VIII
Before doing this, however, let us briefly touch upon one or two other main issues.
The first point I lay stress on is this, that "form" in programme music cannot mean the same thing as form in absolute music; and for this reason. So long as you work in one medium alone, the form is controlled simply by the necessities and potentialities of that medium. In a symphony or a fugue you have to consider nothing but the nature of absolute music; in the drama, you have to worry about no problems except those that lie in the nature of drama. But as soon as you begin to work in a form that is a blend of the two, each of them wants to pull the other along its own road, and a compromise has to be arrived at. This is why it is easier to satisfy our sense of form in a drama or a symphony than in an opera or a symphonic poem. We see the same thing in prose literature. If you are going to write a pure romance, concerned with nothing but romance, your course is fairly easy. If you are going to write a treatise on society, again, you are bound by no laws but those pertaining to this kind of work. But if you want to combine the two—if you want to write a novel that shall not only depict character but also enforce a sociological lesson, as in Zola's novels or some of the stories of the American Frank Norris, then there is a wrench between the two tendencies. The sociology is apt to spoil the fiction, and the fiction the sociology. So it is in poetic music; the poetry wants the music to go its way, the music insists on the poetry going its way. In the case of the sociological novel, what really happens is this. We admit that Zola's Débâcle is not so artistic a piece of work as, say, R. L. Stevenson's Prince Otto; but we make allowances; we give up a little purely æsthetic pleasure in consideration of getting a great deal of another kind of pleasure—that of seeing a bigger picture of a more real life put on the canvas. If we can only get the larger human quality in fiction by giving up a little of the æsthetic gratification that comes from perfect form—well, being reasonable creatures, there are times when we will cheerfully accept the situation and make the compromise.
And so it is in poetic music. Wagner's Tannhäuser overture and the Tristan prelude are not so satisfactory, from the point of view of pure form, as a movement from a Beethoven symphony. We get the repetitions of the themes determined by poetic rather than musical necessities. Push the principle a little further, and you will get almost no musical continuity at all, but a continuity of picture only. If we examine the prelude to the Dream of Gerontius, we see that the order of the themes follows a poetic or scenic purpose rather than a musical purpose. This is legitimate so long as it does not go too far, so long as we are not made to feel that the musical continuity is absolutely thrown overboard to secure didactic or literary continuity. But the broad principle is, that a piece of musical development, like the Tristan or Gerontius prelude, that would not be altogether satisfactory in absolute music, is quite satisfactory in poetic music. It tells the literary story well enough, and yet does not starve our musical sense.