to the problem. Let us look at it a little more closely.
Let us imagine two primitive men, each with the capacity for expressing feeling in musical sound. One of them manages to find a phrase of a few notes that gives him pleasure. Because it gives him pleasure he repeats it. Having repeated it a number of times he finds the mere repetition of it becoming monotonous; so next time he repeats it in a slightly different way. He now experiences, without understanding why, a subtler form of pleasure. If you told him he was making a very practical demonstration of the law that a great deal of æsthetic delight consists in realising unity in variety, he would not grasp your meaning; but all the same that is what he is doing. He still has his old pleasure in the agreeable succession of tones; but this pleasure is intensified, subtilised, by another—the pleasure of detecting the theme in the disguises it assumes. This primitive man has made the first step towards sonata form; he is assisting at the birth of absolute music. From this root there grows up all our pure delight in agreeable tunes for their own sake, in the embroidery of them, in the juggling with them; in a word, all our delight in absolute music. [23] Now take the other man. He starts along another line. When he begins to trace his rude melodic curve, it is not primarily because he finds an all-absorbing delight in the curve itself. He begins because some definite experience has moved him emotionally, and the emotional disturbance must find an outlet in tone; his melodic curve must suggest the experience. Let us say it is the death of a friend. Here is a much more definite impulse than was acting upon the other man; and it accordingly leads to a more definite expression. The curve the melody takes is now determined not merely by the musical pleasure it gives by going this way or that, but primarily by the need to make the melody representative of a definite feeling, or suggestive of the being or the event that aroused the feeling. This man is at the turn of the road that leads to poetical music—to the song, the opera, and the symphonic poem. (I do not allege, let me say again, that there is an absolute line of demarcation between absolute music and poetic music, or between the states of mind from which they flow; the two are always crossing and re-crossing into each other's territory. I am simply throwing into high relief the element in each that gives it its peculiar significance.) In absolute music, as Wagner pointed out, the essential thing is "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms." In poetic music the essential thing is the veracious rendering in tone of an emotion that is as definite as the other is indefinite. Take two concrete examples. The opening phrase of Beethoven's 8th Symphony refers to nothing at all external to itself; it is what Herbert Spencer has called the music of pure exhilaration; to appreciate it you have to think of nothing but itself; the pleasure lies primarily in the way the notes are put together. [24] But the sinister motive that announces the coming of Hunding, in the first act of the Valkyrie, appeals to you in a different way. Here your pleasure is only partially due to the particular way the notes go; the other part of it is due to the veracity of the theme, its congruence with the character it is meant to represent. And, to go back to our two primitive men, the first of them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the opening of the 8th Symphony, while the second of them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the Hunding motive.
Any one who takes the trouble to analyse the phrases of an ordinary symphony and those of a modern song will perceive a broad difference between the kinds of ideas evoked by them. In the old symphony or sonata a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having specific reference to actual life—not attempting, that is, to get at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression, but influencing and affecting us mainly by reason of its purely formal relations and by the purely physical pleasure inherent in it as sound—was stated, varied, worked out and combined with other themes of the same order. Take a thousand of these themes—from Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven, for example—and while they affect you musically you will yet be unable to say that they have taken their rise from any particular emotion, or that they embody any special reflection upon life. It is the peculiarity of music that while on the one hand it may speak almost as definitely as poetry, and refer to things that are cognised intellectually, as in poetry, on the other hand it may make an impression on us, purely as sound, to which the words of poetry, purely as words, can offer no parallel effect. A verse of Tennyson with the words so transposed as to have no intellectual meaning would make no impression when read aloud; no pleasure, that is, would be obtainable merely from the sound of the words themselves. But play the diatonic scale on the piano, or strike a random chord here and there, and though the thing means nothing, the ear is bound to take some pleasure in it. Musical sound gives us pleasure in and by and for itself, independently of our finding even the remotest mental connection between its parts. This connection may be great, or small, or practically non-existent; and the greater it is, of course, the more complicated becomes our pleasure; but it is not essential to our taking physiological delight in music considered purely as sound. Now it is quite possible to construct a lengthy piece of music that shall have absolutely no emotional expression, in the sense of suggesting a reference to human experience—that shall be purely and simply a succession and combination of pleasurable sounds. In the nature of the case, it is clear that not much of the actual music that is written could be of this order throughout. Emotion of some quality and degree is sure to intrude itself here and there into even the most "mathematical" music; but it is quite unquestionable that while some music is alive with suggestions of human interest, of actual man and life, there is an enormous quantity of very pleasant music from which the interest of actuality is wholly absent, that reaches us through physiological rather than through psychological channels, or at any rate, if this is putting it unscientifically, through quite other psychological channels.
Compare with music of this kind the phrases of a highly expressive modern song, or of such a piece as Wagner's Faust Overture, or of one of Liszt's or César Franck's symphonic poems. Here the inspiration comes direct from some aspect of external nature or from some actual human experience; and the musical phrase becomes correspondingly modified. While there still remain (1) the physiological pleasure in the theme as sound, and (2) the formal pleasure in the structure, balance, and development of the theme, there is now superadded a third element of interest—the recognition of the veracity of the theme, its appropriateness as an expression of some positive, definite emotion, something seen, some actual experience of men. And music with a content of this kind, it is important to note, can depart widely from the manner of expression and of development of absolute music, and still be interesting. The proof of this is to be had in recitative. Here there is a very wide departure from the more formal music in every quality—melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic. Attempt to play an ordinary piece of recitative as pure music, without the voice and without a knowledge of the words, and its divergence from music of the self-sufficing order generally becomes obvious. The justification of recitative is to be sought not in its compliance with the laws that govern pure non-dramatic instrumental music, but in its congruence with a definite literary idea that is seeking expression through the medium of tone; and our tolerance of it and appreciation of it are due to this supplementing of the somewhat inferior physical pleasure by the superior mental pleasure given by the sense of dramatic truth and fitness. So again in the song. Let any one try to imagine how little the ending of Schubert's Erl-King would suggest to him if he were totally ignorant of the words or the subject of the song, and he will realise how the literary element at once modifies and supports music of this kind. As a piece of absolute music, the final phrase of the Erl-King means nothing at all; it only acquires significance when taken in conjunction with the words; and the justification of its relinquishment of the mode of expression of pure self-sufficing music is precisely its congruence with the literary idea. To go a step further, the phrases typical of Mazeppa in Liszt's symphonic poem, both in themselves and in their development, would probably puzzle us if we met with them in a symphony pure and simple; they only become such marvels of poignant and veracious expression when associated in the mind with Mazeppa. And, to go still further, and to show not from the structure of a theme but from the treatment of it the change that may be induced by a "programme," I may instance the repetitions in the last movement of Tchaikovski's "Pathetic" Symphony, which, though unwarrantable in a symphony of the older pattern, seem to many of us surcharged with the most direct psychological significance. Right through, from recitative to the symphonic poem or the programme symphony, we see that the fusion of the literary or pictorial with the musical interest necessarily leads to a modification of the tissue of the musical theme and of the musical development. You could not, if you would, express the story of Mazeppa in such phrases as those of the "Jupiter." So that, while we thus have an a priori justification of the programme phrase, we begin to understand the difficulties that attend programme development, and some reasons for its many failures in the past. Much of the work that had been done by the older men in consolidating and elaborating the form of the symphony was found to be of little help to the new school. A new type of phrase had to be evolved, and with it a new method of development.
No one, I think, will dispute the broad truth of the principles here laid down. That absolute music per se and vocal or programme music per se have marked psychological differences between them, and that, while the older bent was towards the one, the modern men show a marked preference for the other—these are fairly obvious facts. Hence the necessity of urging it upon the classicists that it will not do to apply the formal rules of the old music to the new en bloc, as if they were equally valid in both genres. If the modern men reject the classical forms, and try to produce new ones of their own, it can only be because their ideas are not the classical ideas, and must find the investiture most natural and most propitious to them. When Wagner rejected the current opera-form, and strove to attain congruence of the poetical and the musical schemes at all points of his work, the pedants told him that he avoided the long-sanctioned forms because he could not write in them. They did not see that it would have been much less trouble for him, as a mere musician, to shelter himself behind the old forms than to evolve a consistent new one, and that he aimed at a new structure simply because he had something quite new to say. Similarly, when the pedants lay it down that the programmists choose the programme form because it is an easier one to work in than the absolute form, they fail to see how much originality of mind is needed to get veracity of expression in the song or the symphonic poem, where the work, besides having to satisfy our musical sense, will be tested by the standard of the literary utterance or the literary idea with which it deals.