Of all the lamentable debts incurred
By Man through buying knowledge, this were worst:
[440] That he should find his last gain prove his first
Was futile—merely nescience absolute,
Not knowledge in the bud which holds a fruit
Haply undreamed of in the soul's Spring-tide,
Pursed in the petals Summer opens wide,
And Autumn, withering, rounds to perfect ripe,—
Not this,—but ignorance, a blur to wipe
From human records, late it graced so much.
"Truth—this attainment? Ah, but such and such
Beliefs of yore seemed inexpugnable.
"When we attained them! E'en as they, so will
This their successor have the due morn, noon,
Evening and night—just as an old-world tune
Wears out and drops away, until who hears
Smilingly questions—'This it was brought tears
Once to all eyes,—this roused heart's rapture once?'
So will it be with truth that, for the nonce,
Styles itself truth perennial: 'ware its wile!
Knowledge turns nescience,—foremost on the file,
Simply proves first of our delusions."
XIII
Now—
Blare it forth, bold C Major! Lift thy brow,
Man, the immortal, that wast never fooled
With gifts no gifts at all, nor ridiculed—
Man knowing—he who nothing knew! As Hope,
Fear, Joy, and Grief,—though ampler stretch and scope
They seek and find in novel rhythm, fresh phrase,—
Were equally existent in far days
Of Music's dim beginning—even so,
Truth was at full within thee long ago,
Alive as now it takes what latest shape
[441] May startle thee by strangeness. Truths escape
Time's insufficient garniture; they fade,
They fall—those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid
Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine
And free through March frost: May dews crystalline
Nourish truth merely,—does June boast the fruit
As—not new vesture merely but, to boot,
Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall
Myth after myth—the husk-like lies I call
New truth's corolla-safeguard: Autumn comes,
So much the better!
As to the questions why music does not give feeling immortality through sound, and why it should be so ephemeral in its appeal, there are various things to be said. It is just possible that it may soon come to be recognized that the psychic growth of humanity is more perfectly reflected in music than any where else. Ephemeralness may be predicated of culture-music more certainly than of folk-music, why? Because culture-music often has occupied itself more with the technique than with the content, while folk-music, being the spontaneous expression of feeling must have content. Folk-music, it is true, is simple, but if it be genuine in its feeling I doubt whether it ever loses its power to move. Therefore, in folk-music is possibly made permanent simple states of feeling. Now in culture-music, the development has constantly been[442] in the direction of the expression of the ultimate spiritual reality of emotions. Music is now actually trying to accomplish what Browning demands of it:
"Dredging deeper yet,
Drag into day,—by sound, thy master-net,—
The abysmal bottom-growth, ambiguous thing
Unbroken of a branch, palpitating
With limbs' play and life's semblance! There it lies,
Marvel and mystery, of mysteries
And marvels, most to love and laud thee for!
Save it from chance and change we most abhor."
This is true no matter what the emotion may be. Hate may have its "eidolon" as well as love. Above all arts, music has the power of raising evil into a region of the artistically beautiful. Doubt, despair, passion, become blossoms plucked by the hand of God when transmuted in the alembic of the brain of genius—which is not saying that he need experience any of these passions himself. In fact, it is his power of perceiving the eidolon of beauty in modes of passion or emotion not his own that makes him the great genius.
It is doubtless true that whenever in culture-music there has really been content aroused by feeling, no matter what the stage of technique reached, that music retains its power to move. It is also highly probably that in the[443] earlier objective phases of music, even the contemporary audiences were not moved in the sense that we should be moved to-day. The audiences were objective also and their enthusiasm may have been aroused by merely the imitative aspects of music as Avison called them. It is certainly a fact that content and form are more closely linked in music than in any other art. Suppose, however, we imagine the development of melody, counterpoint, harmony, modulation, etc., to be symbolized by a series of concrete materials like clay bricks, silver bricks, gold bricks, diamond bricks; a beautiful thought might take as exquisite a form in bricks of clay as it would in diamond bricks, or diamond bricks might be flung together without any informing thought so that they would attract only the thoughtless by their glitter. But it also follows that, with the increase in the kinds of bricks, there is an increase in the possibilities for subtleties in psychic expression, therefore music to-day is coming nearer and nearer to the spiritual reality of feeling. It requires the awakened soul that Maeterlinck talks about, that is, the soul alive to the spiritual essences of things to recognize this new realm which composers are bringing to us in music.
There are always, at least three kinds of[444] appreciators of music, those who can see beauty only in the masters of the past, those who can see beauty only in the last new composer, and those who ecstatically welcome beauty past, present and to come. These last are not only psychically developed themselves, but they are able to retain delight in simpler modes of feeling. They may be raised to a seventh heaven of delight by a Bach fugue played on a clavichord by Mr. Dolmetsch, feeling as if angels were ministering unto them, or to a still higher heaven of delight by a Tschaikowsky symphony or a string quartet of Grieg, feeling that here the seraphim continually do cry, or they may enter into the very presence of the most High through some subtly exquisite and psychic song of an American composer, for some of the younger American composers are indeed approaching "Truth's very heart of truth," in their music.
On the whole, one gets rather the impression that the poet has here tackled a problem upon which he did not have great insight. He passes from one mood to another, none of which seem especially satisfactory to himself, and concludes with one of the half-truths of nineteenth-century thought. It is true as far as it goes that forms evolve, and it is a good truth to oppose to the martinets of settled[445] standards in poetry, music and painting; it is also true that the form is a partial expression of a whole truth, but there is the further truth that, let a work of art be really a work of genius, and the form as well as the content touches the infinite; that is, we have as Browning says in a poem already quoted, "Bernard de Mandeville," the very sun in little, or as he makes Abt Vogler say of his music, the broken arc which goes to the formation of the perfect round, or to quote still another poem of Browning's, "Cleon," the perfect rhomb or trapezoid that has its own place in a mosaic pavement.