CHAPTER XXXI.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THE ROMANTIC;
MUSIC OF THE FUTURE.
N ordinary speech a distinction is made between the musical productions of the eighteenth century and those of the next following; the former being called Classic, the latter Romantic. The terms are used rather indefinitely. According to Hegel, whose teaching coincided with the last years of Beethoven's life, the classic in art embraces those productions in which the general is aimed at, rather than the particular; the reposeful and completely satisfactory, rather than the forced, or the sensational; and the beautiful rather than the exciting. The philosopher Hegel, who was one of the first to employ this distinction in art criticism, took his departure from the famous group of Laocoön and his sons in the embrace of the destroying serpents. This group, so full of agony and irrepressible horror, belongs, he said, to a totally different concept of art from that of the gods and goddesses of Greece, in the beauty and freshness of their eternal youth. These qualities are those of the general and the eternal; the Laocoön, in its nature painful, was not nor could be permanently satisfactory in and of itself, but only through allowance being made by reason of interest in the story told by it. According to more recent philosophers, the romantic movement in literature and art (for they are parts of the same general movement of the latter part of the eighteenth century) has its essential characteristic in the doctrine that what is to be sought in art is not the pleasing and the satisfactory, so much as the true. Everything, they say, belonging to life and experience, is fit subject of art; to the end that thereby the soul may learn to understand itself, and come to complete self-consciousness. The entire movement of the romantic writers had for its moving principle the maxim, Nihil humanum alienum a me puto ("I will consider nothing human to be foreign to me"). Yet other writers make the romantic element to consist of the striking, the strongly contrasted, the exciting, and so at length the sensational. Whichever construction we may put upon this much used and seldom determined term, its general meaning is that of a distinction from the more moderate writings and compositions of the eighteenth century. Individualism, as opposed to the general, is the key to the romantic, and in music this principle has acquired great dominance throughout the century in which we are still living. Moreover, if the principle of individualism had not been discovered in its application to the other arts, it must necessarily have found its way into music, for music is the most subjective of all the arts; having indeed its general principles of form and proportion, but coming to the composer (if he be a genius) as the immediate expression of his own feelings and moods, or as the interplay of his environment and the inner faculties of musical phantasy.
In this sense there is a difference between the music of Bach and Mozart, on the one hand, and that of Beethoven and Schubert, on the other. Beethoven was essentially a romantic composer, especially after he had passed middle life, and the period of the "Moonlight" sonata. From that time on, his works are more and more free in form, and their moods are more strongly marked and individual. This is true of Beethoven, in spite of his having been born, as we might say, under the star of the classic. He writes freely and fantastically, in spite of his early training. The mood in the man dominated everything, and it is always this which finds its expression in the music.
The romantic, therefore, represents an enlargement of the domain of music, by the acquisition of provinces outside its boundaries, and belonging originally to the domains of poetry and painting. And so by romantic is meant the general idea of representing in music something outside, of telling a story or painting a picture by means of music. The principle was already old, being involved in the very conception of opera, which in the nature of the case is an attempt to make music do duty as describer of the inner feelings and experiences of the dramatis personæ. Nevertheless, while leading continually to innovations in musical discourse for almost two centuries, it was prevented from having more than momentary entrances into instrumental music until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the general movement of mind known as the romantic was at its height. In France the writers of this group carried on war against classic tradition—the idea that every literary work should be modeled after one of those of the ancient writers; subjects of tragedy should be taken from Greek mythology or history; and the characters should think like the classics, and speak in the formal and stilted phraseology of the vernacular translations out of the ancient works. These writers, also, were those who upheld the rights of man, and produced declarations of independence. In short, it was the principle of individualism, as opposed to the merely general and conventional, for we may remember that the conventional had a large place in ancient art. Plato says (see [p. 38]) that the Egyptians had patterns of the good in all forms of art, framed and displayed in their temples. And new productions were to be judged by comparing them with these, and when they contained different principles, they were upon that account to be condemned and prohibited.
In farther evidence of the correspondence between the musical activity in this direction, and the general movement of mind at this period, including the shaking up of the dry bones in every part of the social order, (the French revolution being the most extreme and drastic illustration), we may observe that the composer through whom this element entered into the art of music in its first free development was Franz Schubert, who was born during the years when this disturbance was at its height, namely, in 1797. Moreover, the manner in which his inspiration to musical creation was received corresponded exactly to the definition of the romantic given above; for it was always through reading a poem or a story that these strange and beautiful musical combinations occurred to him, many instances of which are given in the sketch later. It is curious, furthermore, that the general method of Schubert's musical thought is classical in its repose, save where directly associated with a text of a picture-building character, or of decided emotion. Thus, while it is not possible to separate one part of the works of this composer from another, and to say of the one that it belongs to an older dispensation, while the other part represents a different principle of art (both parts alike having the same general treatment of melody, and the same refined and poetic atmosphere), it is, nevertheless, true that if we had only the sonatas, chamber pieces, and the symphonies of Schubert, no one would think of classing his works differently from those of Mozart, as to their operative principles. But when we have the songs, the five or six hundred of them, the operas and other vocal works, in which music is so lovely in and of itself, yet at the same time so descriptive, so loyal to the changing moods of the text, we necessarily interpret the instrumental music in the same light, especially when we know that there are no distinct periods in the short life of this composer concerning which different principles can be predicated.