CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION
One of the most unfortunate conditions surrounding our musical life is the small part men take in it. This is not altogether their fault. Their business is engrossing, and concert-going is made difficult for them. There should be some music for the business man between the time when he leaves his office and the hour of his dinner, and it should be so arranged as to cause him the minimum of trouble and give him the maximum of enjoyment. This means a half-hour or forty minutes of good music available, say, at five o’clock, and not too far away. It means, also, that he shall be provided with a repetition of every long or complicated composition so that he may have a chance to understand it. The average listener hears a Brahms symphony once in, say, two or three years, and there is little chance of his finding it intelligible. No doubt, in course of time this will come about. No doubt, too, workers in shops and offices will by and by be able to hear a little really fine music at lunch time.[13] The influx of men into concert rooms would be of great benefit to the cause of music, as well as to the men themselves. We should, after a time, get rid of that curious Anglo-Saxon idea that art is effeminate, and should begin to value it for what it really is. Whenever I think of this mistaken notion the figure of Michael Angelo rises before me. There was as heroic a man as even the world of war ever produced; capable alike of the Herculean task of the Sistine frescoes,—the actual physical labors of which would kill an ordinary man (and Michael Angelo was then over sixty years old),—of the heroic Moses, and again of that most tender and beautiful of all sculpture, the Pietà; a stern and noble nature capable of fighting for his principles no matter what the risk. Or I think of Beethoven, ill, lonely, deaf, and poor, but nevertheless creating virile music of the kind we know. Or of Bach, sturdy as an oak tree, without recognition from the world, bringing up a large family on almost nothing a year, wholesome, profound, and true—the equal in all that goes to make a man of any “captain of industry,” any soldier, or any statesman. These are the ones I should match men with. I would have men listen to the strains of these composers, look at the works of that colossal genius of Italy and ask themselves: Is art effeminate or am I blind and deaf?
But men, having comparatively little leisure, cannot be expected to waste it on sentimental music or on mere virtuosity. A violinist who plays sweet little pieces, or who astonishes you by his technical skill, should expect no response from human beings who are at work day by day and hour by hour facing the hard facts of life. Men, dealing with exact laws or under the necessities of trade and barter, are forced to distinguish between true and false, between reality and unreality, for their very existence depends on so doing. I do not mean by this that these common experiences of men fit them to understand great music, but I think men possess thereby a certain sense of values and a certain discrimination between what is real and what is false, and that a great piece of real music will find an answer in them. I believe that the opera has much to do with the average man’s attitude toward music. To spend from three to four hours in an overheated and badly ventilated opera house after a day of business, and to listen to the sort of hectic emotionalism which is common in opera is enough to disgust the average business man with all music. How patient he is! But Beethoven, who loved and hated, and suffered and triumphed, we can all understand. When we come to listen to the opening of his violin concerto, for example, we must all say: Here is a man. And when we have compassed the whole of that great composition we shall learn to say: Here is reality turned true at last. We shall then have learned one of the great lessons that art teaches—namely, that there is nothing in the world so heroic, so noble, or so profound but that its qualities may be increased by the imagination and the skill of the great artist. For however profound a human emotion may be or however noble a deed, it becomes more profound or more noble when it is seen in relation to the whole of life and over a stretch of time. The artist gives it true perspective, and enables us really so to see it. Dante the poet is greater than Dante the lover.
But my plea that music should be made easy of access for men is based chiefly on the fact that they need it. It is so easy for human beings—men or women—to become completely submerged in the details of life; and the round of daily acts and daily associations does, in course of time, completely engulf many people, so that they only catch glimpses of something beyond—glimpses of a promised land into which they never enter. I can conceive almost any business as being interesting in itself; the “game” of life has its own rewards; and there is no trade, no profession, no business that does not offer some play to the imagination. But every weight needs a counterbalance, and every human being whose daily occupation is full of practical detail must save himself or herself by some equal force in the opposite direction. The law is as old as life itself. The best preparation for an education in engineering is a course in the classics, and the man who grinds all things in the mill of business eventually goes into the hopper himself.
But love of beauty is a secret and inviolate thing. Our tendency to-day is to seek our salvation—of whatever kind—in the crowd. We form literary and musical clubs, and drama leagues, and art circles to accomplish what each person should do alone. This is an old human fallacy. To attempt to be literary or artistic or socialistic or religious by means of an organization is to waive the whole question. There is only one way of being literary and that is to love good literature and to read it in privacy; there is only one way to understand the drama and that is to read by yourself the great plays from Æschylus onward, and to see as many good plays as possible. I know that it is impossible to hear the symphonies of Beethoven except with some thousands of other people; nevertheless, you are yourself alone, and, by yourself, you must solve the mystery. Never can there be a more complete isolation of the individual than when, sitting with the crowd, a piece of fine music begins. Never is your own individuality so precious to you as then. Straight to your soul come these sounds, automatically separating all the diviner part of you from the lower, singling out what is commonly inarticulate and inchoate, and fanning into life again that smothered spark which never wholly dies. How impossible it is to look at pictures with other people. The mind and the imagination demand freedom to wander at will, to ponder, to speculate. What passes from the picture to you, and from you to the picture, is a sort of trembling recognition, too delicate to be shared, too intimate to be uttered. So it is with books. You need silence and retirement so as to feel the perspective of knowledge, so that your mind may wander through whatever courses open to it.
It has often been remarked that, in America, women have now both leisure and independence to pursue the arts and to satisfy their desire for what is called “culture,” and that in this respect they have taken the place frequently occupied by men. The most characteristic element in this situation is, however, that in the pursuit of intellectual or artistic advancement, woman joins a club! These clubs are of very great use to the individuals who belong to them and to the communities in which they flourish when they undertake—as they frequently do—the betterment of social conditions. Any one familiar with what they have accomplished in this respect must pay them a real tribute. But in their pursuit of “culture” they have been less successful, and for the reasons already outlined here. They pursue too many subjects, and they dissipate their energies. But above all, they seem unconscious of the fundamental principle of education which is that one really educates one’s self. For education, after all, consists in the gradual enlargement of one’s own perceptions through coming in contact with greater minds, and its processes are secret and intensely personal. As you read “The Idiot,” for example, you connect Mishkin with Lohengrin, Parsifal, the Arthurian legends, or even with Christ. The extraordinary account of his thoughts as he falls in the epileptic fit, and his use of the words, “And there was no more time,” bring up a whole fascinating sequence of psychological speculations. The character of Nastasya calls to your memory scores of other characters from Kundry down to Sonia, and, as you read, the whole warp and woof of life, shot through and through with its drab and scarlet, flashes before you. Now, these contacts are as nothing if some one else makes them. The spark must strike in your own imagination. You yourself must feel the current of this magnetism which reaches from the earth to the stars and makes all things akin. A good book should be a provocation to the reader. A club for “culture” is a collection of human beings each hoping for vicarious salvation through the other.
Women’s clubs not only waste energy in their pursuit of knowledge, but they debilitate the intellectual strength of the individual woman. Nothing could be worse for the mind than the peaceful acceptance of the point of view of another without resistance and without the test of your own thoughts and your own personality. Smatterings of knowledge are almost useless. Nothing is yours until you make it so.
The relation between music and life is, then, an intimate and vital relation. Any person, young or old, who does not sing and to whom music has no meaning, is by just so much a poorer person in all that goes to make life happy, joyous, and significant. Any community which employs no form of musical expression is by just so much inarticulate and disorganized as a community. Any church that buys its music and never produces any of its own loses just so much in spiritual power.
We all need music because it is a fluent, free, and beautiful form of expression for those deeper impulses of ours which are denied expression by words. Our speech is too highly specialized; we discriminate with words instead of with inflections and gestures; we smother our natural expressiveness; we hold words to be synonyms of thought, whereas thought is half feeling and instinct and imagination, no one of which can really find issue in exact terms. All great literature is inexact.