Counterparts among Poets and Musicians
Those who have had sufficient interest to read any considerable number of the foregoing chapters cannot have failed to perceive that, to the mind of the author, the sister arts, music and poetry, sustain to each other an even closer, more vitally intimate relation than the family connection generally conceded to them.
It is a kinship of soul and sympathy, as well as of race—a similarity of aim and influence upon humanity; a similarity, even in the kind of effect produced, and the means employed to produce it, which renders them largely interdependent and reciprocally helpful. The purpose of both is expression, chiefly emotional expression, descriptions of nature and references to natural phenomena being introduced merely as accessories, as background or setting for the human life and interest, which are of primary importance. Both express their meaning, not through imitated sounds or forms borrowed from the physical world, but by means of audible symbols devised by man for this express purpose, which have come by long usage and general acceptance to have a definite significance, but require a certain degree of education to comprehend them, and which are therefore more intellectual, more adapted to the expression of the subtler phases of life, and more purely human in their origin, than the media of form and color employed in the plastic arts.
True, the one uses tones, the other words, as its material; but the difference is by no means so radical as at first appears. Both exist in time, while all other arts have to do with space and substance. Both have but one dimension, so to speak,—namely, duration,—and owe whatever of the beauty of form and proportion they possess to a symmetrical subdivision of this given duration into correspondent parts or sections, by means of accents, brief pauses, and rhymes or cadences. Both may successfully treat a progressive series of moods or scenes, of varying character, and fluctuating intensity, which is not possible in the plastic arts, limited as they all are to the portrayal of a single situation, a single instant of time, a single fixed conception. Both, again, possess a certain warmth and inherent pulsing life, which is their common, dominant characteristic, due to the heart-throb of rhythm, which is lacking in all other arts.
Even in the media they employ, there is a strong though subtle resemblance; both appeal directly to the sense of hearing, which scientists tell us is more intimately connected with the nerve centers of emotional life than any other of the senses. In both cases the immediate appeal is to the feelings and the imagination, without recourse to intervening imagery borrowed from external nature. Both embody the cry of one soul to another, and they are not widely divergent in quality or effect. Language at its highest is almost song, and music at its best is idealized declamation. All good poetry must be musical. It should, as we say, sing itself; and all good music must be poetical, conveying a distinctly poetic impression.
To me every poem presupposes a possible musical setting, and every worthy composition, a possible poetic text. Hence the language used, in describing music, must of necessity, so far as the powers of the writer permit, possess a generally poetic character. In all my thought and reading, along this line, it has seemed to me, not only of extreme interest, but of great practical value to every musician and writer, to devote careful study to the analogy between these arts, to the correspondences between artists, in these parallel lines of work, and between their special productions in each, to obtain the widest possible familiarity with both arts and their mutual relations, with a view to letting each aid to a fuller elucidation and better appreciation of the other. I have always grouped together in my mind Bach and Milton, Beethoven and Shakespeare, Mozart and Spenser, Schubert and Moore, Schumann and Shelley, Mendelssohn and Longfellow, Chopin and Tennyson, Liszt and Byron, Wagner and Victor Hugo.
Bach and Milton seem to me to occupy corresponding niches in the temples of music and of verse, because of the strong religious element in the personality of both, of their severe, involved, lengthy, sonorous, and dignified style of utterance; their mutual disdain of mere sentiment and softer graces, and their fondness for works of large dimensions and serious import. Furthermore, because of the proneness of both to religious and churchly subjects, and the corresponding position which they occupy as veteran classics in their respective arts.
The analogy between Beethoven and Shakespeare is almost too obvious for remark. They are the twin giants of music and literature in their colossal and comprehensive powers, in the breadth and universality of their genius, and in the verdict of absolute superiority unanimously accorded them by all nations, all schools, and all factions, both in the profession and by the public. They are like the pyramids of Egypt; they overtop all altitudes, cover more area, and present a more enduring front to the “corroding effects of time” than aught else the world has known.
Mozart and Spenser resemble each other in their quaint and classic, yet naïve and sunshiny style, their abundance, almost excess of fancy, and their fondness for supernatural, though for the most part non-religious and non-mythological scenes, incidents, and characters; also in their habit of treating startling situations and normally grievous catastrophes without exciting any very profound subjective emotions in their readers and hearers. Not that they are flippant or superficial in character; far from it; but with them art was somewhat removed from humanity. With Spenser literature was not life, and with Mozart music was not emotion. We smile and are glad at heart because of them, but we are not thrilled; we are pensive or reflective, but we rarely weep and are never plunged into despair. There is a moral lesson, it is true, in the feats of the knights and ladies in the “Faery Queen,” as also in the vicissitudes of that rather admirable scoundrel, Don Juan, but it is not burned into us, as by a keener and crueler hand. Those who enjoy poetry and music, rather than feel it, love it, or learn from it, are always partial to Spenser and Mozart.
No artistic affinity is more marked than that of Schubert and Moore. They are both preëminently song-writers. Both had a gift of spontaneous, happy, graceful development of a single thought in small compass. Both are melodious beyond compare, and both wrote with an ease, rapidity, and versatility rarely matched in the annals of their arts. Moore is the most musical of poets, and Schubert, perhaps, the most poetic of musicians. One of Moore’s life-purposes was the collection of stray waifs of national airs and furnishing them with appropriate words. Likewise, one of Schubert’s main services to art was the collection of brief lyric poems and setting them to suitable melodies. Each reached over into the sister art a friendly hand, and each, unawares, won his chief fame thereby. Moreover, though clinging by instinct and preference to the smaller, simpler, more unpretentious forms, each wrote one or two lengthy and well-developed works, such as the “Lalla Rookh,” with Moore, and the “Wanderer Fantaisie,” with Schubert, which gloriously bear comparison with the masterpieces of their type from the pens of the ablest writers in the larger forms.