CHAPTER VIII
BEETHOVEN (CONTINUED)
History and analytic thought alike reveal the fact that the highest pinnacles of art can be scaled only at those happy moments when favoring conditions of two distinct kinds happen to coincide. The artist who is to attain supreme greatness must in the first place have at his command a type of artistic technique that has already been developed to the verge of maturity, but that still awaits its complete efflorescence. As Sir Hubert Parry well says: “Inspiration without methods and means at its disposal will no more enable a man to write a symphony than to build a ship or a cathedral.” These means must be already highly developed, yet not to the point of exhaustion. If the technique is primitive, no ardor of artistic enthusiasm can reach through it a full utterance; if all its potencies have been actualized, no inspiration can reanimate it.
In the second place, the artist so happy as to inherit a technique ripe but not over-ripe, must also, if he is to attain supreme greatness, be in unison with the thought and feeling of his age, echo from the common mind of his fellows a deep, broad, and universal eloquence, as though all mankind spoke through him as mouthpiece. He must live in the midst of some great general awakening of the human spirit, to which he lends voice. Merely personal art can be interesting, graceful, charming, moving, noble, but it cannot have the profundity, the breadth, the elevation, which we recognize in the highest art, such as Greek sculpture, Elizabethan drama, or the symphonic music we are now studying. “A great man,” says Emerson, “finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors.”[44]
When Beethoven resolved on his “new path,” his ambition was favored by the two necessary conditions. That he had at his command an inherited technique, just brought to the verge of maturity, we have already seen. And he had furthermore, behind and below him, as a rich nourishing soil for his genius, a great, new, common enthusiasm of humanity.
The eighteenth century had been a time of formalism in art and literature, of rigid conventionality in social life, of paternalism in politics, and of dogmatic ecclesiastical authority in religion. At its end, however, all those dim, half-conscious efforts of humanity towards freer and fuller life which we have indicated under the general term of idealism, were beginning to reach definiteness and self-consciousness. Men were beginning to assert deliberately and openly what they had long been feeling intuitively but insecurely. They were boldly erasing from their standards the mediæval formula: “Poverty, celibacy, and obedience,” to write in its place the modern one: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They were revolting from the tyrannies of Church and State, to proclaim the sacredness of the individual soul.
It was Beethoven’s high privilege to be the artistic spokesman of this new, enfranchised humanity. Haydn, as we know, had reflected for the first time in music the universal interest in all kinds of human emotion, sacred and profane, that marked the dawn of the new era. But in his music the emotion remains naïve, impulsive, childlike; it has not taken on the earnestness, the sense of responsibility, of manhood. It is still in the spontaneous stage, has not become deliberate, resolute, purposeful. But with Beethoven childishness is put away, and the new spirit steps boldly out into the world, aware of its obligations as well as of its privileges, clear-eyed, sad, and serious, to live the full yet difficult life of freedom.
The closeness of Beethoven’s relation to the idealistic spirit of his time is shown equally by two distinct yet supplementary aspects of his work. As it was characteristic of the idealism which fed him to set supreme store by human emotion in all its intensity and diversity, so it is characteristic of his music to voice emotion with a fullness, poignancy, definiteness, and variety that sharply contrast it with the more formal decorative music of his forerunners. And as it was equally characteristic of idealism to recognize the responsibilities of freedom, to restrain and control all particular emotions in the interest of a balanced spiritual life, so it was equally characteristic of Beethoven to hold all his marvelous emotional expressiveness constantly in subordination to the integral effect of his composition as a whole, to value plastic beauty even more highly than eloquent appeal to feeling. In other words, Beethoven the musician is equally remarkable for two qualities, eloquence of expression and beauty of form, which in his best works are always held in an exact and firmly controlled balance. And if we would fully understand his supremacy, we must perceive not only his achievements in both directions, but the high artistic power with which he correlates them. Just as the courage to insist on the rights of the individual, and the wisdom to recognize and support the rights of others, are the two essentials of true idealism, so eloquence and beauty are the equal requisites of genuine art.
So closely interwoven, so mutually reactive, are these twin merits of expression and form in the great works of Beethoven’s prime—in the pianoforte sonatas from the Waldstein to Opus 90, in the String Quartets, Opus 59 and 74, in the fourth and fifth piano concertos and the unique concerto for violin, in the Overture to “Coriolanus,” the incidental music to “Egmont,” and the opera, “Fidelio,” in the Mass in C, and above all in the six great symphonies from the “Eroica” to the Eighth—that it seems like wanton violence and falsification to separate them, even for the purposes of study. Synthesis, at any rate, should go hand in hand with analysis; we should constantly remember that the various qualities our critical reagents discern in this music, exist in it not, as in our analysis, single and detached, but fused and interpenetrative in one artistic whole. The chemist may find carbon, and hydrogen, and oxygen in the rose, but a rose is something more, something ineffably more, than a compound of these chemical elements.