[5] The ancient Greeks with characteristic intellectual power did not believe in mere irresponsible accident.
[6] Compare for example the feebleness of our contemporary love-songs and ballads.
[7] For example we can ask nothing more than that a composer should write “exciting musical patterns.” It all depends upon what is meant by “exciting.”
Chapter VII
Beyond all Sense
Music will not end with Beethoven. It is possible that the very problems that confronted him and still confront us will fade out of the imagination just as those political problems which occupied so much of the attention of the historical world from the Greek Republics to the British Empire are ceasing to exist before our very eyes. And when we think of the religious dissensions of Christendom and reflect on the questions which once divided father from son, sect from sect, church from church, it is with difficulty that we can give them a meaning intelligible to our minds, much less feel any shadow of the life that was once in them. In the memory of living men, heartburning intellectual problems have become empty phrases. Darwin, Huxley, and the Anglican Bishops all seem as unreal as the waxworks of Madame Tussaud and are seen to be the complementary phenomena of an intellectual nightmare. No one to-day imagines that Truth wears the strange Victorian get-up of any of these gentlemen.
Similarly the sociological phantoms of the age of Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, of Karl Marx and Lenin are cutting the last of their antithetical capers. Socialist and Anti-Socialist, Communist and Anti-Communist, Conservative and Revolutionary have suddenly caught sight of their own faces behind the masks of their opponents. Their passionate reality is seen to be no more than a Fancy Dress Ball—for all these figments, these fictions, these Ideas were never any more than the Masks of false passions, passions which have never succeeded in begetting a progeny, since they are the mere nightmare passions of social indigestion.
In another five generations there will be no poverty, there may be no matrimony, there will certainly, if there is no poverty, be no patrimony. Children may take their mother’s name and then fathers will have not even a fifty-year royalty upon their creations. Men and women will look upon their children as artists look upon their works and will wish others to enjoy them. The world will be so changed that none of the problems which to-day set our newspapers printing and our politicians talking will even exist. Our present ideas on sex, morality, beauty and value will in those days appear as strange, as fantastic, as illusory as the ideas of our ancestors who took Beecham’s pills to cure all ills.
Will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day? Necessarily, since life without change is inconceivable to us and music that is alive must be changing. But the meaning of this change is not to be apprehended by the mind, for it is no less than life itself. A part of it, however, can be apprehended, for, although we feel instinctively that the more the world changes the more that it is the same[8] yet we cannot deny that it is the same with a difference. And it is the difference which matters and is matter—that which appears, is visible and audible—the death-shape of the spirit.
It would be boring and futile to consider the methods which may be invented of distributing music or of making music heard. That a million persons listen to Beethoven by wireless or gramophone where, previously, a thousand listened in a concert hall is one of those statistical changes which it is beyond the wit of man to value.
Fortunately there is a period fixed to the possibilities of “progress” of this kind; and when every baby is born to Beethoven and to Freedom then culture and statistics of culture, education and measurements of education will have simultaneously ceased. There will be in those days no newspaper interviews with Neo-Edisons because there will be no newspapers; the people will have forgotten that it is interesting to know whether a celebrity drinks de-caffeined coffee or dehydrogened water because there will be no “people” and no celebrities. The Age of Vulgarity will have passed.