VII
On two lines of inquiry, then, we have found the case for programme music somewhat stronger than its hasty opponents have imagined. On the one hand, we have seen that when the nature and origin of music are psychologically analysed, there are two mental attitudes, two orders of expression, and two types of phrase, from one of which has arisen absolute, from the other, programme music. On the other hand, we have seen that, from a variety of reasons, programme music could not have been cultivated by the great masters of the eighteenth century who beat out the form of the classical symphony; while its fascination for the modern men is due to its being the only medium of expression for a certain order of modern ideas. It is quite time, then, that not only critics but composers realised that when the brains are out the form will die; that you cannot write a symphony in the form of Mozart or Beethoven unless your mental world is something like theirs, and that if the literary, or pictorial, or dramatic suggestion is all-potent with a composer, it is folly for him to throw it aside, and try, by using a form that is uncongenial to him, to get back into an emotional atmosphere it would be impossible for him to breathe.
The change that came over music about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that first came to full fruition in Wagner's operas, is best described in the oft-quoted words of Wagner himself, as "the fertilisation of music by poetry." He felt that there was considerable evidence of the action of poetry upon music in Beethoven, though, as can be seen from the passages on the Leonora overture already quoted, in Beethoven the reins are still too tightly clutched by absolute music. He always, no matter what the origin of his conceptions may have been, worked them out within the limits of symphonic form. Berlioz, roughly speaking, went the other way, always keeping his eye fixed intently on the lines of his poetic scheme. Wagner's criticism upon this practice of Berlioz is interesting, even if not final. In listening to music of this kind, he says, "it always happened that I so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of exertion could I re-find and knit it up again." His point was this, to put it in words of our own: if he was listening to a Berlioz work, he could not get complete pleasure out of the music, as mere music, because it was not developed along purely musical lines; the chief theme, let us say, gave him pleasure on its first announcement, but he could not see the rationale of its future treatment, as one can always see the rationale of the return of the themes in a symphony. This was because the course of the music was determined not by abstract musical intentions, but by poetic intentions which were not made clear to him; and the result was, as it were, that he fell between two stools. "I discovered," he says, "that while I had lost the musical thread (i.e. the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as indicated in the programme. Indisputably these motives existed in Shakespeare's famous balcony scene" (Wagner is speaking of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet); "but in that they had all been faithfully retained, and in the exact order given them by the dramatist, lay the great mistake of the composer." And Wagner's contention was this, that when a composer wants to reproduce in music a certain scene from a drama, he must not take the thing as it stands and move on from point to point in exactly the same way as the poet did. What was right for the poet would be wrong for the musician. He must tell his story or paint his scene according to the laws and capacities of music, not those of poetry; and Wagner goes on to praise Liszt for having, by superior artistic instinct, avoided the pitfall that nearly proved fatal to Berlioz. Liszt, instead of trying to tell us in music precisely what the poet had already told us in verse, rethinks in music what the poet has said, and gives it out to us as something born of musical feeling itself.
Now we need not go into the question of how far Wagner is right in what he says of Berlioz. This, at all events, is certain, from his own words in praise of Liszt, that Wagner had no à priori objection to the symphonic poem, but only to the symphonic poem when it went on what he took to be the wrong lines. All that is needed is for the proper compromise to be agreed upon between the poetic purpose and the musical form. This, I think, Richard Strauss has effected, and it would be interesting to have had Wagner's criticism of Strauss. But since we cannot get that, we may criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic poem.