Page:EB1922 - Volume 31.djvu/1099

Rh

It will be convenient first to deal with the unrealities. The most formidable of these arise from the unnatural conditions on which the modern musician acquires his reputation. At no period in history has an artist been able to make his living solely by his highest line of work ; but the hardships of the classical artist's life were at all events not unnatural. They were mostly the effects of human nature, and not of an inflated self-con- sciousness among art critics. It has always been hard to struggle against a depressing prevalence of dull or vulgar tastes and pedantic conventions; but such a struggle is life, and victory in it is health. Far less certain is it that life and health can be found in the struggle for musical reputation under modern conditions; especially for reputation as a composer. The grounds on which new music is commonly criticized are no longer grounds of healthy and intelligible discussion. The critics, conscious of the proverbial persecution of genius by contemporary pedants and upholders of convention, are now unanimous in condemning all that is under suspicion of being " correct," and are desperately anxious that no soi-disant revolutionary tendency shall miss acclamation and that no dangerous outbreak of normality shall escape damnation. The music that is most written about and talked about is the music about which it is the easiest to say clever things. The clever things must be or seem to be intel- ligible to the general reader; and this means that they must not be musical facts, for musical facts are involved in musical technicalities. Yet the clever sayings must be impressive. The result is a special psychological jargon, mostly unknown to psychologists, which the general public believes to be a musical jargon. The public finds it fairly amusing, especially when the critics, having exhausted their stock of new musical discoveries and revolutions, are reduced to discussing each other. But it may be news to the public that the jargon is almost wholly unintelligible to real musicians, and nowhere more unintelligible to them than where it employs musical terms. Meanwhile real music struggles into existence, and even, occasionally, into recognition, while fashion follows the journalists, and awards fame without popularity 20 times a year to musicians of perfectly respectable character and intellect who are driven to pose as lunatics lest sanity should earn them the reputation of prigs. In such conditions it is not surprising that there is more genuine musical life in provincial districts than in the metropolitan cities. The musical life of the provinces is their own; the metro- politan public is so anxiously watching the jumping of the critical cat that even the formation of coteries is conditioned more by diplomacy than by enthusiasm. Popularity and healthily good music are driven to meet on new ground. Theatre music, apart from opera, is in Great Britain still in a state of squalor which must remain hopeless as long as British theatre-goers maintain the habit of drowning the musical entr'actes in talk. But the cinema produces a remarkably perfect silence in spectators, and in its not always fresh atmosphere many an excellent player finds a livelihood which he can ill afford to exchange for a good position in a permanent orchestra. The London music hall, especially since the advent of the great Russian ballet dancers, has drawn into its sphere of influence many a serious musician, among composers as well as performers; and the composers to whom it is still a strange environment may sometimes find that more than a pot-boiler impulse and technique are required of them if they are to distinguish themselves there. At all ages there have been heartsearchings as to the border lines of " legitimate " art, and the origins of the highest classical art forms have far more often been popular tendencies than critical doctrines. The health and fruitfulness of permanently valuable art demands two conditions: first, that artists shall have the inducement of a living wage for producing it; secondly, that audiences and spec- tators shall be accustomed to receive it so attentively as to induce the artist to refine his style. Art does not thrive in a state of public opinion and critical jargon in which nothing is allowed a right to exist except works of devastating genius, and genius itself stands less chance of recognition in such a state than in any other. A good period of art is that in which the ordinary styles are so good that the sensibilities of a child of

genius are not starved or disgusted by them before he has had time to outgrow them as a genius must. Nothing good can be expected for genius or philistine from a state of art in which every style is ostentatiously paradoxical.

It is not impossible to distinguish between the fruitful and the unfruitful tendencies in contemporary music. The questions at issue are not primarily matters of taste or tradition. It may be assumed that vital art has deep foundations of taste and tradition, even if it professes to revolt from them all; but the signs of its vitality are neither in revolt nor in conformity, but simply in the variety and the coherence of the art in itself. And the variety and coherence are matters of discoverable fact. Principles which make for them are likely to be sound; principles which destroy them are, if correctly stated or imputed, certain to be unsound. We must, however, bear in mind that the crea- tion of a work of art is an altogether different process from criticism and analysis. The craziest theory may be accepted by a composer as being his method of work, and it will do him not the slightest harm so long as it keeps his attention so poised that the depths of his mind are free to express themselves. But the same theory will be disastrous to most of his disciples, though some may share his luck with it. The classical art forms were not, in their origin and maturity, crazy theories, but shrewd generalizations from familiar experience. As that experience becomes remote the art forms lose their vitalizing expressive power. But there is more vitality in remote experience than in none at all; and a mere arbitrary contradiction of old artistic theories is, one would think, the most obvious sterilizing pro- cedure that could be devised for future art. The procedure is seen at its worst when it is applied to some all-pervading category of music, such as harmony. Whatever may be the merits or the fecundity of the composer, we may be absolutely certain that when he explicitly promulgates a new system of harmony he is talking nonsense. A certain composer begins his career as a brilliant 20th-century Chopin, with an unmistakable power of composition in large and free form, besides a happy vein in the tiniest of preludes. In time certain harmonic mannerisms develop: the composer is also inspired to write for orchestra; his vigorous talent for composition not only stands the strain of this larger medium but remains traceable in works based each on some single artificial chord of which the original meaning is obviously a Wagnerian progression, but which the composer expounds to the gasping interviewer as the most perfect chord in music. And so the gasping interviewer goes on his way rejoicing in the possession of a profound technical mystery worthy of revelation together with the composer's theosophic doctrines and other matters of popular interest. There is no reason for doubting the composer's sincerity either in his theosophy or in his harmony. Artists are seldom also men of science, and even men of science keep some region of their minds in a state of holiday wherein they may be perfectly arbitrary and self-centred. Art originates from such regions of the mind, but it will be stifled, and those regions will be starved, unless it emerges and forages in the wide world of human life. Ego- centric as is the nature of art, the confines of one personal life are not enough for sane self-development ; and the personal note of the artist who retires into the recesses of his arbitrary domain will not long retain its power.

The untimely death of Scriabine left his art just at the point where it was beginning to alienate his enthusiastic supporters. Contemporary enthusiasm and hostility on theories of harmonic style may be left to the theosophists. The important fact is that Scriabine did, while he lived, produce compositions with a large flow and climax: nor do we know that his power to do so was likely to fail him. In all the chaos of modern experiment with discord and disordered rhythm, two questions alone are capable of permanently significant and truthful answers: the one concerns the composer and the other the listener. To the composer we may address Brahms's rude query, " Do you find this fun? " Of the listener we may ask, " Can you find a sufficient variety of coherent definite elements, events, qualities and forms in this art, quite irrespective of any question of novelty? " This