Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/202

* MUSIC. 166 MUSIC. prompts him to select a parlieular art as the type for all. Wagiier, in a superb elVurt, attempted to house all the arts within the walls of a mighty synthesis. Music, however, won the vielory; it is Wagner the composer who will live, not Wag- ner the dramatic poet or Wagner the scene paint- er. The intellectualists are (juile as wrong in their endeavor to force upon nuisic the oflice of preacher or philosopher. By reason of its limi- tations, nuisic is not well adapted for the ex- pression of an intellectual content. It gives us the nia.iinum of sensuous etl'ect, though we do not agree with Syniunds that in it is the mini- nuini a])pcal to the intelligence. If this were so, Bach, licethoven. Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, Kichard Strauss would not he in the same cate- gory with Uante, .Michelangelo, Milton, Shake- speare. Shelley, Swinburne, and Kodin. Jiesides, has not Spencer said, "The emotions are the mas- ters, the intellect is the servant"? Great intcl- lectiiality, great eniotionaT temperaments go to the making of great composers as well as of great architects, poets, dramatists, painters, and scul|)tors. Architecture is not emotional like nuisic. but it is more concrete, it arouses the sense of the sublime — which nuisic does, too. un- der certain conditions. Scul))ture is impressive in its symbolism of the human form and its evocation of harmonious lines; of all the arts it is the most unlike music. Painting, with its illusions of life on a flat superficies, has certain allinities with music, while music and poetry have several qualities in common — the subtleties of -.ouiid and the power of continuous narration — though here music speaks a tongue not to be trans- lated into words. It gives the sense of situation, not action, the prism of the arts, as Symonds phrases it, "each distinct, but homogeneous, and tinctured at their edges with hues borrowed from the sister arts. Their difTercnees derive from the several vehicles they are bound to employ. Their unity is the spiritual substance which they cx|iress in common. Abstract beauty is one and indivisible. But the concrete shaiies which mani- fest this lieauty decompose it. just as the prism analyzes white light inlo colors." We have rapidly survcyeil music on its acous- tical, psychological, and irsthetical sides; there re- mains the evolutionary. From a mere cry in the submerged, ])rehistoric worlil it has passed into the <laily life of man. a magnificent art work in which the spiritual and the sensuous are har- moniously blended or struggle for precedence. A presentative art. it has nevertheless been made representative in the acouslic parellelisms of liichard Wagner and olhers. Kurnishing the mo- tive power for ballets, music is the handmaid of religion, and by some authorities is considered to have therapeutic powers. In history it has figured as a healer of sick souls, and to-day in its loftier manifestations it is a balm and a stimulant to the weary in mind and body. . d in the last analysis is not music an aural mode of motion? Kvoi.iTTON. The histor>- of musical art is an elfort to record, to systematize ami bring into general harmony a vast mass of hopelessly in- tractable m.iterial, conflicting facts, many Incuntr anil irreconcilable trails which try the temper of the most anient historian. Kvolution there has been, and, despite pessimistic rloubts. genuine progress; but it is an evolution that often curves in upon itself, its line of progress is more fancied than real. To draw' a straight line from the earliest musical lispings to the omiiiputent utter- ances of B(*thovcn, is the ideal of the critic ; but the task is a dillicult one. ilusical history is a history of suppressions, evasions, and empirical classifications. Like the evolutionary processes in the physical world, progress is often seemingly crab-wise. If science aims at discovering law and rea.son in nature, a notation of the actual, the art of music furnishes an example of purely arbitrary progress. The artist does not create in the abstract, but in the concrete, so that two art products are independent and never alike. To e.plain one by the other is at once the cardinal fault of criticism and its excuse for existence. Palestrina and Wagner are poles asunder, and it is a bold man who claims precedence for either. And yet nothing of Palestrina's has been lost; his harmonic seeds are come to a fiowering. Has Wagner surpassed Gluck in certain elementary qualities? Who since the death of Beethoven has symphonized so marvelously? Has the rush and sweep of the Handelian chorus ever been re- peated, or who can equal Bach in polyphonic mastery? Music is the youngest of the arts, but it behooves us to ask if the nineteenth century is literally its seminal epoch. So there have been factitious groupings, vague theorizing by some compilers of musical history, who. be it said with emphasis, have made much of tantalizing, incom- plete records. To be sure, schools usually fol- lowed the strong men, and there is a chain of deveUqinient during the past few hundred years, enough to furnish cre<lible criticism. Before that the roots are in the darkness of the mother churches, or the medi;eval twilight of the clois- ters. There has been much sublime guessing to build up a fabric capable of withstanding ad- verse comment. But it has been accomplished, and in Xaumann, Ambros, Wallaschek. Row- botham, Grove, Rockstro, Parry, Henderson, Finck, Apthorp, Hale, Krehbiel, Elson, Krnest Newman, Hadow, and others we may catch, glimjises of a baffling whole. One fact is un-j alterably demonstrated by the researches of these scholars: that so far from music being a uni- versal language, it is more subject to geograiihical limitations than is speech. It is a veritable: tower of Babel in its multitudinous dialects, its jargons and eloquence. The divine stammering of the men who made ecclesiastical music is olTset by the heathenish rhythmic bowlings of the Bush- men; and the nu'huicboly monotony of the Chi- nese iientatonic scale is drowned by the full or- chestra of Tschaikowsky. Men of many climes may converse by mute signs, but set them all to music-making, each after their kind, and the re- sult will be anarchy. It is one of the pleasing^, fancies of the poet, this catholicity of music. Facts, however, contradict the idea; just as* surely as they deny the assumption that vocalj music, i.e. words with song, is superior tol absolute music, i.e. music that is self-suflicient, that needs no illustration, no libretto to explain its existence, .bsolute music then is the highest reach of the art, the most ilignificd and satisfy- ing. Xo doubt the human larynx is the most pei-fi'ct of instruments, and the sounil it produces touches (lie heart, for it is human. But poetry pure and music absolute cannot be blended with- out a loss to both. Vocal tones preceded instru- mental ones; inileed, one school asserts that sing- ing came before speech. Grcll and Engel main-