Largely are men indebted even to the music of ballads and of songs. Difficult it would be to measure the good which such music has done to mankind. To multitudes in days of yore songs were the only literature, and by the bards they had all their learning. Songs were their history; their romance; their tragedy; their comedy; their fire-side eloquence, giving utterance and perpetuity to sacred affections, and to noble thoughts—and keeping alive a spirit of humanity in both the vassal and the lord. Men have not yet ceased to need such influences, nor have such influences lost their power. They still add purer brightness to the joys of the young—and are a solace to the memory of age. They are still bonds of a generous communion. They banish strangeness from the rich man’s hall: they add refinement to the rich man’s banquet: they are joy in the poor man’s holyday, they express lovingness in the poor man’s feast. What so aids beneficent nature as such music does, to remove barbarism and to inspire kindness? How dear amidst all the toils of earth are the songs which were music to our infant ears—the songs of our hearth and of our home—the songs which were our childhood’s spells, a blessedness upon our mother’s lips, a rapture and delight! What solaces the exile, while it saddens him? What is it that from the ends of ocean turns him with wistful imagination to the star which overhangs his father-land? What is it that brings the tear to his eye, and the memory of other days, and the vision in the far-off west; that annihilates years and distance, and gives him back his country, and gives him back his youth? Song—inspired song—domestic song—national song—song that carries ideal enthusiasm into rudest places—with many a tale of marvel and magnanimity—of heroism in the soldier, and sanctity in the saint—of constancy in love, and of bravery in war.
Man is a social being. Unselfish society is the harmony of humanity: loving interchange is the music of life; the music which lifts the attuned soul above discordant passions and petty cares—and song is the voice in which that music breathes. These are the strains that have memories in them of all that true souls deem worthy of life or death—the purities of their homes, the sacredness of their altars, the hopes of their posterity—all for which martyrs suffer—all for which patriots bleed—all that give millions a single wish and a single will—all that make the cry of liberty as the trump of judgment, and the swords of freemen as the bolts of heaven. Glorious names, and glorious deeds, and honorable feelings, are always allied to the lyric spirit. The independence of a country may seem to be utterly lost: the ruin of a nation may appear decided: indeed, its external destiny may be accomplished; but the character of a people is never absolutely degraded until the lyric fire is dead upon the altar, and the lyric voice is heard no longer in the temple.
Music is not exhausted in expressing feeling, though some persons are so constituted as not beyond this to understand or to enjoy it. But music of more profound combination is not, on this account, without meaning and without value. The higher forms of music, like the higher forms of poetry, must, of course, if tested by mere instinct, seem remote and complicated. Music, too, is susceptible of more multiplied combinations than poetry; and, without the restraints of arbitrary signs and definite ideas, can expatiate in the region of pure imagination. In the true sense of the word, it is infinite. Not bound to form, not bound to color, not bound to speech, it is as unlimited as the capacity of the soul to exist in undefinable states of emotional being. And into these it can throw the soul with inconceivable rapidity of change. The great master of even a single instrument appears, indeed, a wizard. He seems, in truth, to be the only artist to whom the designation of wizard can with any correctness be applied. Men of other genius may be creators, but the musician is the wizard. His instrument is a talisman. It is full of conjurations—out from it he draws his witchery; he puts his spell upon all around him; he chains them in the slavery of delight; and he is the only despot that rules over willing captives. No other power on the imagination is so complete—so uncontrollable. The fiction or the poem you can lay aside; the picture or statue moves you but calmly; the actor is at the mercy of an accident; the orator may fail, by reason of your opposition to his sentiments or opposition to his person; but the musician draws you from every thing which can counteract his charm, and once within his circle you have no escape from his power. Emotional conceptions—solemn, gay, pathetic, impassioned—are as souls in all his sounds. But in the case of an executive musician, the art seems incarnate in the artist. We associate the personality of the artist with the effects of his art. We are not yet within the limitless domain of imaginative music. The great instrumentalist is, indeed, a wizard—a cunning necromancer; but he is before us while he works his spells, and though we cannot resist the enchanter we behold him. In a great composer there is a higher potency, and it is one that is not seen. The action of his spirit on our spirits, though exercised by means of intermediate agents, is yet that of an invisible incantation. The great composer is an imperial magician—the sovereign of genii and the master of wizards. He is a Prospero, and Music is his Enchanted Island. The creative musician, and the region in which he dwells, can have no analogy more correct than that presented to us in Shakspeare’s extraordinary play of “The Tempest.” There we have the loud-resounding sea; at one moment the sun bright in the clear sky, at another hidden by the mist or breaking through the blood-red cloud; now the heavens are full of stars, and in an instant they are thick with gloom; the elements gather into masses, they clash together, and the thunder and the waves fill up the chorus. Then the day dawns softly, and the morning breaks into summer songs. Caves are there and pleasant dells; solitudes are there, dark and lonely; spots beautiful as well as terrible; barren and blasted heaths, where goblins hold their revels; and labyrinthian walks, where sweet-hearts, not unwilling, lose themselves and linger. The earth, the atmosphere, shore, stream, grove, are filled with preternatural movements, with sweet voices and strange sounds. There are Ariel-melodies, there are Caliban groanings; there are the murmurings of manly passions, and the whisperings of maiden-love; there are Bacchanalian jovialities, high and mysterious monologues, fanciful and fairy-ditties, the full swellings of excited hearts, and the choral transports of all nature, made living and made lyrical. But the Prospero who rules in this island, dwells in a lonely cell, and yet commands all the voices of the universe to do his bidding. Have I not, by this analogy, described a grand imaginative composer? Without intending it, I have described Beethoven. I speak, I admit, only as one of the appreciating vulgar—as one of the impressible ignorant; I am able only to express a sensation, not to pronounce a judgment. In listening to Beethoven’s music there is a delight, for which, no doubt, the learned artist can give a reason. I know nothing of art, and with me the listening is an untutored, a wild, an almost savage joy or sorrow, or a mixture of emotions that cannot be defined. The music of Beethoven, if I can judge from the little that I have heard of it, is unearthly; but the unearthliness of this music is of a compound nature. Like Spenser’s, Beethoven’s imagination is unearthly; and, like Spenser’s, it is unearthly in the supernaturally grand and beautiful. Like Milton’s imagination, also, Beethoven’s is unearthly; but here it is unearthly in the mysterious and the solemn. The union of these elements in the wholeness of Beethoven’s genius, have given to us that singular, that most original music, which seems to belong to the ideal region, which eastern fancy has peopled with genii and fairies. What a wonderful thing is a symphony of Beethoven’s! But who can describe it, in either its construction or its effects? You might as well attempt to describe, by set phrases, the raptures of St. Paul or the visions of the Apocalypse. It always seems the utterance of a mighty trance, of a mysterious dream, of a solemn ecstacy. The theme, even the most simple—so simple that a child, as it might appear, could have fashioned it, is one, however, that genius of a marvelous peculiarity only could have discovered—a genius that worked and lived amidst the most ideal analogies by which sounds are related to emotions. And this unearthly theme is thrown at once into an ocean of orchestral harmony, and this orchestral harmony is as unearthly as the theme. Thrown upon the orchestra it seems to break, to divide itself, to scatter itself upon the waves of an enchanted sea, in a multitude of melodies. It seems as a tune played by a spirit-minstrel, on a summer night, in the glade of a lonely wood, to which all the genii of music answer, in chorusses of holy, sad, enchanting modulation.
And of Mozart! What shall we say of him—of Mozart, less only than Beethoven in those strains which linger amidst remote associations, but versatile beyond most composers in the romance and reality of the comic and the tragic in actual life. If ever a genius lived with which all its work was play, that genius was the genius of Mozart. Constantly he made the merest play of genius. At ten years old he could astonish the most critical of musical audiences in Paris, and before their rapture had approached within many degrees of moderation, he would be romping in the crowd of his companions. Nor was it different in his maturity. He could compose a piece, in which he was himself to take a part. He would distribute the score, perfectly arranged for the several performers. As they played, he would turn page after page over along with them, always in the spirit of the music and its harmony; but the emperor, looking over his shoulder, could see that not a note had he written down. Mozart seemed to combine in his genius all the sweetness of Italy with all the depth of Germany. But on these themes I have no authority to speak. All I can say is, that what I have heard of his compositions, and most of what I have learned of his life, have led me to think of him with admiration as a musician, and with affection as a man.
Music, it is sometimes said, is not an intellectual art. What does this mean? Does it mean that music employs no intellect in the artist, and excites none in the hearer? The assertion in both cases is untrue. Music, as a study, must, I think, be profoundly intellectual. In the oldest universities it has always had a place among the abstract sciences. But, considered as an enjoyment—considered in relation to the hearer—we should first need to settle what we understand by an intellectual enjoyment. To work a problem in algebra, or to examine a question of theology, may be each an intellectual pleasure; but the pleasure, it is manifest, is, in each case very different. These both, it is true, agree in taxing the reasoning faculty; but is nothing intellectual but that which formally taxes this faculty? Is nothing intellectual but that which involves syllogism—but that which implies demonstration or induction? Prayer is not intellectual, if we identify intellectuality with logic; and if we do this, it is not intellectual to feel the merits of a picture, but peculiarly so to understand the proportions of its frame. According to such a theory, it is intellectual to analyze with Aristotle, but it is not so to burn and to soar with Plato. To speculate with Jeremy Bentham is intellectual, but it is not so to be enraptured by the divine song of Milton. Assertions which lead to such conclusions must be radically false. Whatever puts man’s spiritual powers into action, is intellectual. The kind of action engaged will, of course, be ever according to the subject and the object. The intellectuality of a statesman is not that of a bard; the intellectuality which concocts an act of parliament, is not that which composes a “Song of the Bell.” Music is neither inductive nor raciotionative. It is an art; that is, it is an inward law realised in outward fact. Such is all art. In this music agrees with all arts, for all arts are but the outward realities of inward laws. But some of these are for utility, others for delight. Music is of those arts which spring from the desire for enjoyment and gratify it. It bears the soul away into the region of the infinite, and moves it with conceptions of exhaustless possibilities of beauty. If ideas, feelings, imaginations, are intellectual, then is music; if that which can excite, combine, modify, elevate—memories, feelings, imagination—is intellectual, then music is intellectual.
An art which, like music, is the offspring of passion and emotion, could not but take a dramatic form. The lyrical drama, secular and sacred, civilized humanity could not but produce. Nothing is more natural than that the gayety and grief of the heart should seek the intense and emphatic expression which music can afford. It would, indeed, be extraordinary if a creature like man—so covetous of excitement, so desirous of varying his sensations—did not press into his service, wherever it could be used, an art which has no other equal to it for excitement and variety. The opera, both comic and tragic, is a genuine production of this desire. The burlesque, the odd, the merry, the absurd, and, still more, pity, love, jealousy, vengeance, despair, have their music in the rudest states of society; it is only in the order of things that they should in cultivated states of society have a cultivated music. Such music, as a matter of course, would connect itself with a story, a plot, with incident, character, scenery, costume, and catastrophe. It would thus become dramatic. Thus it has become; and as such, it has a range as ample as that of human life, as deep as human passions, as versatile as the human fancy and the human will. Hence we have the opera. The opera is that form which the drama assumed among a people musically organized—among a people whose love of music was, therefore, intense, constitutional and expansive. But no art remains within the limits of its native space, and the opera is now as extensive as civilization; as extensive, certainly, as modern civilization. The ballad is the first comedy or tragedy. There are germs in the words of the ballet for the genius of Shakspeare—there are germs in the air of it for the genius of Rossini. Many object to the opera. First, they say, it is expensive. All our amusements are expensive—expensive as they ought not to be—expensive as they would not be with a higher and a purer social culture. Artistic amusements are expensive, especially, by the want of taste, which hinders the many from sharing in them—by the want of taste, which makes expense itself distinction. True taste coincides with true feeling; true feeling delights in beauty, as it delights in goodness, for its own sake; and true feeling being wide as nature and humanity, the more widely its delight is shared the greater its own enjoyment. Were there among the people a diffusive taste for elevated music, we cannot but feel that music could be cheap as well as noble. But, secondly, many say that the opera is unnatural. It is absurd, they quizzically aver, that persons should sing their love-talk, their madness, their despair, etc., and grieve or laugh, and die or be married, in sharps or flats, in major or minor. And yet, this is exactly what nature does. Nature sings all its stronger emotions. The moment expression becomes excited it has rhythm—it has cadence; and the tune of Rossini is nearer to instinct than the blank verse of Shakspeare. Who will say that genuine passion is not in this wonderful blank verse? But who is it that could impromptu speak it? So in the tones and harmonies of music. In both nature is carried into the region of art, out from the region of the actual; and within the region of art the musical utterance of nature is no more strange than the poetical utterance of nature. The moral view of the opera I do not here pretend to deal with. My purpose is to speak on music as an element of social culture; and it is not beyond the range of possibility that beautiful truths can be united dramatically to beautiful tones. If they cannot, then society has an immense loss; and if a noble story cannot be told by music—cannot be told to a moral purpose, then music ceases to be an art, as it has always been considered as associated with the divinest impulses of our nature. The abuses of which the opera is susceptible, are the abuses of which every form of art is susceptible. The artist stands—he has ever stood—upon a point between the human and divine. He may carry his art into gross sensualities of the human, or into lofty spiritualities of the divine. With the purification of society we shall have the purification of art and of the artist; and, therefore, I can see no reason why the opera might not be made effective in the best culture of social humanity. The lyrical expression of humanity is not less human than it is religious.
The sacred lyrical drama, or oratorio, seems to be a remnant of the old mysteries. In those old mysteries a scriptural subject was exhibited to the people in a theatrical manner. The scriptural subject is all that remains of the old mystery in the modern oratorio. Stage, scenery, costume, have departed, and music takes their place. Music, therefore, in the oratorio, must, by its own power, indicate character, sentiment, passion; it must unite grandeur and diversity with unity of spirit; it must unite them with unity of expression. Yet even the oratorio has not escaped objection. But, if it has been wrongly attacked, it has been as unwisely defended. What, it is triumphantly asked, can inspire deeper devotion, more fervent piety, than the sacred composition of Handel? The mistake of the artiste on this side of the question, has its only measure in the mistake of the ascetic on the other. The strains, even of Handel, may be in unison with the highest and purest aspirations of the mind; but, in his divinest dramas, they are not of themselves—devotion. But, if high music confers a pleasure that harmonizes with the mind’s best faculties; if it prepares the mind’s best faculties for their best exercise; if by lifting the mind up into the sphere of great emotions from that of mean ones; if by withdrawing it from attention to selfish desires, it carries it into lofty thought, music exercises for the mind, even in the temple, a sacred power, though its power should yet only be artistic. No mind, for instance, can be in a low or degraded condition, while it is in sympathy with the pure and delectable genius of Haydn. No mind can have communed with him through his oratorio of the “Creation,” can have drunk in its liquid melodies—its gladdening hymns of praise—its soft and heart-soothing airs—its songs, which seem to sparkle with the light which they celebrate—with the dew that bathed first the flowers of Paradise—with its anthems of holy exultation, such as the sons of God might have shouted—with the whole breathing in every part as it does—with the young soul of goodness and beauty—no mind, I say, can be in such communion, and for the time be otherwise than transported beyond all that can belittle or defile. But Handel excites a profounder sentiment. He is not so cheerful as Haydn. He could not be; for this he is too massive and austere. He does not, like Haydn, lead the mind out to nature, he turns it in upon itself. Not loveliness, but mysteries make the spirit of his music. We find in Haydn the picturesqueness and the buoyancy of the Catholic worship; in Handel, the sombre, the inquiring, the meditative thoughtfulness of the Protestant faith. By Haydn’s “Creation” we are charmed and elated; by Handel’s “Messiah” we are moved with an overcoming sense of awe and power. Though nothing can surpass the sweetness of Handel’s melodies, yet interspersed amidst such masses of harmony, they seem like hymns amidst the billows of the ocean, or songs among the valleys of the Alps. Handel’s genius was made for a subject that placed him in the presence of eternity and the universe. His moods and movements are too vast for the moods and movements of common interests or the common heart. They require the spaces of the worlds. They require interests coincident with man’s destiny, and with man’s duration. Though Handel’s airs in the “Messiah” are of sweetest and gentlest melody, they have majesty in their sweetness and their gentleness. We can associate them with no event lower than that with which they are connected. In such tones we can conceive the Saviour’s birth celebrated in the song of angels; in such tones we can fancy the Redeemer welcomed in hosannas by those who ignorantly dragged him afterward to Calvary. And then the plaintiveness of Handel in the “Messiah,” has its true horizon only in that which girds the immortal. It is not simply plaintive, it is mysteriously awful. It is not a grief for earthly man, it is a grief for him who bore the griefs of all men—for Him who carried our sorrows—who was wounded for our transgressions—who was bruised for our iniquities, who was oppressed and afflicted, and who bore the chastisement of our peace. It is not a grief in which any common spirit dare complain. It is fit only for Him who had sorrows to which no man’s sorrows were like. It does not cause us to pity, but to tremble. It does not move us to weeping, because there lie beneath it, thoughts which are too deep for tears. And then, in unison with this dread and solemn pathos, is the subdued but mighty anguish of the general harmony. When the victory is proclaimed—the victory over the grave—the victory over death—the victory in which mortality is swallowed up of life—we are lost in the glory of a superhuman chorus; our imagination breaks all local bounds; we fancy all the elements of creation, all glorified and risen men, all the hosts of Heaven’s angels united in this exultant anthem. Handel truly is the Milton of music.
The grandest office of music, however, is that in which, no doubt, it originated—that in which, early, it had its first culture; in which, latest, it has its best—I mean its office in religion. In the sanctuary it was born, and in the service of God it arose with a sublimity with which it could never have been inspired in the service of pleasure. More assimilated than any other art to the spiritual nature of man, it affords a medium of expression the most congenial to that nature. Compared with tones that breathe out from a profound, a spiritually musical soul, how poor is any allegory which painting can present, or that symbol can indicate. The soul is invisible; its emotions admit no more than itself of shape or limitation. The religious emotions cannot always have even verbal utterance. They often seek an utterance yet nearer to the infinite; and such they find in music. You cannot delineate a feeling—at most you can but suggest it by delineation. But in music you can by intonation directly give the feeling. Thus related to the unseen soul, music is a voice for faith, which is itself the realization of things not seen. And waiting as the soul is amidst troubles and toils, looking upward from the earth, and onward out of time, for a better world or a purer life, in its believing and glad expectancy, music is the voice of its hope. In the depression and despondency of conviction; in the struggles of repentance; in the consolations and rejoicing of forgiveness; in the wordless calm of internal peace, music answers to the mood, and soothingly breaks the dumbness of the heart. For every charity that can sanctify and bless humanity, music has its sacred measures; and well does goodness merit the richest harmony of sound, that is itself the richest harmony of heaven. Sorrow, also, has its consecrated melody. The wounded spirit and the broken heart are attempered and assuaged by the murmurings of divine song. A plaintive hymn soothes the departing soul. It mingles with weeping in the house of death. It befits the solemn ritual of the grave. The last supper was closed with a hymn, and many a martyr for Him who went from that supper to his agony, made their torture jubilant in songs of praise.
An essay equal to the subject on the vicissitudes and varieties of sacred music, would be one of the most interesting passages in the history of art. In their long wanderings to the land of promise, sacred music was among the hosts of Israel; and in that great temple of nature, floored by the desert, and roofed by the sky, they chanted the song of Miriam and of Moses. It was in their Sabbath meetings—it resounded with the rejoicings of their feasts, and with the gladness of their jubilees. When Solomon built a house to the Lord, it was consecrated with cymbals, and psalteries, and harps, with the sounds of trumpets, and the swell of voices. As long as the temple stood, music hallowed its services; and that music must have been supremely grand which suited the divine poetry of the inspired and kingly lyrist. Israel was scattered—the temple was no more. Silence and desolation dwelt in the place of the sanctuary. Zion heard no longer the anthems of her Levites. A new word that was spoken first in Jerusalem had gone forth among the nations; and that too had its music. At first it was a whisper among the lowly in the dwellings of the poor. Stealthily it afterward was murmured in the palace of the Cæsars. In the dead night, in the depths of the catacombs, it trembled in subdued melodies filled with the love of Jesus. At length the grand cathedral arose, and the stately spire; courts and arches echoed, and pillars shook with the thunder of the majestic organ, and choirs, sweetly attuned, joined their voices in all the moods and measures of the religious heart, in its most exalted, most profound, most intense experience put into lyrical expression. I know that piety may reject, may repel this form of expression, still these sublime ritual harmonies cannot but give the spirit that sympathizes with them, the sense of a mightier being. But sacred music has power without a ritual. In the rugged hymn, which connects itself, not alone with immortality, but also with the memory of brave saints, there is power. There is power in the hymn in which our father’s joined. Grand were those rude psalms which once arose amidst the solitudes of the Alps. Grand were those religious songs, sung in brave devotion by the persecuted Scotch, in the depths of their moors and their glens. The hundredth psalm, rising in the fullness of three thousand voices up into the clear sky, broken among rocks, prolonged and modulated through valleys, softened over the surface of mountain-guarded lakes, had a grandeur and a majesty, contrasted with which mere art is poverty and meanness. And while thus reflecting on sacred music, we think with wonder on the Christian Church—on its power and on its compass. Less than nineteen centuries ago, its first hymn was sung in an upper chamber of Jerusalem; and those who sung it were quickly scattered. And now the Christian hymn is one that never ceases—one that is heard in every tongue; and the whisper of that upper chamber is now a chorus that fills the world.
Music is an essential element in social life and social culture, and our times have few better movements than the increasing introduction of vocal music into popular education. The higher kinds of music might be included in all the higher kinds of education for men as well as for women. Milton so teaches in his great tractate; and so the Greeks practiced, in whose training no faculty was wasted or overlooked. The music which is now most wanted, however, is music for the common heart. If education will give us the taste for such music, and give us the music, it will confer upon us a benefit, a blessing. It is not desired that music in the home, or in the friendly circle, should never wander out of the sphere of the home or the friendly circle, only let not these spheres of feeling be without any strains peculiarly suitable to themselves. Let the theatre have its music; let the camp have its music; let the dance-room have its music; let the church have its music; but let the home and the friendly gathering also have their music.