To this conclusion two possible objections may be urged: first, that it takes an 'ascetic' view of art; second, that it places the criterion in a mere subservience to abstract and mechanical laws. Both of these rest on a misunderstanding of the position. True art is neither ascetic nor intemperate: it implies a full command of the sensuous and emotional factors in beauty, but it knows how to employ them. Its object is to make the whole work beautiful, not to elaborate this or that aspect at the expense of the rest; and such an object can only be achieved in virtue of certain intellectual principles. Beethoven's harmony is not less exquisite, or his passion less true and vital because he regards the requirements of style and structure as paramount. On the contrary, the sensuous and emotional beauties of his work are themselves enhanced by the unerring skill with which he places his effects and contrasts his colours. Again, whatever their intellectual laws may be they are not mechanical. They afford no excuse for kapellmeistermusik, no justification for cold accuracy and dull correctness: so far from precluding genius, they presuppose it. They are not grammatical conventions which can be learned from text-books, they are the direct and spontaneous outcome of the human reason. Thus, in order to ascertain them, we must begin by discovering what is the broadest principle of formal beauty which can be deduced from the laws of mind, and use it as a provisional hypothesis with which to approach our problem. We shall then see how far this principle finds actual embodiment in the works of the great composers, and if there are exceptions or divergences, how far they can be explained. If our original hypothesis is confirmed by experience, we may reasonably conclude that it is true; if not, we must recognise that we are on the wrong line, and we must retrace our steps. In musical criticism, as in every other form of scientific investigation, it is not the function of man to anticipate facts, but to interpret them.

II
STYLE AND STRUCTURE

'It may be shown,' says Mr Herbert Spencer,[4] 'that Music is but an idealisation of the natural language of emotion, and that, consequently, Music must be good or bad according as it conforms to the laws of this natural language. The various inflections of voice which accompany feelings of different kinds and intensities, are the germs out of which Music is developed. It is demonstrable that these inflections and cadences are not accidental or arbitrary: but that they are determined by certain general principles of vital action; and that their expressiveness depends on this. Whence it follows that musical phrases, and the melodies built on them, can be effective only when they are in harmony with these general principles. It is difficult here properly to illustrate this position. But perhaps it will suffice to instance the swarms of worthless ballads that infest drawing-rooms, as compositions which science would forbid. They sin against science by setting to music ideas that are not emotional enough to prompt musical expression: and they also sin against science by using musical phrases that have no relation to the ideas expressed, even when these are emotional. They are bad because they are untrue. And to say they are untrue is to say they are unscientific.'

In these words we may find a starting-point for sound criticism. If a musical composition is to make any bid for the rank of classic it must, as a primary essential, be genuine in feeling: by which we mean, that it must not only be original, though originality is implied and included, but that, in Wordsworth's fine phrase, it must be inevitable. To recognise a melody as perfect is to feel, when we come to know it, that it could not possibly have been written in any other way: that its phraseology, whether simple or complex, whether obvious or recondite, is the necessary outgrowth of the thought which it embodies. Of course this law does not preclude the element of surprise, which is one legitimate factor of musical effect. The hearer, like the composer, may sometimes be 'stung with the splendour of a sudden thought' and roused into a moment of exquisite consciousness by an unexpected cadence or a new modulation. But if the surprise be more than temporary, it is inartistic. Before we reach the conclusion of the work, we must be convinced that the effect in question bears some vital and organic part in the total structure: that it is, in short, a prediction which is justified by a future fulfilment. And, in that case, we end by acknowledging that it was not an isolated and deliberate attempt to stir our wonder, but part of an established plan which only astonished us at the moment because we were unable to foresee its issue.

It is obvious that in the drama or the novel we are but little impressed by devices which we can detect as artificial. A writer who lets us see that he 'wants to make our flesh creep,' has forearmed us already against all his terrors: a playwright who tells us at the outset that he is going to persecute his heroine, simply fills us with an idle curiosity as to the precise form which the persecution will take. There can be no illusion where there is no appearance of spontaneity: no art when there is no concealment of artifice. Victor Hugo can move us intensely; Scribe cannot move us at all: for the former, with all his vehemence and exaggeration, is speaking out of the abundance of the heart, and the latter is merely using the stage as a chess-board for the elaboration of ingenious problems. So it is in Music. Meyerbeer is one of the 'cleverest' of musicians: brilliant, ready, resourceful, courageous enough to rob the grave of its horror and the Church of its majesty, if only he may rouse his audience to a higher strain of attention. Yet we are no more stirred by Meyerbeer than we are by Monk Lewis. The music is drowned by the soliloquies of the composer, who looks on from his box and wonders whether this scene is sufficiently terrible, whether that situation contains the requisite amount of pathos; and whether the effects, which have been so carefully calculated and so precisely measured, have after all proved to be a profitable investment.

But there are lower depths than this. It is not long since an eminent composer of sentimental ballads was obliging enough to communicate to the magazines a complete recipe of his method. It is hardly worth while to give the details, but attention may be called to the singularly naïve confession with which the disclosure ended:—that for a song to be truly successful 'its melody must always remind the audience of something that they have heard before.' Surely there has never been so complete an instance of artistic falsehood gibbeted by its own perpetrator. Poe, no doubt may be quoted as a parallel, but not with justice. The famous essay on the Raven is clearly an afterthought: a critical puzzle designed to mystify a credulous public. One might as well believe that Burger's Lenore was written by rule and measure, or that Berlioz planned his Marche au Supplice with a diagram of the procession at his side.

Such examples of artistic failure are not always ignoble. It is quite possible that a man may be preoccupied with some scientific aspect of his art, that he may write not from the overmastering desire to express some beautiful thought, but from a deliberate wish to solve some difficult problem or transcend some technical limit. In such a case he will produce work which, though not valuable as an artistic achievement, is yet interesting as a study. He may show us some new method of resolving a discord, some new cadence for the conclusion of a phrase, some new shape which the melodic curve can legitimately assume: and thus, though he devote himself to a side issue, though his work will be purely formal and academic, he may yet claim an honourable place, not indeed among the poets of Music, but among its verse-writers. Of this type we have a conspicuous instance in Sir George Macfarren. He is essentially a musical grammarian, engaged all his life long in settling the doctrine of the enclitic de, wide of knowledge, sincere of purpose, and almost entirely devoid of spontaneity. Consequently there is not, in all his composition, a single page which is without interest to the student of harmony, and there is hardly one which can put forward any claim to rank as a living product of art. And this is not because he has regarded the intellectual aspect of Music as paramount,—for to do this is a necessary condition of good work,—but because he has emphasised the wrong intellectual aspect, because he has confused grammar with style. The great masters—Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—are every whit as correct as Macfarren, and every whit as ingenious, but to them correctness and ingenuity are subordinate, almost incidental: to him they appear to be the main object and aim of composition.

Secondly, the feeling must not only be inevitable, it must be worth expressing. 'The maiden,' says Ruskin, 'may sing her lost love, but the miser may not sing his lost money-bags.' Now it is obvious that worth is a relative term. We do not want gravity in a ballroom or solemnity in a comic opera. There is plenty of space in Music for lightness, and delicacy, and simplicity and humour, provided that they recognise their proper limits and are devoted to their proper themes. But there is no room for forms of expression which are silly or superficial or vulgar. We are not really moved by the sorrows of a little tin soldier, or the flirtations of a man and a maid under an umbrella. We do not really weep over the chorister boy who becomes an angel, or the carol singer (with organ obbligato) who dies in a snow-drift through half-a-dozen stanzas of imperfect verse. It is with very alien jaws that we laugh at the tedious horse-play and cheap catch-words of our 'humorous' songs. It is with very little fascination that we watch the posturing of our hoydenish polkas or our ill-bred slangy waltzes. And our aversion is not due to any pedantic insistence on the dignity of the art. Music has a perfect right, desipere in loco, but it ought to choose its place with opportunity, and regulate its folly by some laws of good behaviour.