The masters, when they had won their spurs, were ever restive under rules.[23] Yet they underwent the strictest discipline, gaining early the secret of expression; for the best purpose of rules is liberation, not restraint. On the other hand they were, in the main, essentially conservative. Sebastian Bach clung to the older manner, disdaining the secular sonata for which his son was breaking the ground.
The master feels the full worth of what has been achieved; else he has not mastered. He merely gives a crowning touch of poetic message, while the lighter mind is busy with tinkering of newer forms. For the highest reaches of an art, the poet must first have grasped all that has gone before. He will not rebel before he knows the spirit of the law, nor spend himself on novelty for its own sake.
The line between the Master and the Radical may often seem vague. For, the former has his Promethean strokes, all unpremeditated, compelled by the inner sequence,—as when Beethoven strikes the prophetic drum in the grim Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony; or in the Eroica when the horn sounds sheer ahead, out of line with the sustaining chorus; or when Bach leaps to his harmonic heights in organ fantasy and toccata; or Mozart sings his exquisite clashes in the G Minor Symphony.
As the true poet begins by absorption of the art that he finds, his early utterance will be imitative. His ultimate goal is not the strikingly new but the eternally true. It is a question less of men than of a point of view.
It seems sometimes that in art as in politics two parties are needed, one balancing the weaknesses of the other. As certain epochs are overburdened by the spirit of a past poet, so others are marred by the opposite excess, by a kind of neo-mania. The latter comes naturally as reaction from the former. Between them the poet holds the balance of clear vision.
When Peri overthrew the trammels of counterpoint, in a dream of Hellenic revival of drama, he could not hope to write a master-work. Destructive rebellion cannot be blended with constructive beauty. An antidote is of necessity not nourishment. Others may follow the path-breaker and slowly reclaim the best of old tradition from the new soil. The strange part of this rebellion is that it is always marked by the quality of stereotype which it seeks to avoid. This is an invariable symptom. It cannot be otherwise; for the rejection of existing art leaves too few resources. Moreover, the pioneer has his eye too exclusively upon the mere manner.
A wholesome reaction there may be against excess. When Gluck dared to move the hearts of his hearers instead of tickling their ears, he achieved his purpose by positive beauty, without actual loss. In this sense every work of art is a work of revolution. So Wagner, especially in his earlier dramas,[24] by sheer sincerity and poetic directness, corrected a frivolous tradition of opera. But when he grew destructive of melody and form, by theory and practice, he sank to the rôle of innovator, with pervading trait of stereotype, in the main merely adding to the lesser resources of the art. His later works, though they contain episodes of overwhelming beauty, cannot have a place among the permanent classics, alone by reason of their excessive reiteration.
One of the most charming instances of this iconoclasm is the music of Claude Débussy.[25] In a way we are reminded of the first flash of Wagner's later manner: the same vagueness of tonality, though with a different complexion and temper. Like the German, Débussy has his own novel use of instruments. He is also a rebel against episodic melody. Only, with Wagner the stand was more of theory than of practice. His lyric inspiration was here too strong; otherwise with Débussy. Each article of rebellion is more highly stressed in the French leader, save as to organic form, where the latter is far the stronger. And finally the element of mannerism cannot be gainsaid in either composer.[26] ]
Among the special traits of Débussy's harmonic manner is a mingling with the main chord of the third below. There is a building downward, as it were. The harmony, complete as it stands, seeks a lower foundation so that the plain tower (as it looked at first) is at the end a lofty minaret. It is striking that a classic figure in French music should have stood, in the early eighteenth century, a champion of this idea, to be sure only in the domain of theory. There is a touch of romance in the fate of a pioneer, rejected for his doctrine in one age, taken up in the art of two centuries later.[27]
A purely scientific basis must be shunned in any direct approach of the art whether critical or creative,—alone for the fatal allurement of a separate research. The truth is that a spirit of fantastic experiment, started by the mystic manner of a César Franck, sought a sanction in the phenomena of acoustics. So it is likely that the enharmonic process of Franck led to the strained use of the whole-tone scale (of which we have spoken above) by a further departure from tonality.[28] And yet, in all truth, there can be no doubt of the delight of these flashes of the modern French poet,—a delicate charm as beguiling as the bolder, warmer harmonies of the earlier German. Instead of the broad exultation of Wagner there is in Débussy the subtle, insinuating dissonance. Nor is the French composer wanting in audacious strokes. Once for all he stood the emancipator of the art from the stern rule of individual vocal procedure. He cut the Gordian knot of harmonic pedagogy by the mere weapon of poetic elision. He simply omitted the obvious link by a license ancient in poetry and even in prose. He devised in his harmonies the paradox, that is the essence of art, that the necessary step somehow becomes unnecessary. Though Wagner plunges without ceremony into his languorous chords, he carefully resolves their further course. Débussy has them tumbling in headlong descent like sportive leviathans in his sea of sound. Moreover he has broken these fetters of a small punctilio without losing the sense of a true harmonic sequence. Nay, by the very riotous revel of upper harmonies he has stressed the more clearly the path of the fundamental tone. When he enters the higher sanctuary of pure concerted voices, he is fully aware of the fine rigor of its rites. And finally his mischievous abandon never leads him to do violence to the profoundest element of the art, of organic design.[29]