The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

by Samuel Butler

The answer is that it is not mere familiarity that should forbid borrowing, but familiarity with a passage as associated with special surroundings. If certain musical progressions are already associated with many different sets of antecedents and consequents, they have no special association, except in so far as they may be connected with a school or epoch; no one, therefore, is offended at finding them associated with one set the more. Familiarity beyond a certain point ceases to be familiarity, or at any rate ceases to be open to the objections that lie against that which, though familiar, is still not familiar as common form. Those on the other hand who hold that a musician should never knowingly borrow will doubtless say that common form passages are an obvious and notorious exception to their rule, and the one the limits of which are easily recognised in practice however hard it may be to define them neatly on paper.

It is not suggested that when a musician wants to compose an air or chorus he is to cast about for some little-known similar piece and lay it under contribution. This is not to spring from the loins of living ancestors but to batten on dead men’s bones. He who takes thus will ere long lose even what little power to take he may have ever had. On the other hand there is no enjoyable work in any art which is not easily recognised as the affiliated outcome of something that has gone before it. This is more especially true of music, whose grammar and stock in trade are so much simpler than those of any other art. He who loves music will know what the best men have done, and hence will have numberless passages from older writers floating at all times in his mind, like germs in the air, ready to hook themselves on to anything of an associated character. Some of these he will reject at once, as already too strongly wedded to associations of their own; some are tried and found not so suitable as was thought; some one, however, will probably soon assert itself as either suitable, or easily altered so as to become exactly what is wanted; if, indeed, it is the right passage in the right man’s mind, it will have modified itself unbidden already. How, then, let me ask again, is the musician to comport himself towards those uninvited guests of his thoughts? Is he to give them shelter, cherish them, and be thankful? or is he to shake them rudely off, bid them begone, and go out of his way so as not to fall in with them again?

Can there be a doubt what the answer to this question should be? As it is fatal deliberately to steer on to the work of other composers, so it is no less fatal deliberately to steer clear of it; music to be of any value must be a man’s freest and most instinctive expression. Instinct in the case of all the greatest artists, whatever their art may be, bids them attach themselves to, and grow out of those predecessors who are most congenial to them. Beethoven grew out of Mozart and Haydn, adding a leaven which in the end leavened the whole lump, but in the outset adding little; Mozart grew out of Haydn, in the outset adding little; Haydn grew out of Domenico Scarlatti and Emmanuel Bach, adding, in the outset, little. These men grew out of John Sebastian Bach, for much as both of them admired Handel I cannot see that they allowed his music to influence theirs. Handel even in his own lifetime was more or less of a survival and protest; he saw the rocks on to which music was drifting and steered his own good ship wide of them; as for his musical parentage, he grew out of the early Italians and out of Purcell.

The more original a composer is the more certain is he to have made himself a strong base of operations in the works of earlier men, striking his roots deep into them, so that he, as it were, gets inside them and lives in them, they in him, and he in them; then, this firm foothold having been obtained, he sallies forth as opportunity directs, with the result that his works will reflect at once the experiences of his own musical life and of those musical progenitors to whom a loving instinct has more particularly attached him. The fact that his work is deeply imbued with their ideas and little ways, is not due to his deliberately taking from them. He makes their ways his own as children model themselves upon those older persons who are kind to them. He loves them because he feels they felt as he does, and looked on men and things much as he looks upon them himself; he is an outgrowth in the same direction as that in which they grew; he is their son, bound by every law of heredity to be no less them than himself; the manner, therefore, which came most naturally to them will be the one which comes also most naturally to him as being their descendant. Nevertheless no matter how strong a family likeness may be, (and it is sometimes, as between Handel and his forerunners, startlingly close) two men of different generations will never be so much alike that the work of each will not have a character of its own—unless indeed the one is masquerading as the other, which is not tolerable except on rare occasions and on a very small scale. No matter how like his father a man may be we can always tell the two apart; but this once given, so that he has a clear life of his own, then a strong family likeness to some one else is no more to be regretted or concealed if it exists than to be affected if it does not.

It is on these terms alone that attractive music can be written, and it is a musician’s business to write attractive music. He is, as it were, tenant for life of the estate of and trustee for that school to which he belongs. Normally, that school will be the one which has obtained the firmest hold upon his own countrymen. An Englishman cannot successfully write like a German or a Hungarian, nor is it desirable that he should try. If, by way of variety, we want German or Hungarian music we shall get a more genuine article by going direct to German or Hungarian composers. For the most part, however, the soundest Englishmen will be stay-at-homes, in spite of their being much given to summer flings upon the continent. Whether as writers, therefore, or as listeners, Englishmen should stick chiefly to Purcell, Handel, and Sir Arthur Sullivan. True, Handel was not an Englishman by birth, but no one was ever more thoroughly English in respect of all the best and most distinguishing features of Englishmen. As a young man, though Italy and Germany were open to him, he adopted the country of Purcell, feeling it, doubtless, to be, as far as he was concerned, more Saxon than Saxony itself. He chose England; nor can there be a doubt that he chose it because he believed it to be the country in which his music had the best chance of being appreciated. And what does this involve, if not that England, take it all round, is the most musically minded country in the world? That this is so, that it has produced the finest music the world has known, and is therefore the finest school of music in the world, cannot be reasonably disputed.

To the born musician, it is hardly necessary to say, neither the foregoing remarks nor any others about music, except those that may be found in every text book, can be of the smallest use. Handel knew this and no man ever said less about his art—or did more in it. There are some semi-apocryphal [128] rules for tuning the harpsichord that pretend, with what truth I know not, to hail from him, but here his theoretical contributions to music begin and end. The rules begin “In this chord” (the tonic major triad) “tune the fifth pretty flat, and the third considerably too sharp.” There is an absence of fuss about these words which suggests Handel himself.

The written and spoken words of great painters or musicians who can talk or write is seldom lasting—artists are a dumb inarticulate folk, whose speech is in their hands not in their tongues. They look at us like seals, but cannot talk to us. To the musician, therefore, what has been said above is useless, if not worse; its object will have been attained if it aids the uncreative reader to criticise what he hears with more intelligence.

Music

So far as I can see, this is the least stable of the arts. From the earliest records we learn that there were musicians, and people seem to have been just as fond of music as we are ourselves, but, whereas we find the old sculpture, painting (what there is of it) and literature to have been in all essentials like our own, and not only this but whereas we find them essentially the same in existing nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, this is not so as regards music either looking to antiquity or to the various existing nations. I believe we should find old Greek and Roman music as hideous as we do Persian and Japanese, or as Persians and Japanese find our own.

I believe therefore that the charm of music rests on a more unreasoning basis, and is more dependent on what we are accustomed to, than the pleasure given by the other arts. We now find all the ecclesiastical modes, except the Ionian and the Æolian, unsatisfactory, indeed almost intolerable, but I question whether, if we were as much in the habit of using the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixo-Lydian modes as we are of using the later Æolian mode (the minor scale), we should not find these just as satisfactory. Is it not possible that our indisputable preference for the Ionian mode (the major scale) is simply the result of its being the one to which we are most accustomed? If another mode were to become habitual, might not this scale or mode become first a kind of supplementary moon-like mode (as the Æolian now is) and finally might it not become intolerable to us? Happily it will last my time as it is.