Bloch
Once before, East and West have met and merged. On the plains where the soldiers of Darius and Alexander slaughtered one another, and where the Macedonian phalanxes recoiled before the castellated elephants of Porus, a marriage was consummated. Hovering over the heads of the opposing armies, the angel of Europe and the angel of Asia embraced, and sent their lifebloods coursing through each other. Passage was made to India. The two continents slowly faced about. Two reservoirs that had been accumulating for eons the precious distillations of two great centers of the human race began mingling their essences. In whatever the East did, there was evident the hand of the West. In whatever the West thought there was visible the prismatic intelligence of the East. The gods of Greece showed their smooth foreheads on the banks of the Ganges. Oriental systems refracted the blonde Mediterranean light into an hundred subtle tints. But the empire of Alexander crumbled, Parthians annihilated the legions of Crassus. Persians and Seljuks and Ottomans barred Europe from the East. Steady communication ceased. Asia withdrew under her cloudy mysterious curtains. Legendary fumes, Cathay, Zipango, the Indias of the Great Ocean, arose. Once again, the two basins were cut off. Once again, each began secreting a substance radically different from the other's, a substance growing more individual with each elapsing century. For almost two thousand years, East and West developed away one from the other.
And now, a second time, in our own hour, the two have drawn close and confronted each other. Once again, a fusion has taken place. We are to-day in the midst of a movement likely to surpass the period of Hellenization in duration and extent. This time, perhaps, no dramatic march of Macedonians to the banks of the Indus has served to make the connection. Nevertheless, in the image of Amy Lowell, guns have again shown themselves keys. For a couple of centuries, great gates have been swinging throughout the East at the behest of frigates and armed merchantmen. And slowly, once again, Asia has been seeping into Europe. Warm spicy gusts have been drifting over the West, steadily permeating the air. At first, there appeared to be nothing serious in the infiltration. The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only with Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance at Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; if Chippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, it seemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persian letters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches, arose apparently only from the desire for masquerade. Grétry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took their seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only, began to assume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon the West again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies was opened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new orientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-Deutsche Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829, Victor Hugo published "Les Orientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar." If Weber little more than toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in "Oberon," Félicien David in his songs and in his "Le Désert" attempted seriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of the Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apartment there sat an effigy of the Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the first time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese prints. Manet, Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But though the craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more came into being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionists and the post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all the arts the art of Japan became powerful. De Maupassant wrote a prose that is full of the technique of the Japanese prints; that works chiefly through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senses were being born again. People listened with new keenness to the sounds of instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.
And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being. Something that had long lain inert had been reborn at the contact in Western men. A part of personality that had lain dead had of a sudden been suffused with blood and warmth; light played over a hemisphere of the mind long dark. The very hand that drew, the very mouth that matched words, the very body that beat and curved and swayed in movement, were Western and Eastern at the same time. It was no longer the Greek conception of form that prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be, significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri Matisse, for instance. A sense of design and color the like of which had hitherto been manifest only in the vases and bloomy carpets of Teheran dictated his exquisite patterns. Hokusai and Outamaro got in Vincent Van Gogh a brother. The sultry atmosphere and animal richness of Hindoo art reappeared in Gauguin's wood-cuts. One has but to go to any really modern art, whether produced in Paris or in Munich or in New York, to see again the subtle browns and silvers and vermilions, the delicate sensuous touch, the infinitely various patterns, the forms that carry with them the earth from Arabia to Japan.
As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was near.
But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in that of Ernest Bloch. In a work like this composer's suite for viola and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virile formative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solid as mountains, projects volumes through time. One four-square movement is set atop another. There is no weakening, no slackening, no drop. One can put one's hand around these brown-gold blocks. And at the same time, this organizing power makes to live a dusky sensuality, a velvety richness of texture, a sultriness and wetness that sets us amid the bronzed glowing wood-carvings of Africans, the dark sunsets of Ceylon, the pagodas in which the Chinaman sits and sings of his felicity, his family, his garden. The lyric blue of Chinese art, the tropical forests with their horrid heat and dense growths and cruel animal life, the Polynesian seas of azure tulle, the spice-laden breezes, chant here. The monotony, the melancholy, the bitterness of the East, things that had hitherto sounded only from the darkly shining zither of the Arabs, or from the deathly gongs and tam-tams of the Mongolians, speak through Western instruments. It is as though something had been brought out from a steaming Burmese swamp and exposed to the terrible beat of a New York thoroughfare, and that out of that transplantation a matter utterly new and sad and strange, favoring both father and mother, and yet of a character distinctly individual, had been created.
For no composer was better fitted by nature to receive the stimulus of the onrushing East. As a Jew, Bloch carried within himself a fragment of the Orient; was in himself an outpost of the mother of continents. And he is one of the few Jewish composers really, fundamentally self-expressive. He is one of the few that have fully accepted themselves, fully accepted the fate that made them Jewish and stigmatized them. After all, it was not the fact that they were "homeless" as Wagner pretended, that prevented the company of Meyerbeers and Mendelssohns from creating. It was rather more the fact that, inwardly, they refused to accept themselves for what they were. The weakness of their art is to be understood only as the result of the spiritual warfare that threatens to divide every Jew against himself. There was operative in them, whether they were aware of it or no, a secret desire to escape their stigmata. They were deliberately deaf to the promptings of the beings that were so firmly planted in the racial soil. They were fugitive from the national consciousness. The bourn of impulse was half stopped. It was not that they did not write "Jewish" music, utilize solely racial scales and melodies. The artist of Jewish extraction need not do so to be saved. The whole world is open before him. He can express his day as he will. One thing, however, is necessary. He must not seek to inhibit any portion of his impulse. He must not attempt to deny his modes of apprehension and realization because they are racially colored. He must possess spiritual harmony. The whole man must go into his expression. And it was just the "whole man" who did not go into the work of the composers who have hitherto represented "Judaism in Music." An inhibited, harried impulse is manifest in their art.
For, like Meyerbeer, convinced of the worthlessness of their feelings, they manufactured spectacles for the operatic stage, and pandered to a taste which they least of all respected. Or, like Mendelssohn, they tried to adapt themselves to the alien atmosphere of Teutonic romance, and produced a musical jargon that resembles nothing in the world so much as Yiddish. Or, with Rubinstein, they gloved themselves in a pretty salon style in order to conceal all vestiges of the flesh, or tried, with Gustav Mahler, to intone "Ave Maria." Some, no doubt, would have preferred to have been true to themselves. Goldmark (the uncle) is an example. But his desire remained intention, largely. For his method was a trifle childish. He conceived it as a lying on couches amid cushions, sniffing Orient perfumes in scent-bottles. He did not realize that the couch was the comfortable German canapé, the cushions the romantic style of Weber and the early Wagner, and that through the
"Sabæan odors from the spicy shore