"Ideas impregnable: numbers are nothing. Who knows what was the population of Jerusalem? 'Tis of no importance whatever. We know that the Saint and a handful of people held their great thoughts to the death; and the mob resisted and killed him: and, at the hour, fancied they were up and he was down; when, at that very moment, the fact was the reverse. The principles triumphed and had begun to penetrate the world. And 'tis never of any account how many or how rich people resist a thought."
Our final question, then, resolves itself to this: Are there in the music of our day, known or unknown to the majority, any such vital "thoughts," based on principles that a discerning criticism may see even now to have "triumphed and begun to penetrate the world"? Is there music being written to-day which is modern, not through its pampering to jaded sense or dulled intelligence, but through its intuition and expression of the deeper emotional experience and spiritual aspiration of our time? Is there music, in short, not only seductive to the ear but beautiful to the mind? To answer such a question intelligently we shall have to take account of certain truths which the foregoing discussion has tended to establish, and which may now be made explicit. Thought, emotion, all that we call the spiritual side of music, expresses itself not through sonorous or harmonic effects, primarily sensuous in appeal, but through melody and rhythm and their interplay and elaboration in so-called thematic development. In truly great music we remember, not such and such a bit of tone-color, not this or that sonority, but the soaring or tender curve of the themes, their logical yet ever new unfolding, their embodiment, in the whole composition, of richest variety with completest final unity. The man in the street is absolutely right in feeling that music succeeds or fails by its tunes; his limitation arises in his conception of "tune."
Again, since the creation and manipulation of great "tunes" or themes, unlike the hitting off of sonorous effects or the discovery of rococo harmonies, comes never by luck, but only through a discipline based on the assimilation of all that is best in music, we always find that all really fine music is firmly founded upon tradition, and reaches its roots into the past, while blossoming, so to speak, into the future. The artist, despite the popular supposition to the contrary, depends on his forerunners quite as closely as the scientist. You can no more write a solid sonata without knowing Beethoven than you can work efficiently in biology in ignorance of Darwin. Yet on the other hand this assimilation of the past has to produce, not an academic and sterile complacency with what is, but an equipped and curious advance upon what is to be: the artist, like the scientist, brings all his learning to the test in acts of creative imagination, leaps in the dark. Thus artistic advance may be figured as like the shooting of frost crystals on a window pane; never is there a crystal that is not firmly attached by traceable lines to the main body; yet no one can prophesy whither each fine filament may strike out in its individual adventure. The great artist is bound to the past by love and docility, to the future by a faith that overleaps convention.
Looked at in the light of these considerations, contemporary music presents a scheme of light and shade somewhat different from that ordinarily accepted. If some high lights are overshadowed, others seem to shine more brightly. There is plenty of hopeful promise for the future. Leaving aside the sounder elements in Strauss and Debussy, in whom there is so much of the richness of decay, we shall find the chief centers of truly creative activity perhaps in three composers who in their differing ways and degrees carry on the great tradition: Rachmaninoff in Russia, Elgar in England, and d'Indy in France. Each of these men reaches back roots to the primal sources of musical life—Bach and Beethoven: Rachmaninoff through Tschaikowsky, the eclectic Elgar through Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, and others, and d'Indy through Wagner and Franck. Each, as we see in such modern classics as "Toteninsel," the A flat Symphony, and "Istar," can create, in settings of modern opulence of color, nobly beautiful forms, melodies that live and soar in a spiritual heaven. All, too, though in varying degrees, move on as creators should toward the unknown. Here the Frenchman has perhaps, with his characteristic lucidity and logic, something the advantage of the more sensuous Slav and the more convention-beset Anglo-Saxon. Rachmaninoff, for all his warmth, does not always escape the vulgarity of Tschaikowsky, and Elgar cannot always forget the formulæ of oratorio. But in d'Indy, with his untrammeled experimental attitude toward all modern possibilities, we have an influence destined steadily to grow and already clearly suggesting an epoch combining the best of the old ways with new ones at which we can for the present only guess.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See, for example, "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas, and "Work and Wealth," by J. A. Hobson.
[2] "Social Forces in England and America," by H. G. Wells, New York and London, 1914.
[3] In an article on Public-School Music, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1916.
[4] "Pages from an Unwritten Diary," C. V. Stanford.