Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 3.djvu/584

572 drilled into a regular shape, admitting of very little variation, in order that the development of the movement might march direct and undeviating in its familiar course. Musicians had arrived at that artificial state of mind which deliberately chose to be conscious of formal elements. Their misconception was a natural one. The existing conditions of art might lead a man to notice that uncultivated people delighted in simple and single tunes, and that cultivated people enjoyed the combination of several, when disposed according to certain laws, and to conclude from this that the disposition was of more importance than the matter. But, in fact, the mind is led from point to point by feelings which follow the ideas, and of these and their interdependence and development it is necessarily conscious; but of the form it is not actively conscious unless the ideas have not sufficient force to possess it, or the necessities of logical consequence are outrageously violated. It is only under peculiar social and intellectual conditions that structural qualities can be so excessively emphasised. The production of a genuine master must be ultimately reducible to logical analysis, but not on the spot or at once; and to insist upon art being so immediately verifiable is not only to set the conclusion to be drawn from its historical development upside down, but to refer the enjoyment of its highest achievements to the contemplation of dry bones. The imagination and the reason must both be satisfied, but before all things the imagination.

In the middle years of the 18th century the imaginative side had not a fair chance. Music was too much dependent upon the narrow limits of the taste of polite circles, and the field of appeal to emotion was not free. But when at last the natural man threw off the incubus that had so long oppressed him, the spiritual uprising and the broadening of life brought a new kind of vigour into art and literature. Beethoven was the first great composer to whom the limitless field of unconventionalised human emotion was opened, and his disposition was ready for the opportunity. Even in the ordinary trifles of life he sometimes showed by an apparently superfluous rebellion against polite usages his antipathy to artificiality, and conversely the bent of his sympathy towards unmistakeable realities of human feeling. He thus became the prototype of genuine modern music, and the first exponent of its essential qualities; and the sonata form being ready in its main outlines for his use, and artistic instinct having achieved the most perfect spontaneity in its employment, he took possession of it as an appropriate mode of formulating some of the richest and most impressive of his thoughts. With him the idea asserted its rights. This is not to say that structure is ignored, but that the utmost expansion and liberty is admitted in the expression of the vital parts which can be made consistent with perfect balance in the unfolding of the whole; and this obviously depends upon the powers of the composer. Under such circumstances he can only be guided by the highest development of instinct, for the process of balance and distribution becomes so complicated that it is almost out of the reach of conscious analysis, much more of the dictation of science. The evolution of this vital ingredient, the idea, is so obscure and difficult that it is out of the question to enter upon it in this place. It is an unhappy fact that the scientists who have endeavoured to elucidate music, with a few great and honourable exceptions, foreseeing that the analysis of ideas was quite beyond their reach, at all events until immense advances are made in the sciences which have direct reference to the human organism, have set their faces to the structural elements, as if music consisted of nothing but lines and surfaces. The existence of idea is so habitually ignored that it necessarily appears to be nonexistent in their estimate of art. On the other hand, the philosophers who have said anything about it appear on the surface not to be in accord; though in reality their views are both compatible and necessary, but require a more detailed experience of the art and of its historical development to explain their interaction. But meanwhile the external method of the scientists gains disproportionate preeminence, and conscientious people feel uneasily that there may be no such things as ideas at all, and that they will be doing better to apply themselves to mathematics. And yet the idea is everything, and without it music is absolutely null and void; and though a great and comprehensive mathematician may make an analysis after the event, a synthesis which is merely the fruit of his calculations will be nothing more than a sham and an imposture. In fact the formulation of the idea is a most vital matter in musical history, and its progress can be traced from the earliest times, proceeding simultaneously with the development of the general structure of the sonata. The expressive raw material was drawn from various sources. The style of expression developed under the influences of religion in the ages preceding the beginnings of instrumental music, supplied something; dance music of all orders, mimetic and merely rhythmic, supplied much; the pseudo-realism of the drama, in respect of vocal inflexion and imitations of natural circumstances, also something; and the instincts surviving in the race from countless past ages, the actual cries arising from spontaneous nervous reaction, and many other similar causes, had a share in suggestion, and in actual, though unrealised, motive power. And all these, compounded and inseparably intermingled, supplied the basis of the expressive element in music. Through all the time from Monteverde to Beethoven this expressive element was being more and more clearly drawn into compact and definite proportions; floating at first vaguely on the surface, springing out in flashes of exceptional brightness here and there, and at times presenting almost perfect maturity by fits of individual good fortune; but hardly ever so free but that some of the matrix is felt to be