Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

A sentence in the dedication by Palestrina just cited affords us as serviceable a key as we could desire to the fundamental temper or mood of mind which underlay the type of art he represents. The technical peculiarities of this art already traced in the foregoing pages, do not in themselves explain it; they are, indeed, but manifestations of a deeper spirit underneath, a spirit that was as characteristic of the mediæval mind as idealism is of the modern mind. Incommensurate as were the technical resources of the mediæval composer with ours, their whole mental temper and outlook upon life was in even more striking contrast with the modern attitude. We have, therefore, next to ask: What was the most characteristic peculiarity of this age? What was its most pervasive general trait? What was the one dominant quality in which most of Palestrina’s contemporaries, for all their minor differences, were alike?

Palestrina himself suggests the answer to such questions. “The sharper blame, therefore,” he writes, “do those deserve who misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing.” This setting in antithesis of “men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil,” with the attribution of a “great and splendid gift” to a God conceived as remote from men though beneficent to them, exemplifies the essence of that mediæval view of life which we wish to understand, and for which perhaps the best single name is mysticism. The mystic begins his philosophy with a sharp sundering of himself, considered as an individual existing in time and space, with earthly body, finite mind, and human passions, from what he considers supreme, formless, and eternal good. In common with other men, he has his instinctive perceptions of the divine; but unlike other men he cuts off very sharply the divine thus perceived from the real world in which he eats and drinks, works and plays, lives and dies. His is a world of strong contrasts, of extreme antithesis—the world that mystical terminology divides into “apparent and real,” “divine and carnal,” “temporal and eternal.” His intuition of what is beyond the veil of mortality, absolute, permanent, serves only to emphasize more poignantly his own frailty, partiality, and transience. He not only hypostatizes his own ideal, his dream and aspiration of what ought to be, making of it, as all men do, a real objective existence, but he then cuts it off from himself, makes it a touchstone of all the dross that in him exists alongside the pure gold, and while he attributes all virtue to this “other” or “beyond” projected by his unconscious imagination, reserves to his present actual self, as directly known, all wickedness, sin, and failure. God is perfect, but remote; man is near—and base.

This was the characteristic attitude of religious-minded men in the middle ages. If to us it may seem pathetically childish and superstitious, we should not judge it without remembering the epoch of which it was a part. When we reconstruct in imagination that historic moment, that peculiar inheritance and environment of the sixteenth century Europeans, it is hard to conceive how else they could have interpreted the world. Theirs was an age, we must remind ourselves, of violence and bloodshed, of greed, hypocrisy, lust, and faithlessness. Craft and cruelty reigned in places of power, and the minds of the common people groped in the obscurity of gross ignorance, made even darker by fitful flashes of superstition. The poor were ground down by tyrannies and oppressions, the powerful were tormented by constant dread of treachery and assassination. Plagues and pestilence, war and famine and drought, made physical existence miserable; priestly bigotry and dogmatism crushed all mental initiative. It is not surprising that humanity, in the midst of such conditions, failed to recognize, as the source of its beliefs, its own latent virtue; the wonder is rather that it succeeded in rising at all to the intuition of a holiness which, by a natural error, it conceived as entirely severed from itself. It was much to arrive at this point. The object of the present analysis is not to discredit the mediæval conception of the world, but, by pointing out its peculiarities, to throw light on the music which was one of its profoundest utterances.

The most familiar, and in some respects the most characteristic, element of mysticism is its ecstatic, devout attitude towards the deity or Absolute it worships. The mystic throws himself on the ground before his God, so to speak, in an ecstasy of complete self-abandonment and surrender. He is utterly prone, passive, will-less. His worship is the most complete, the most devoted worship of which there is record. The Greek pagans might sacrifice a lamb or an ox at the altars of their gods, the mystic sacrifices nothing less than himself, his very personality. He desires no reciprocal relations with his deity, makes no reservations in his commerce with it, retains no claim to independence, seeks no special favors; what he longs for, whole-heartedly and with a passionate fervor, is complete absorption, utter annihilation. In the trances of the devotees, consciousness dwindles to a point, all sense of individuality lapses, perception, sensation, thought even, flag and cease, and there remains only a vast, vague sense of the infinite self in which the human self is dissolved and obliterated.

So prominent a feature in this longing or absorption in the infinite, however, was the characteristic mystical condemnation of the finite, that an account of the relations of mystical belief and practice to the affairs of actual life reduces itself largely to a series of negative statements. Closely connected with the dogma of the supreme worth of the absolute, and producing even more conspicuous effects than that, was the obverse dogma of the worthlessness of the immediate, of whatever could be called “this,” “now,” or “here.” Love of God was considered to involve contempt of man, and since man was nearer, more immediate in experience, than God, mysticism expressed itself, historically, very largely in negations. It acted, in all departments of life, and on all planes—the physical, the intellectual, and the emotional or spiritual—as an anti-naturalistic force, for which, perhaps, the best general name is asceticism.

On the physical plane, asceticism took the form of abstinence and mortification of the flesh. In its milder phases it prompted merely the refusal of all the natural calls of instinct and appetite. Because it was natural to hunger, asceticism required men to fast; because to sleep was natural, it counselled vigils; because men naturally enjoy women’s love, material well-being, and personal initiative, monastic orders imposed the triple oath of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Of course it is true that there were positive benefits to be derived from all these modes of discipline, and that much could be argued in their favor by mere common-sense; but over and above their positive virtues there was about them an opposition to nature, a violence to human instincts, that even more irresistibly commended them to true ascetics. A still further application of the same principle was mortification of the flesh. Indian Jogis, Mohammedan dervishes and fakirs, Christian cenobites and anchorites, all, in a word, who held the mystical doctrine of the absolute opposition of body and spirit, believed that to mortify the flesh was to vivify the soul, and carried out their belief with the help of a thousand engines of penance.

On the intellectual plane, the same distrust of man and of nature prompted an agelong opposition to science, to independent metaphysical or religious thinking, and indeed to all forms of free mental activity. The story of Galileo summoned before the seven cardinals at Rome and forced to deny his belief in the heretical doctrine that the earth revolved round the sun is typical of the experiences of almost all venturesome thinkers in the middle age. The application of human intellect to the unravelling of the august mysteries of God was zealously punished as a blasphemy; the only authorized channel of knowledge was revelation. The rational and systematic questioning of nature that has given us modern science was by the true mystical mind held in horror, first because the intelligence is a human and therefore corrupt instrument, and secondly because nature itself is an illusion, a pitfall for unwary feet that falter in their search for heaven.

An asceticism which saw in the physical and intellectual activities of the natural man more evil than good, could hardly be expected to look more leniently on his emotional life, which is, perhaps, the most intensely human and natural part of him, and of which the organized expression is art. Ordinary human feelings, exercised spontaneously in the present world, and not as mere offerings to the beyond, seemed to the ascetic as unworthy of a God-fearing man as sensuous pleasures and intellectual quests. And especially abhorrent to him was their free embodiment in art. As religion is the expression of man’s consciousness of the supernatural, so art is the expression of his delight and joy in the natural. Its work is to build, out of primitive sensations, utterances of feeling and monuments of beauty. But these sensations are all ultimately physical. These feelings are the simple, instinctive feelings of humanity, and this beauty is one that is apprehended by no metaphysical faculty, but by ordinary human powers—by the senses, the heart, and the mind. Art is the most radically and inexorably human of all man’s interests. And since the whole bias of asceticism was against the free development or expression of merely human powers, it was inevitable that mysticism, in which the ascetic element is so considerable, should be even more restrictive than helpful in its influence on art. While it did indeed foster the purely devout and adoring element in artistic expression, it discouraged that full appeal to the whole man by which alone art attains its maturity.

The music of Palestrina’s age is probably the most consummate expression in the whole history of art of this peculiar type of feeling, with all its characteristic qualities and limitations. “No other form of chorus music has existed,” writes Mr. Edward Dickinson,[14] “so objective and impersonal, so free from the stress and stir of passion, so plainly reflecting an exalted, spiritualized state of feeling. This music is singularly adapted to reinforce the impression of the Catholic mysteries by reason of its technical form and its peculiar emotional appeal.... It is as far as possible removed from profane suggestion; in its ineffable calmness, and an indescribable tone of chastened exultation, pure from every trace of struggle, with which it vibrates, it is the most adequate emblem of that eternal repose toward which the believer yearns.”