IX
Musician, Critic, and Public
The newspapers and the public.
I have been told that there are many people who read the newspapers on the day after they have attended a concert or operatic representation for the purpose of finding out whether or not the performance gave them proper or sufficient enjoyment. It would not be becoming in me to inquire too curiously into the truth of such a statement, and in view of a denunciation spoken in the [introductory chapter] of this book, I am not sure that it is not a piece of arrogance, or impudence, on my part to undertake in any way to justify any critical writing on the subject of music. Certain it is that some men who write about music for the newspapers believe, or affect to believe, that criticism is worthless, and I shall not escape the charge of inconsistency, if, after I have condemned the blunders of literary men, who are laymen in music, and separated the majority of professional writers on the art into pedants and rhapsodists, I nevertheless venture to discuss the nature and value of musical criticism. Yet, surely, there must be a right and wrong in this as in every other thing, and just as surely the present structure of society, which rests on the newspaper, invites attention to the existing relationship between musician, critic, and public as an important element in the question How to Listen to Music.
Relationship between musician, critic, and public.
The need and value of conflict.
As a condition precedent to the discussion of this new element in the case, I lay down the proposition that the relationship between the three factors enumerated is so intimate and so strict that the world over they rise and fall together; which means that where the people dwell who have reached the highest plane of excellence, there also are to be found the highest types of the musician and critic; and that in the degree in which the three factors, which united make up the sum of musical activity, labor harmoniously, conscientiously, and unselfishly, each striving to fulfil its mission, they advance music and further themselves, each bearing off an equal share of the good derived from the common effort. I have set the factors down in the order which they ordinarily occupy in popular discussion and which symbolizes their proper attitude toward each other and the highest potency of their collaboration. In this collaboration, as in so many others, it is conflict that brings life. Only by a surrender of their functions, one to the other, could the three apparently dissonant yet essentially harmonious factors be brought into a state of complacency; but such complacency would mean stagnation. If the published judgment on compositions and performances could always be that of the exploiting musicians, that class, at least, would read the newspapers with fewer heart-burnings; if the critics had a common mind and it were followed in concert-room and opera-house, they, as well as the musicians, would have need of fewer words of displacency and more of approbation; if, finally, it were to be brought to pass that for the public nothing but amiable diversion should flow simultaneously from platform, stage, and press, then for the public would the millennium be come. A religious philosopher can transmute Adam's fall into a blessing, and we can recognize the wisdom of that dispensation which put enmity between the seed of Jubal, who was the "father of all such as handle the harp and pipe," and the seed of Saul, who, I take it, is the first critic of record (and a vigorous one, too, for he accentuated his unfavorable opinion of a harper's harping with a javelin thrust).
The critic an Ishmaelite.
The critic not to be pitied.