And paint man, man, whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?'»
The individualism, the subjectivity, the mystical distrust of definite forms, so stirringly championed in these lines, are vital principles in the work of all the composers of the generation after Beethoven. Thus in Schumann's music, for example, the generality of the emotional burden of classical music is changed to something far more individual and introspective. Expression is more tinged by temperament; the work of art exhales a personal fragrance. Schumann tells us not merely of love, longing, and passion, but of Robert Schumann's love, longing, and passion. His work, for all its beauty, is much less inclusive and complete than the classical masterpieces. In the same way Chopin filled his nocturnes and preludes with the lovely but often unhealthy poetry of the isolated dreamer, and Wagner, separating the passion of love from the other interests of the heart, and thus throwing out of balance the spiritual economy, sacrificed as much in health as he gained in potency. And of the men we have been studying, Grieg, Franck, and Tschaïkowsky also illustrate in various ways the tendency to «paint man, man, whatever the issue,» to let the «flesh be frayed» and the «visible go to the dogs.» It is hardly necessary to say that all these men have their legitimate place. Their message of passion and unrest, already audible in Beethoven, was the inevitable and indispensable expression of one of those self-conscious phases in man's growth when he freshly realizes his finitude. Their utterances make a deeply pathetic appeal to us, because they reveal all the terrible sadness of personal life which as yet finds no resting-place in the universal. Aspiration and disappointment, bitter grief and blind pain, speak in their fragmentary loveliness. The romanticists will never want for our love, since they interpret to us a part of our own experience.
But, as we have said, after man suffers emotion he reflects upon it; after he feels the parts he learns the whole; after musicians have developed new capabilities of expression they proceed to subordinate them to plastic beauty. Adjustment follows discovery, and the romantic takes on classical perfection. The chaos of one age is thus the order of the next; and after Schumann and his fellows had enriched the world with their beautiful but fragmentary and wayward feelings, it remained for Brahms to essay a further conquest; to commence at least (and perhaps he has not done more) the task of making these new feelings more intelligible, of clarifying their turgidity, of subordinating their conflicts in a more complex harmony. Or, to state his function in more specifically musical terms, he had to discover how rugged melodic outlines, bold harmonic progressions, and the large-spanned phrases of modern musical thought could be organized and brought into that unity in variety which is beauty.
We are now in a position to grasp the full significance of that severe training to which Brahms subjected himself in his youth. Without it he would have gone on doing brilliant work of the romantic order, like his first compositions, but he would never have attained the grasp and self-control that raised him above all his contemporaries and that made possible his peculiar service to music. That period of training was the artistic counterpart of what many men undergo when they discover how many sacrifices and how long a labor are necessary to him who would find a spiritual dwelling-place on earth. Many pleasures must be renounced before happiness will abide; evil and suffering are opaque save to the steadfast eye. So, in music, effects and eloquences and crises must be the handmaids of orderly beauty, and tones are stubborn material until one has learned by hard work to make them transmit thoughts. Technic is in the musician what character is in the man. It is the power to stamp matter with spirit. Brahms's long apprenticeship was therefore needed in the first place to make him master of his materials; in the second place to teach him the deeper lesson that the part must be subordinated to the whole, or, in musical language, expression to beauty.
He achieved this subordination, however, not by the negative process of suppression, but by conquest and co-ordination. In his music emotion is not excluded, it is regulated; his work is not a reversion to an earlier and simpler type, it is the gathering and fusing together of fragmentary new elements, resulting in a more complex organism. Thus it is a very superficial view to say that he «went back» to Beethoven. He drew guidance from the same natural laws that had guided Beethoven, but he applied these laws to a material of novel thought and emotion that had come into being after Beethoven. Had he repudiated the new material, even for the reason that he considered it incapable of organization, he would have been a pedant, which is to say a musical Pharisee. One masters by recognizing and using, not by repudiating. And just as a wise man will not become ascetical merely because his passions give him trouble, but will study to find out their true relation to him and then keep them in it, so Brahms recognized the wayward beauties of romanticism, and studied how to make them ancillary to that order and fair proportion which is the soul of music.
To this great artistic service he was fitted by both the qualities which have been pointed out above as co-operating to form his unique nature. His deep and simple human feeling, which put him in sympathy with the aims of the romanticists and enabled him to grasp their meaning, would not have sufficed alone; but fortunately it was associated with an almost unprecedented scope of intellect and power of synthesis. Brahms's assimilative faculty was enormous. Like a fine tree that draws the materials of its beauty through a thousand roots that reach into distant pockets of earth, he gathered the materials of his perfectly unified and transparent style from all sorts of forgotten nooks and crannies of mediæval music. Spitta remarks his use of the old Dorian and Phrygian modes; of complex rhythms that had long fallen into disuse; of those means of thematic development, such as augmentation and diminution, which flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; of «the basso ostinato with the styles pertaining to it—the Passacaglia and the Ciaconna;» and of the old style of variations, in which the bass rather than the melody is the feature retained. «No musician,» Spitta concludes, «was more well read in his art or more constantly disposed to appropriate all that was new, especially all newly discovered treasures of the past. His passion for learning wandered, indeed, into every field, and resulted in a rich and most original culture of mind, for his knowledge was not mere acquirement, but became a living and fruitful thing.»