II. HOW SHALL WE UNDERSTAND IT?
It is obvious, then, that the only possible way to understand a symphony is to accept it as it is and not try to make it into something else. Music is not a language; it does not exist in other terms, but is untranslatable. When a trumpet blares and you make any of the conventional associations with the trumpet, such as a battle, a hunt, a proclamation, a signal, off goes your mind on a stream of alien ideas that may carry you anywhere and that will certainly carry you farther and farther away from the music itself. Each of the orchestral instruments has its own individual association—the oboe reminds you of a shepherd’s pipe, the flute of a bird’s song, the French horn of hunting, and so forth; but each one of the instruments in the orchestra as you listen to it is forming lines, and adding colors, as it were, in a great design. And this design, always complete at any one point, goes on unceasingly forming itself ever and ever anew. It is always complete and always incomplete, always moving onward, always delicately poised for inevitable flight. As you listen you have lived a thousand lives; dream after dream has dissolved itself in your consciousness; each moment has been a perfect and complete existence in itself. When it is finished you awake to what you call happiness or unhappiness, peace or struggle, satisfaction or chagrin; the unreal spectacle of the world imposes itself upon you again; you are once more a human being. Why ask that glorious world in which your nature has been freed and your soul has been disencumbered of your body to assume all the imperfections of this one? The gods, of necessity, dwell in the heavens. No, you cannot understand music by translating it into other terms, or by preserving your associations with the world in which you live. Mind and feeling, sublimated by the magic of these sounds, must detach themselves and rise to a world of pure imagination where there is no locality.
Reconciliation! A philosophy without a category; a religion without a dogma; an indestructible shadow world which offers no explanations, promulgates no opinions, and has no mission—which exists completely in itself. What more shall we ask for? Why cry to the heavens for a manifestation? Why take refuge in a so-called “system” of philosophy? Why shuffle off the whole problem on a dogma? What comfort to a squirrel in a cage to know the number of its bars? Is our slow and inevitable progress from the unknown to the unknown any more significant because we have learned to tell our beads, intellectual, religious, or æsthetic, to mumble our little formulæ, and to pick our way, eyes downward, amongst the stones and thorns, never once glancing clear-eyed upward to the sun? We have always sought a fourth dimension, and have always had it. We want what we have not; we wish to be what we are not; and all the time they have been within our grasp. We make a far away heaven to answer this universal cry, when our hand is on its very doorlatch. Our imagination falters most when we apply it to things nearest us. Where can heaven be if not here? Is it an omnibus in which you may secure a comfortable seat by paying your fare? Or is it a state of yourself toward which you continually struggle and to which you occasionally attain?
This, then, is my thesis. A symphony is not merely an arrangement of rhythms, melodies, and harmonies; it is not a record of the thoughts, feelings, and deeds of men; it is not a picture of man or of nature. Rather does it launch itself from these into the unknown. It is pure imagination freed from the actual.
The foregoing does not, in any sense, preclude that idea of a symphony which is expressible in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony. What I have said has been said for the purpose of preventing a conception of it in these terms only (and, of course, in still lower terms). Our physical hearing is a transit to the imagination and we want the physical hearing to serve that purpose. Nothing retards it more than an attempt at the time to intellectualize the process. In other words, listening to a symphony should consist in giving yourself freely to it; in making of yourself a passive medium. Your study of the arrangement of themes, and so forth, should precede or follow the actual experience. And if you have no leisure or opportunity for such study and depend entirely on an occasional concert, you should nevertheless continue to pursue the same inactivity, allowing the music itself to increase your susceptibility little by little. If the mind is employed in an attempt to extricate order from confusion, it usurps for the moment the other functions of listening. And I would go so far as to say that the proper goal of a musical education should be to arrive at such a state of impressionability to pure music as would leave the mind, the feelings, and the imagination free to act subconsciously without active direction, and without struggle. The matter is so obvious. There is the music; here is the person. It awaits him. It was created of him and for him. It is inconceivable without him. It is his spirit coming back to him purified. It is the only thing he cannot sully, and which cannot sully him, for in the very nature of it, it cannot be turned to base uses. What man would be, here he is. In making this beautiful spectacle of life, as Conrad says, he has found its only explanation. So we should avoid marring the actual experience by conscious intent on the technical details.
What I have said thus far may seem of but slight assistance to the average person who attends symphony concerts. I have stated what I thought symphonic music to be, and have urged my readers not to listen to it analytically. But my purpose here is not to attempt to blaze an easy path for the music-lover; in fact, I am unqualifiedly opposed to that too common practice of æsthetic writing. There is no easy path, and an attempt to find one is disastrous to any progress whatever. Every person who has attained to a real understanding of æsthetic objects knows that the growth of that understanding has been slow. The characteristic weakness of our artistic status is self-deception. We are not frank with ourselves; we are unwilling to admit ourselves in ignorance; we advance opinions which are not our own. The only possible basis for advancement in anything is intellectual honesty. Information about a symphony is useless unless there is a real appeal in the music itself. So I do not attempt to provide here a panacea; just the opposite is my purpose. All I want to do is to show that the symphony is worth struggling for, and to brush away such misconceptions about it as might retard the progress of those who have the will and the perseverance to struggle. And when there is no will to struggle, nothing can be accomplished. What is called “mental lassitude” is almost a contradiction in terms.
It is obvious that a proper musical education would have solved our problems in a natural manner. If, as children, we had been taught to sing only beautiful songs; if we had been trained to listen to music; if our memory for musical phrases, rhythms, etc., had been cultivated, we should be quick in apprehending all the qualities of a symphony, for all our analytical reasoning would have been done beforehand. And nothing can ever take the place of such an education, because the natural taste for music, which is so strong in childhood, has in us been allowed to lapse. So that our first duty is to our children. We want them to avoid our mistakes. In every household, in every school, public or private, this ideal of music-study should be upheld—namely, that the children should enter life so prepared by their early training as to be able to enjoy the greatest music.
I take a form of pure music as a type of our highest attainment, because when music is allied to words or to action it gives certain hostages. Furthermore, the symphony evolved slowly under the law of its own being, and it represents the application to music of those general laws of proportion and balance, of unity and variety, which govern all artistic expression. It has never been subjected to alien influences; popularity has not been its motive power; virtuosity has never dictated to it. If you understand the symphony you can apply that understanding to any other form of music. If one compares it with the opera this distinction is at once evident. In the opera that antagonism of which Spencer speaks between states of feeling and of cognition does exist, because the mind is there appealed to through objects rather than through pure sound. The symphony speaks in its own terms; opera speaks in terms of characters in action, of costume and of scenery, as well as of music. Even the greatest operas cause you to reflect on something outside themselves—on human motives as they find expression in human action. In either “Don Giovanni” or “Tristan,” although the music reaches great heights of beauty and is profoundly moving, there is the inevitable struggle between seeing and hearing, the inevitable difficulty between a simultaneous state of cognition and of feeling. The symphony entirely escapes this dilemma. Np doubt great motives lie beneath it; no doubt it, too, is a drama of human life, for otherwise it could not be great as a work of art; but the play of motives in a symphony is hidden behind the impenetrable veil of sound. The Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven are truly dramatic, but only in this sense. They range from the tender to the terrible; they have their own emotional climaxes; they philosophize, they brood, they grin like a comic mask; action and reaction follow each other as in life itself; nothing is lacking but that one inconsequential thing, reality. Art is truth; life is but a shadow fading to nothingness as the sun sets.