Daniel Gregory Mason

CHAPTER III
THE MODERN SPIRIT

The need of mastering life, of reducing its multitudinous, thronging details to some sort of order, that shall lack neither the unity which alone can satisfy the mind, nor the variety requisite to do justice to the complexity of experience, is the one perennial need of humanity. The aim of all the chief human undertakings is to find schemes of order: physical science is the quest of order in the material world; morality is the quest of coordination and balance between many individual wills; religion is the search for the One Spirit which contains and fuses together all finite souls; art is the pursuit of that organization of diverse elements, of whatever sort, in one sensible whole, in which we perceive beauty. But since experience is bewilderingly many-sided and complex, one scheme after another is made only to be discarded as inadequate, and progress entails the constant substitution of more inclusive for less inclusive syntheses. Our most catholic formulas are provisional and temporary; “opinions are but stages on the road to truth.”

Such a word as “modern” can therefore have but a relative meaning. What is modern to-day will be archaic a hundred years hence. Our contemporary ideas are more liberal than those of our grandfathers, but they will likely appear as the rigid superstitions of a dark age to our still more enlightened descendants. When we speak of the modern spirit we say nothing in regard to the future; we name simply the attitude of mind which characterizes the present as contrasted with the past. That new vision or intuition or instinct of truth by which we of to-day reinterpret in more liberal wise the elements of experience either interpreted too narrowly or quite ignored by the earlier generations—that is the “modern spirit.”

We have been considering at some length, in the foregoing chapter, the characteristic mystical attitude of the mediÆval mind. We have seen how the typical thinkers of the middle age, aware of good but unable to identify it with an actual world so full of evil, made a sharp division, a total breach, between the actual and the divine. The mystic cut the Gordian knot of the world-problem by rejecting the actual altogether from his house of life. His scheme had its own harmony, unity, rationality; but being built upon an exclusion, it had in the nature of things to give place in course of time to a scheme less disregardful of the true wealth and reality of experience. The modern mind turned away from mysticism, envisaged the world afresh, and reinterpreted truth in terms of idealism.

Idealism is, in essence, a belief in the possibility of attaining the divine through a selective manipulation of the actual. In the respect it pays to finite life lies its sharp contrast with mysticism. It has gone far to obliterate the breach between the actual and the divine which the mystic had made so wide; it has tried to find the eternal in the temporal, and to nourish the spirit by guiding and developing, rather than by mortifying, the flesh.[15] Mysticism spurned the “this,” the “here,” the “now;” idealism, on the contrary, is on its hither side, so to speak, identical with realism. The idealist believes in the immediate, and loves the finite, as much as the crassest realist. He finds in it the point of departure of all desirable truths, the scaffolding for all mansions of the spirit. But he differs from the realist in that he does not stop with the real, but, using it as material for idealism, selects from it the elements of his heart’s desire. The actual world is to him a sort of keyboard on which he strikes those chords, and those only, which he wishes to hear. He is, indeed, an artist in life, and his method is the true artistic method of selection and synthesis. But on the other hand, he differs even more radically from the mystic, in that he makes the very materials of his Celestial City out of those earthly, momentary, and finite experiences that the latter rejects as dross. All three types of thought find themselves confronted by the opposition between actual facts and spiritual desires which is so characteristic of our world: the mystic repudiates the facts; the realist discredits the desires; the idealist sets out to win, by a selective or artistic manipulation of the facts, the satisfaction of the desires.

Characteristic of idealism is therefore its respect for the actual, in all its phases. It respects, to begin with, the human body. The tendency of modern thought is towards a wise paganism in physical life, towards a substitution of hygiene for mortification, of moderation for abstinence, of the liberal conception of “mens sana in corpore sano” for the monkish ideal of a soul gradually burning up and sloughing off its tenement. Development of the body is increasingly manifesting its true relation to the spiritual enterprises of men—a relation that repression of it only obscured and distorted. The Hermit of Carmel, in the poem of that name,[16] spends his days in a painful, endless, and futile struggle to eradicate fleshly lusts; the young knight knows another sort of purity, more joyful and bountiful, the purity of the lover who remembers his beloved. Idealism, like that happy knight, remembers that it is the mission and destiny of flesh to wait on spirit.

Again, idealism respects the intellect. The great development of the physical sciences, generally considered the most striking fact in nineteenth century history, is the necessary result of an idealistic faith in the powers of human observation and reason. The modern mind, believing in its own ability to interrogate nature, has done so with tireless energy, recording the answers obtained in half a hundred special “sciences,” ranging from histology to psychology. It has applied the same method introspectively to such good purpose that metaphysics, in the hands of Kant and his successors, has radically altered our conception of how we know truth, and what sort of truth it is that we know. Nor have the contributions of the enfranchised intellect stopped with philosophy; they have immensely deepened and vivified religion. The doctrine of evolution, for example, a product of the most remarkable keenness, liberality, and patience in intellectual research, has substituted for the childish anthropomorphic doctrine of creation the wondrously vital modern conception of a God not remote and detached, but nearer than thought and more enveloping than the atmosphere, incarnate in every atom and regnant in every mind.

The emotional or spiritual essence in man is as much respected by idealism as his body and his intellect. Loyalty to actual feelings as they well up spontaneously in the heart, rather than mere conformity to custom, is the modern attitude in all spheres of voluntary life. Personal conduct is a truer mirror of individual feeling than it used to be. What a contrast the student of literature observes between the conventional worldliness of eighteenth-century manners and morals and the intense individualism of the early nineteenth-century poets in England and of our own transcendentalist writers—an individualism which was the logical outcome of the idealist’s championship of human emotion in and for itself. The greatest men are of course always ahead of their age, but such sturdy, independent lives as Thoreau’s, Whitman’s, Darwin’s, George Eliot’s, Stevenson’s, would have created even more consternation in the eighteenth century than they did in the nineteenth, dimly stirred to freer ideals. The same regard for emotional verities that has so deepened individual life is producing a revolution in all social relations. They are constantly becoming more spontaneous and genuine—less matters of tradition. Class boundaries are being obliterated, a man’s success and position coming to depend less on family and station, more on the man himself. Women’s economic progress, combined with an increasing sense in both women and men of the real sacredness and responsibility of love between the sexes, is making marriage, in many ways the most vital of all social relations, a free and joyful bond between equals, rather than a yoke imposed by egotism and endured by helplessness. In sum, the democratic ideal is substituting, in all social relations, the genuine inner cohesion for the artificial mortar and cement of external usage. Finally, it is the same regard for inner realities, so characteristic of idealism, that is giving to men’s religious experience a new profundity. When once the heart is awakened, it needs no longer the assurance of antique books that God exists, and it can worship him no longer as a mere formula, universal because featureless. Intuition supplants revelation, and men enter into a personal relation with the God they had before conceived as austere, characterless, and remote. Modern nonconformity is an indication of the reality of modern religious feeling.

In countless ways we thus discern the working of the idealistic impulse in our contemporary life. Independence in personal conduct and thought, democracy in social relations, nonconformity in religion, stand out as salient features of the modern world, especially when we contrast them with the conventionality, paternalism, and ecclesiasticism of the mediÆval.

The foregoing remarks, together with the reflections they will suggest to the reader, may perhaps suffice to show that idealism has met at least one of the requirements of human progress, by filling the mind with a vastly richer and more various mass of contents than mysticism admitted. The realities it takes account of are far less pathetically inadequate to match the actual richness of experience than the thin, impalpable, and austere conceptions of the mystic. Compared with his, the world of the idealist is a breathing, moving world, not entirely void of the infinite tragedy and comedy of life itself. Something of passion and pathos it has, and it is held in shape by the tough fibres of commonplace—for even the trivial is not excluded. All this increase of complexity, however, would be quite nugatory were a principle of unity lacking. The complexity must be built into an order if it is to be truly a synthesis, satisfying to the mind as well as to the sense of reality.

It is, therefore, a fact of capital importance, that idealism does succeed in unifying, as well as in enriching, our conceptions of life. It systematizes, at the same time that it broadens, our views. Much as it insists on the variety of experience, even more does it assert its organic unity. Indeed, the central ideal of idealism, its very heart of hearts, is its belief in the wholeness, the organized integrity, of the universe. It respects the body, the mind, and the soul of man; but even more it respects the whole man, in just balance and full inward cooperation of functions. Believing man to be an organism, it sets supreme store by his full or organic activity, and deplores undue prominence in any element of his life, as injuring the harmony of the whole. Ardently as it champions individual initiative, it demonstrates, through philosophy, that the very consciousness of the individual is dependent on his social relations.[17] It recognizes that democracy can exist only through mutual service, and that freedom is based on a universal sense of responsibility. It is clearly aware that a personal relation with God comes only to him who is willing to obey God, not in a spirit of passive endurance, but with active joy, as a part serving the whole in which it has its being. This recognition of a just relation to the whole as the supreme ideal of all partial existences is testified to most strikingly by our very vocabulary, the natural repository of our beliefs. The word “health,” denoting physical well-being, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon “hal,” or whole; “sanity,” signifying mental well-being, is from the Latin word for the same idea, “sanus;” and we name the most indispensable of moral traits “integrity.” True idealism is in no way more certainly to be distinguished from its sentimental counterfeits than by its constant recognition that the preservation of the wholeness, as well as the fullness, of man’s nature, is the sine qua non of human welfare. It values every least manifestation of his nature, because it considers each one sacred; but it values even more the coordination and harmony of all.

Turning from the consideration of idealism in its general effect on modern life to examine its more special effect upon art, we recognize at once its importance as an Æsthetic force. Art is the expression of man’s physical, emotional, and spiritual life, in organized fullness. Wherever there is direct, complete, and beautiful expression of what seems to man precious, there is art. Wherever, on the contrary, there is suppression of any genuine human impulse, in fancied service to some other, as in the case of mediÆval mysticism, there is artistic immaturity or arrest; and wherever there is an exaggerated development of any one impulse, at the expense of others and of the balance or symmetry of all, as in the cases of modern French realistic literature and of program music, for example, there is artistic decadence. And since idealism insists both on the claims of all legitimate human impulses to recognition, and on their submission to adjustment in the interests of a rounded human nature, idealism is a potent stimulus to true art.

All this is amply illustrated in that great development of art under the spur of idealism which we name the Renaissance. By renaissance, or rebirth, is meant a reawakening of the human spirit to fuller activity, an increased recognition of its native dignity and value as transcending all artificial sanctions and limits. The renaissance period was, as it were, the adolescence of humanity. It was the time of putting away childish things—passive dependence on authority, superstition, timorous conventionality—and of asserting the freedom and the responsibilities of men. In the race, as in the individual, it was primarily an internal event, which reached external expression only with difficulty and after a struggle. The youth has his vague internal sense of the sacredness of his convictions long before he can work these out into the fabric of actual life. A long fight with stubborn customs, with indifferent circumstances, must take place before ideals can become actualities. Just so, the idealism of the race had to meet in mortal combat a thousand opposing conditions, had to conquer its foes and acquire its ways and means, before it could victoriously express itself in art. In other words, feeling had to enter into and transform technique in order that the art might voice fully the impulse that animated it. When we speak of the renaissance, therefore, we mean no narrow, special period of time, precisely dated, like a battle or a treaty. We mean a new spirit of liberty and self-respect in the human mind, which expressed itself in one way at one time, in another at another, according to the facility and promptitude with which it acquired mastery over these ways. The expression followed the effort only after a long interval, and different expressions came at different epochs, far apart in time. In a general way we may say that the Renaissance has occupied the centuries of our era from the fourteenth to the one in which we live. But each art has also had its special period of development, reaching in its own good time the goal of its own particular efforts, under the conditions of its own peculiar medium.

There are as a rule several successive stages in the evolution an art thus undergoes under the spur of idealism. First there is the vague inner sense of a new weight of meaning to be expressed, fresh insight or intuition that demands utterance. Men awake to the true value of those inner impressions and feelings which have so long been smothered under conventions and the worship of the external. They know not what to do with them, how to voice them; but they have at least what Stevenson calls “that impotent sense of his own value, as of a ship aground, which is one of the agonies of youth.” This may be called the period of the fresh insight. Then comes the period in which some sort of technical medium is arduously developed for the expression of the new impulse. This period, in which a vast work must be done by patient experiment, by slow adaptation, without standards and without models, is necessarily long and laborious. Often the prompting insight is almost forgotten in the toil, and the initial passion seems to be lost in dry formalism and pedantry. But all the while ways and means are being invented, problems solved, and traditions established, even as, while the youth toils at desk or plough or counter, forgetful, for the moment, of the ideals that sent him thither, habits are being formed, mastery is being acquired. The period of technical equipment, then, if it be properly conducted, leads over into the period of achievement, in which the original impulses are adequately expressed by means of the acquired skill. This is the time of consummation, of maturity, of balance between the means and the ends of expression. Such was the age of Pericles in Greek sculpture, the age of Sophocles in Greek drama, the Elizabethan age in English drama, the age of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Italian painting, the age of Wordsworth and Keats in English lyric poetry. Unfortunately, the period of maturity is generally followed by still another period, in which the original impulse overshoots its mark and becomes embodied in distorted, grotesque, and unbeautiful forms. So weak is human nature that it can seldom recognize justly its own value without going further, without precipitating itself into the pitfall of over-valuation, pride, and arrogant self-assertion. The balance of all the elements of art to which idealism aspires is then lost; special elements become preponderant, special effects are made fetishes, and degeneration ensues. Ripeness leads over into decay; wholeness or sanity is lost, and partiality paves the way to disintegration.

MediÆval painting, for example, was exceedingly rigid, dry, and conventional. The effort of the ecclesiastical painters was merely to symbolize religious truths; they were like chroniclers, who aim at narrating facts, rather than like ballad-writers and minstrels who are interested also in the beauty of their language, the richness, charm, and intrinsic appeal of their images and phraseology. But by imperceptible degrees, led on by the natural human delight in shapeliness of form and luxury of color, and learning to make the skill acquired in delineation subserve the higher and more immediate purposes of art, the painters of the Renaissance gradually substituted for this merely symbolic treatment a broader one, in which human beauty was as much sought as religious edification. The nude figure was lovingly studied, not because the saints happened to be men, but because men are beautiful. Garments, draperies, fabrics received a new attention, in the interests, not of historical accuracy, but of the intrinsic pleasantness of textures and tints. Postures were softened, adjusted, made less angular and uncompromising than in the almost chart-like early frescoes. Atmosphere, chiaroscuro, composition, balance, were deemed worthy of the efforts of painters who considered art an end in itself. Eventually, by the great pictures of the Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan masters, all the human faculties were called into harmonious activity; the eye was delighted, the feelings were wooed and stimulated, the imagination was touched and informed. “Instead of riveting the fetters of ecclesiastical authority,” says J. A. Symonds,[18] “instead of enforcing mysticism and asceticism, [art] really restored to humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, and helped to prove the untenability of the mediÆval standpoint; for art is essentially and uncontrollably free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral religion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of contemplation.” Whether painting, which thus by insistence on the intrinsic values of its medium attained maturity, then carried the process too far, and lost roundness and balance by prizing mere richness of color above all else, whether, in a word, its consummation was followed by a decadence, is a question too large for discussion here. But it is beyond doubt that painting went through the first three phases of growth pointed out as the results in art of an idealistic impulse.

In the same way, the story of music from the beginning of the seventeenth century up to Beethoven, or throughout that section of its history in which we are at present interested, was essentially the story of a renaissance, or novel artistic development, under the spur of idealism. Looking at it from the vantage-point now reached, we easily trace its evolution through the several regular stages. In the Florentine reformers’ abandonment of old conventions and their half-conscious aspiration towards a new utterance, we discern the first stage of the movement, that of the novel impulse; in the steadfast and efficient delving away at technical methods, at the involutions of harmony, counterpoint, and form, which characterized many of the later composers of the seventeenth century, and occupied much of the attention of even such men as Haydn and Mozart, we trace the second stage, that of equipment; and in the glorious works of Beethoven, who set the keystone in the arch, we find the stage of consummation and fulfilment. Springing from the foundation of the mystical art of Palestrina much as modern Italian painting sprang from the foundation of mediÆval religious delineation, the art of Pure Music reached, in the masterpieces of Beethoven, its maturity.

Now, as we saw in the first chapter, the mature art of Pure Music, which may be defined as the art of combining pure tones, without words, into forms expressive of our fundamental emotional life, and congruous with one another, or beautiful, necessarily possesses three kinds of value, or modes of effect, to which we have assigned the descriptive labels “sensuous,” “expressive,” and “Æsthetic.” Music has sensuous value in proportion to the actual physical gratification afforded us by the tones that compose it; it has expressive value proportional to the degree in which it excites in us, by association and suggestion, the fundamental emotions or feelings; it has Æsthetic value proportional to its success in assimilating or organizing all its various effects into clear unity, thus giving us that sense of ordered richness which we call beauty. If it be true, then, that music, during the seventeenth century, under the spur of the idealistic or modern spirit, developed from a primitive into a mature art, it is obvious that this development must have rested on progress made in all three kinds of effect; and it becomes a matter of much interest to trace at least some of the chief phases of this three-fold blossoming. In the remaining portion of the present chapter, accordingly, we shall study the most striking features of the progress made during the seventeenth century in sensuous charm and in expressive power; and in the following chapter we shall examine those principles of pure music which underlie its highest, most indispensable quality of all—that of beauty, or final unity and harmony of impression.

Remarkable, in the first place, is the development the mere material medium of music underwent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sensuous fact at the bottom of all music being the tone, the sensuous value of music depends on the kind of tones employed and on the modes of their combination, just as the sensuous value of a painting depends on the purity and richness of the pigments used and on the harmoniousness of their arrangement. So long as composers dealt either with choirs of human voices alone, or with a few crude instruments like the organs of Bach’s predecessors, the violins of the early sixteenth century, and the spinets and clavichords of the same period, they could get little variety or sonority of tonal color. But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made a wonderful mechanical advance. The violin, the most important of all instruments, not only because of its inimitable beauty and expressiveness of tone but because it is the nucleus of the orchestra and of the string quartet, was brought, by the Amatis, Giuseppe Guarneri, and Antonio Stradivari, the famous Cremonese violin-makers who flourished from about 1550 to 1737, to a degree of perfection which the utmost modern ingenuity has been unable to exceed. The organ, which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was so cumbersome that each key had to be struck by the entire fist, came by 1600 to something like its modern condition, as may be seen by looking at the pieces written for it by Frescobaldi (1583-1644) and Buxtehude (1637-1707). The prototypes of the modern piano were rather slower to develop. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the clavichord was a smallish oblong box without legs, placed on a table when played; its compass was somewhat over four octaves; one set of strings had to suffice for several keys, each key being provided with a metal tangent or tongue that not only sounded the string, but at the same time “stopped” it at the requisite point for producing the desired tone. The “damping” or silencing of the strings, entrusted in the modern piano to the felt dampers, was often done by the left hand of the player. The spinet differed from the clavichord in that its tones were produced by a hard piece of quill that plucked the string. Both instruments gave but weak, short, and rather characterless sounds. But all through the period we are considering they were being experimented upon and slowly improved in sonority, variety, and color of tone.

But even after they are provided with perfected instruments, men are still much restricted in their search for lovely effects of tone unless they have also a well-developed tonal technique, or science of harmony. The tools are not enough; the use of them must also be known. As we have seen, however, the harmony of Palestrina and his school was for all its purity somewhat colorless and flat. A harmonic fabric made up exclusively of consonant chords is like a picture painted altogether with pure, light colors; it is wonderfully bright and transparent, but its very purity makes it lack force. For the sake of contrast an admixture of dissonances is required, much as shadow is required in a picture, or harshness and irregularity in a poem. The entirely sweet, soft, and mellifluous series of chords at first charms, but finally cloys.

One of the important tasks of seventeenth century composers, therefore, was to find out how to introduce dissonances in such a way as to invigorate without disrupting the fabric. Their harshness must not be obtruded, but it must be used. The Florentine reformers and their successors showed great skill in solving the problem. They learned how to “prepare” a dissonance, that is, to let one of its constituent tones appear in a consonance and then hold over while other voices moved to dissonant intervals; they experimented in harsher and harsher dissonances, admitting them only with great circumspection, but using their characteristic qualities with striking effect; and they established, as cadences, conventional formulÆ of chords containing dissonant intervals, which became by mere force of repetition acceptable and familiar. In this way they introduced into the material of music a variety and range of color that consonances alone could never give. “Monteverde,” says Mr. R. A. Streatfield, “with his orchestra of thirty-nine instruments—brass, wood and strings complete—his rich and brilliant harmony, sounding so strangely beautiful to ears accustomed only to the severity of the polyphonic school, and his delicious and affecting melodies, sometimes rising almost to the dignity of an Aria, must have seemed something more than human to the eager Venetians as they listened for the first time to music as rich in color as the gleaming marbles of the CÀ d’Ora or the radiant canvases of Titian and Giorgione.” If we could disabuse our minds of all emotional and Æsthetic perceptions while listening to modern music, we should still find it vastly superior to the choral art of the middle ages in its purely sensuous richness. Sensuously it is a kaleidoscope of shifting effects, now harsh, now sweet, now resonant and sibilant, the next moment infinitely wooing and grateful; and through all ever changing its outlines and melting from color to color like the iridescent film of a soap-bubble.

But of course we cannot disabuse our minds of emotional and Æsthetic perceptions; no human being can divest himself of such essential parts of his nature; and indeed it was even more in obedience to higher requirements than for the sake of mere sensuous richness that the musicians of the renaissance period so radically remodelled their art. The essence of their reforms is to be looked for, not in the increase of the first or sensuous value of music, but in the enhancement of its expressiveness, and of its plastic beauty.

Expression, in general, may be defined as the presentation of a feeling or idea by means of an impression. The impression may act either directly, calling up the specific idea or feeling by virtue of a long-established association between them, or more generally, by simply inducing a state of mind congruous with the expression desired, and so tending to generate it. The former is the case in verbal expression (language), where certain definite symbols, words, are immemorially coupled in our minds with certain ideas, conceptions, or feelings, so that when we hear the word we immediately think the thing. Musical expression differs from verbal expression in that in does not act by this direct arbitrary symbolism, but rather by the more subtle general process which instills a feeling by setting up its appropriate atmosphere or milieu. It is much vaguer and more general, and for that very reason far more potent. The word “love,” for example, arbitrarily denotes a certain idea, not because it is anything like the idea, but because we all agree that that word is to mean that thing.[19] An amorous piece of music, on the contrary, utters no definite symbol; it makes our heart beat faster and deeper, it makes our blood circulate, it ravishes our senses and our minds, until whether we will or not we know what it says, though for our lives we could not put its burden into words.

It is by this direct establishment in us of a congruous or favorable state of mind that the consonances of the mediÆval music express religious peace; and it is no otherwise that dissonance, that powerful engine of the modern musician, expresses the inward division, the struggle and sweet torment, of idealistic states of feeling. The harshness, disagreeable in itself but essential to a process in which it is organically linked with sweetness and rest, arouses by an association of ideas a sense of the stern beauty, the tragic splendor, of the experience of the human heart. It reproduces in the sphere of sound that same series of states, that pain merging into joy, which we recognize in the sphere of our consciousness as so deeply characteristic of finite life. And so doing, it suggests or shadows forth the very essence of our nature, it echoes the utterance of our very hearts. It is no expurgated reading of the book of life: it is the full text, with all its shuddering horror and all its celestial joy.

Probably of all the employers of dissonance for the purpose of emotional expression, in the whole course of the seventeenth century, when the aims of musicians were so tentative that it required courage to brave convention, the most daring was Claudio Monteverde. “As Monteverde most frankly of all musicians of his time,” writes Sir Hubert Parry,[20] “regarded music as an art of expression, and discords as the most poignant means of representing human feeling, he very soon began to rouse the ire of those who were not prepared to sacrifice the teaching of centuries and their own feeling of what really was artistic without protest. That he should presume to write such simple things as ninths and sevenths without duly sounding them first as concordant notes[21] was so completely at variance with the whole intention of their art that it struck them with consternation. And well it might, for small as these first steps were they presaged the inevitable end of the placid devotional music. The suddenness of the poignancy which unprepared discords conveyed to the mind implied a quality of passionate feeling which musicians had never hitherto regarded as within the legitimate scope of musical art. They had never hitherto even looked through the door which opened upon the domains of human passion. Once it was opened, the subjective art of the church school, and the submissive devotionalism of the church composers, was bound to come rapidly to an end. Men tasted of the tree of knowledge, and the paradise of innocence was thenceforth forbidden them. Monteverde was the man who first tasted and gave his fellow men to eat of the fruit; and from the accounts given of the effect it produced upon them they ate with avidity and craved for more.”

Parry gives in illustration of Monteverde’s style a fragment known as “Ariadne’s Lament,” from the opera “Arianna,” so characteristic that it must be reprinted here:

[Listen]

In studying this remarkable fragment, the reader will not only note the striking unprepared dissonances of measures 2, 5, 11 and 13 (the latter peculiarly poignant), but if he will take the trouble to compare the effect of the passage as a whole with that of the bit of Palestrina given in Fig. III., he will be amazed at the increase in expressiveness, especially if it be remembered that “Arianna” was produced probably in 1607, or only thirteen years after Palestrina’s death. The “Lament” is reported to have moved everyone who heard it to tears. Its pathos is largely due to the skilful way in which harsh dissonances are made to alternate with the consonances into which they naturally and inevitably lead—a process which, though not directly expressive of the facts of human emotion, in the sense in which the word is directly symbolic of the thing which usage has coupled with it, is yet indirectly and generally expressive, in that it reproduces in tones a series of impressions identical with the series of feelings we everywhere experience in actual life. Pain linked to pleasure by an organic bond—that is the universal experience of everyone who cherishes an ideal, since an ideal is a yearning for something which now is not, but which must eventually come to be.

The melodic character of the “Lament” is as impressive as its harmonic style. In its short and poignant phrases the accent of passion is unmistakably heard. And this is true not only of Monteverde’s work as a whole, but of that of all the other composers of the Florentine “new music.” As early as the year 1600 Jacopo Peri wrote an opera on the subject of Euridice, to be performed at the wedding of Henry IV of France to Maria Medici. A study of the passages in which he tried to express the grief of Orpheus at the loss of Euridice, and his joy in their reunion, brings home forcibly to the mind the advance that composers had even at that time made in eloquence of expression. They are as follows:

[Listen]

O mio core O mio speme
O pace O vita
Ohime Chi mi t’ha tolto
Chimi t’ha tolto
Ohime...... deve segita

Gioite al canto mio
selve frondo se
Gioite amati
coli e d’ogni intorno.
Ecco rimbombi dalle valle ascose.

In spite of the primitiveness of the style, there is considerable force and even definiteness of expression here. As Sir Hubert Parry points out: “the phrases which express bereavement and sorrow are tortuous, irregular, spasmodic—broken with catching breath and wailing accent; whereas the expression of joy is flowing, easy and continuous.” It was in fact the aim of the inventors of the type of operatic recitative here exemplified, to imitate, while idealizing, the actual cadence of the voice in emotional speech. The music of the choral epoch had carefully avoided the impression of passionate feeling; the new music as persistently sought it. The old music had been written for chorus, which by mere virtue of numbers is quite impersonal; the new was put into the mouths of individuals. The melodic style of the former was dignified, formal, severe; that of the latter was mobile, flexible, constantly adaptable to the most subtle changes of mood. Here again, then, we see the effect of the idealistic impulse on music. Idealism, insisting on the worth of finite experience, focusses man’s attention on himself, on his actual feelings, petty as well as universal, base and noble alike, and makes him, whether for good or evil, vividly self-conscious. It believes in the hopes and fears, the aspirations and disappointments, of men and women; believes that in human beings, in spite of their pathetic weakness, there is a unique original value, not to be denied without crippling that august whole of which they are the minute but essential parts. The music of Peri, Caccini, and Cavaliere, and later of Monteverde, succeeded in voicing, at first dimly but with increasing eloquence, the primitive human emotions that mysticism had disdained as worldly; the tendency they initiated gathered force apace, and passed with Cavalli and Lulli into France, where it culminated in the work of Gluck. The great contribution of early modern opera to pure music was the accent of genuine and various human feeling.

A third tendency toward distinctively modern methods that was steadily gaining ground throughout this period was the tendency toward metrical and rhythmic vigor. We have seen how vigorous meter, in music, serves to express our active impulses, how it grows out of that ordered gesticulation we name dance.[22] We have seen how devoid was the mediÆval choral music of meter,[23] and indeed how inappropriate to its peculiar genius metrical qualities would have been.[24] The moment men’s attitude toward their own ordinary activities changed, however, and they began to see in them life rather than death, their expression in art became a desideratum. And it is a fact that very early in the sixteenth century, even before the pure choral music had reached its perfect maturity, some composers had begun to write simple dances for unaccompanied instruments, generally a combination of strings with harpsichord.

For a long while these efforts remained tentative and inchoate, because the men who made them were neither very clearly aware what they were trying to do, nor acquainted with technical means for doing it. But the scheme of treating dances as the basis of instrumental movements, the chief expression of which was that of energy, vitality, the more active and effervescent emotions, was afterwards elaborated by more trained masters, and eventually bore fruit in the innumerable suites and partitas, or bundles of dances, of the eighteenth century, and in the symphonic minuet and scherzo.

The mere fact that composers of the seventeenth century paid respectful attention to the popular minstrelsy, which had been treated with such scant courtesy by ecclesiastical masters, and that they so persistently imitated its methods, is in itself strong testimony to the change of attitude that was taking place. The songs and dances of the people are the most spontaneous expressions of purely personal feeling in the entire range of music. They were upwellings of primitive emotion, as instinctive and unsophisticated as the cries and gestures from which they were developed. And for these reasons they were norms of the proper expression of naÏve feeling in music—all music, so far as it aims to express personal feeling at all, makes use of the melodic phrases derived from the cry, and of the dance-rhythms derived from the gesture. Consequently, so soon as musical artists became inspired with the new ideal of personal expression, they turned to the popular music for inspiration and methods.

Thus in all ways the tendency of music in the seventeenth century was toward a fuller, more varied, and more poignant emotional expressiveness. Men were willing to forego without a murmur all the advantages of the perfected technique of the earlier choral age, and to trust themselves on the pathless sea of the New Music, because, like the pilgrims who in the same century left European civilization behind them to seek a larger if more difficult life in an uncharted country, they were inspired by a love of the human spirit in its fullness and freedom. All arbitrary limitations and denials of it, no matter how hallowed by long usage, were to them not religious, but sacrilegious. To them, as to Terence, “nothing human was alien”; and they might have cried, with Whitman, to every human trait, however trivial, ignoble, or commonplace, “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”

We need not wonder that for a while they paused helpless before the task of assimilating into an order all these rich materials that their humanism had evoked out of chaos. At first they were more discoverers than artists. But genuine progress, as we say, takes place only when a richer variety is stamped with a broader but still obvious unity. Art is not merely expression, of howsoever varied and penetrative a quality; it is congruous, harmonious expression, delighting us not only mediately by what it says, but immediately by what it is. In other words, it rises from the plane of interest to the plane of beauty, and becomes genuine art, only by the possession of that third or Æsthetic value which depends on the ultimate unity of all the various factors of effect. This highest value music came, in the course of time, to possess; and the conquest of new forms, intrinsically beautiful, in which all the novel sensuous and expressive effects could be embodied, was of all the achievements of the seventeenth century the most important.

It remains, therefore, to study, in another chapter, the means by which musicians learned, after long trial and patient experiment, to give shape and integral life to all this motley array of feelings and effects that they had summoned out of the depths of the human spirit. Their task, as may easily be believed, was an arduous one. We need not follow all the steps they took on that long road. It will suffice to examine some of the more important stages of their progress, to get before our minds the general artistic principles which underlay their practices, and to see what point they had reached by the time Haydn, the first great forerunner of Beethoven, came to take his share in their great enterprise.