Contemporary Composers

by Daniel Gregory Mason

III

And indeed, how should we expect it to be otherwise? Enlightened minds and hearts, we must remember, are the finest and rarest fruits of civilization, to be cultivated only under conditions of decent leisure, fair physical and mental health, and free association with "the best that has been done and thought in the world." When they are so rare even in the class that has all these advantages, how shall we expect them to be common among those living either in an industrial servitude that for monotony of toil is almost worse than chattel slavery, or by clerical and other secondary work that through the modern specialization and subdivision of labor condemns each individual to a more or less mechanical repetition of a few small acts through the larger part of his working hours, a routine the relation of which to human life as a whole he often does not see? Writers on sociology are beginning to realize[1] that such conditions of work inevitably produce a morbid psychological condition in the worker, dulling his mind by the meaningless drudgery and depressing his body and nerves by fatigue-poisons, so that even in his few hours of leisure his perfectly natural seeking for pleasure does not take entirely normal paths. Too exhausted to respond to delicate shades and subtle relationships, whether in sensuous or mental objects, his jaded nerves cry out for violent stimuli, for sharp contrasts, for something to goad and whip them into new activity. This craving for violent stimuli is the essential feature of the fatigue-psychology. Now, is it not highly suggestive that the age of industrialism is also the age of a hundred goads for tired nerves—of the newspaper headline, the dime-novel and "penny-thriller," the lurid moving-picture drama, ragtime and the "revue"? And is it not possible that the sensationalism of so much modern music is only another evidence, on a somewhat higher plane, of the working of this same psychology of fatigue?

Again, these overworn nerves of ours have within a comparatively short period had brought to bear upon them, through the progress of modern invention with its cheap printing, quick transportation, and long distance communication, a thousand distractions. No longer insulated from the outlying world, so to speak, by time and space, as were our more simply-living ancestors, we read, hear, and see as much in a day as they did in a week. The inevitable result has been a diffusion of attention fatal to concentrated thought except for the most resolute, breeding in the average man mental indigestion and habits of disorder and impatience, and gradually evolving the characteristic modern type—quick, sharp, and shallow. Outward distraction has thus added its influence to inner weariness to urge our art away from quiet thought towards ever noisier solicitation. For thought always depends on simplification, on inhibition: in order to think we must neglect the given-by-sense, as we see strikingly in the case of the absent-minded, in order to attend to the given-by-memory-and-imagination; and over-stimulation of sense is therefore just as hostile to thought as the depression of the higher mental faculties through fatigue. Thus it is highly characteristic of our prevailing attitude that we strive, not for elimination, but for accumulation, distraction, dissipation. The formula is always mental apathy, physical and nervous excitement. Not having the joy of the mastery which comes only through thought, because we lack both concentration and favorable opportunity to discipline ourselves, we seek the stimulus of constant change. We digest nothing, taste everything; "eclecticism" is our euphemism for spreading our attention very wide and very thin; and the nightmare that you soon uncover under all our art is not that our minds may become bewildered (for that they are already), but that our senses may become jaded—which of course they do.

Still another line of influence that may be traced from general modern conditions to the peculiar qualities of modern art concerns especially the third of the classes described above, the capitalist class. Here again we find a morbid condition, a distortion of wholesome human contacts; but here instead of the impediment of meaningless drudgery, it is the incubus of a fruitless, selfish idleness. Cut off from the normal outlet of energy in useful work, the luxurious classes become pampered and bored, and develop through very vacuity a perverted taste for the unusual, the queer, the generally upside down and backside to. Every season sees a new crop of the "isms" thus produced, the ephemera of the world of art, which live a day and die as soon as they lose their one interest, novelty. Of all manifestations of so-called "art" they are the most sterile, the most completely devoid of vital relation to any real impulse. They might be ignored did they not complicate still further an already complicated situation, and were they not an additional, though a largely negative, illustration of the close causative relation between general social conditions and artistic expression that our discussion is making more and more evident. Fortunately they produce little enduring effect beyond their own narrow circles; for as they spring not from any vital interest, but only from an unguided curiosity and desire for excitement, they take mutually opposing forms and largely cancel each other. Thus, for instance, fads for very old or for very new music, directed as they are toward the mere age or the mere newness, and having no concern with the quality of the music itself, leave the actual public taste just where it would have been had they never arisen. Nevertheless the diversion of so much energy, which might under better conditions find an outlet in fruitful activity, to a sterile posture-making, is uneconomical and to be regretted.

So far, we have been looking chiefly from the point of view of the devil's advocate, at the injurious influences on contemporary music that can be traced with some degree of plausibility to the capitalistic and industrial social system of the nineteenth century. Noting the sensational bent, whether extensively or intensively expressing itself, of the chief contemporary schools, we have asked ourselves whether it could be attributed in some measure to the kind of demand made by an audience dulled by overwork at monotonous tasks and depressed by fatigue-poisons. Remarking the multiplicity of fads and "isms" by which our art is confused, we have asked how far these might be attributed to the cravings of a group whose normal appetites have been perverted by luxury and self-centered isolation. All of these evils, we have insisted, are aggravated in their effects by the distractions under which we live. It is now time, however, taking a more positive view and attempting a more constructive theory, to ask how these evils may be combated, what more hopeful elements already exist in the situation, and what others may be expected to develop in the future.

IV

First of all, it may be suggested that, so far as these evils are fairly attributable to the social conditions of the nineteenth century, they may fairly be expected to be mitigated somewhat by those changes which already seem probable in those of the twentieth. The capitalistic era seems likely to be followed by an era of coöperation or communism; and in countless ways such a change must eventually be deeply revivifying to all forms of art. Of course, it is only too easy to indulge in baseless dreams of the results upon art of a millennium brought about in this way, only too easy to forget that we are only at the threshold of such new systems of organization, and that they may go the wrong way instead of the right. All we can safely say is that if they do go the right way they will rescue art, among many other human interests, from the condition to which much of it has been prostituted under capitalism.

Let us suppose, for instance, that something like what Mr. H. G. Wells calls the Great State[2] eventually results from the troublous reconstructions through which we are living. The Great State is only one of three possibilities he sees in the further adjustment of the leisure class and the labor class of our present order. The first possibility (and a disagre vivid one it must seem to all thoughtful Americans) is that "the leisure class may degenerate into a waster class," and the labor class "may degenerate into a sweated, overworked, violently resentful and destructive rebel class," and that a social débâcle may result. The second possibility is that the leisure class "may become a Governing Class (with waster elements) in an unprogressive Bureaucratic Servile State," in which the other class appears as a "controlled, regimented, and disciplined Labour Class." The third possibility is that the leisure class "may become the whole community of the Great State, working under various motives and inducements, but not constantly, nor permanently, nor unwillingly," while the labor class is "rendered needless by a general labour conscription, together with a scientific organization of production, and so re-absorbed by reendowment into the Leisure Class of the Great State."

The first two of these possible conditions would be fatal to art, one through anarchy and loss of standards, the other through conventionalization. The third would bring about a renascence, after a troubled period of conflicting standards and of readjustments such as we find ourselves in to-day. The main elements in such a progress would be, first, the gradual refining, deepening, and vitalizing of the taste of the general public under the influence of increasing leisure, health, self-respect, and education; second, the cutting off of extravagance, luxury, and faddism in the wealthier classes by a wholesome pressure of enforced economy; third, increasing solidarity of feeling in the whole social fabric through such a mutual rapprochement, giving the indispensable emotional basis for vital art.