There are three stages in the history of every new truth. Take, as an example, the Darwinian theory. First of all it is assailed with tooth and claw by a thousand people who know nothing about it and have never given ten minutes' consecutive thought to it, but who hate it simply because it disturbs their long mental inertia. Then, when its truth becomes more and more evident, and too many clear-headed people believe in it for it to be laughed down, and too many strong people adopt it for it to be howled down, the partisans of the older school become obnoxiously polite to it; they no longer call it a mass of error, but they graciously permit it to take rank, after their own particular theory, as a secondary and imperfect kind of truth. Finally, it is universally accepted, purged of its admixture of error, and both it and its predecessors are then seen to be just inevitable stages in the development of the human mind, the second having no more title than the first to be considered the end of the story. At first Darwin's theory of development is thought to be crushed by the mere flinging at it of citations from the Bible; then the professional theologians try to impress it into their own service; finally its victory over misunderstanding and ignorance and prejudice is complete, but by this time it is no longer the ultimate theory of things, but only a stepping-stone to other theories. Something of the same kind has happened, or is in process of happening, with programme music. Formerly the dear old virginal academics shuddered if the foul word polluted their chaste ears; now they condescend to discuss it, more or less temperately, but always with the idea that it is merely an inferior branch of the great music-family—a kind of poor relation of absolute music; in a little while the rationality of the thing will be beyond question, but by that time it will probably be making way for something still newer than itself—though what that may be we have at present no means of knowing. Just now we are in the second stage of the controversy upon the subject. The advocate of programme music, it should be said at once, is not necessarily a hater of absolute music, nor is the lover of absolute music necessarily an enemy of programme music. One can like Wagner and Strauss and Liszt and Berlioz and still appreciate to the full the Bach fugue or the Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms symphony. Still it is an unfortunate fact that too often a liking for the one kind of art goes along with an abhorrence of the other. Any narrowness of this kind is to be regretted on either side; but if one partisan exhibits more of it than the other, I should say it is the absolutist, who is usually much less fair towards programme music, and less open to conviction, than the programmist is to absolute music. And since the contest between the two schools is very strenuous just now, and as one of the services of the critic is to give an art room to breathe and grow by clearing away dead traditions from around it, some good may be done to the creative musician, as well as to the ordinary concert-goer, by a review of the field of dispute between the antagonists.

II

Just as the average programmist is, on the whole, more generous in his appreciations than the average absolutist, so he has done more to clear up the darkness that envelops too much of the subject. From this side there has come some good Æsthetic discussion; from the other side there has come little but dogged and tiresome repetition of old catch-words, without any serious attempt to grapple with the psychology of the question as a whole. In the latest edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music, Mr. Fuller Maitland gives us an example of this method of "killing Kruger with your mouth." "It is only natural," he says, "that programme music should for the time being be more popular with the masses than absolute music, since the majority of people like having something else to think of while they are listening to music." The last clause I take to be purely random assertion; there are millions of people—even among the masses—who prefer abstract ear-tickling that saves them the trouble of thinking of anything else while they are listening. Nay, one of the complaints of the untutored amateur against programme music is that it is so hard to follow—that he cannot sit quietly in his seat and just listen to the music as it comes, but must needs first read and pre-digest a long story out of the analytical programme. Minds of this kind—and I have met with many of them—protest simply because they have to think of something else while the notes are being poured into their ears. This rather lame device is one way of disparaging programme music—the device of implying that it is most popular with the "masses," with people, that is, of limited musical culture—which is of course not true. The other way of denigrating it is the time-honoured one of an appeal to the past; it is the Æsthetic equivalent of the frequent appeal to the Agnostic to remember what he "learned at his mother's knee." "In the great line of the classic composers," Mr. Maitland tells us, "programme music holds the very slightest place; an occasional jeu d'esprit, like Bach's Capriccio on the Departure of a Brother, or Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony, may occur in their works, but we cannot imagine these men, or the others of the great line, seriously undertaking, as the business of their lives, the composition of works intended to illustrate a definite programme. Beethoven is sometimes quoted as the great introducer of illustrative music, in virtue of the Pastoral Symphony, and of a few other specimens of what, by a stretch of terms, may be called programme music. But the value he set upon it as compared with absolute music may be fairly gauged by seeing what relation his 'illustrative' works bear to the others. Of the nine symphonies, only one has anything like a programme; and the master is careful to guard against misconceptions even here, since he superscribes the whole symphony, 'More the expression of feeling than painting.' Of the pianoforte sonatas, op. 90 alone has a definite programme; and in the 'Muss es sein?' of the string quartet, op. 135, the natural inflections of the speaking voice, in question and reply, have obviously given purely musical suggestions which are carried out on purely musical lines."

To all this there are a good many objections to be raised. (1) In Bach's time programme music, as we understand it, simply could not be written. There was not the modern orchestra with the modern orchestral technique; you could no more delineate Francesca da Rimini with the instruments of Bach's time than you could adequately suggest a rainbow with a piece of paper and a lead pencil. Further, for the expression of a number of things that we now express in music, there were needed (a) the modern enlargement of the musical vocabulary, and (b) the "fertilisation of music by poetry," on which Wagner rightly laid such stress. But in any case Bach's neglect of programme music is no argument against the form. We might as well say that the fact that he wrote no operas is a proof of the natural and perpetual inferiority of opera. (2) Mr. Maitland passes over the fact that, imperfect as their means of utterance were, many old composers were frequently obsessed by the desire to write something else than absolute music. He says nothing of the attempts of Muffat, of the composers represented in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, of Jannequin, of Buxtehude, of Frescobaldi, of Hermann, of Gombert, of Carlo Farino, of Frohberger, of Kuhnau, of Couperin, of Rameau, of Dittersdorf, and others, of some of whom I shall speak shortly. [19] There has always been a strong desire to write "illustrative" music, but for a long time it was checked by the imperfection of the media through which it had to work. (3) He ignores Haydn's excursions into "illustrative" music in the Creation and the Seasons—the representation of chaos, of the passage from winter to spring, of the dawn, of the peasants' joyful feelings at the rich harvest, of the thick clouds at the commencement of winter; he says nothing of the "illustrative" symphonies or parts of symphonies and other works of Haydn—"the morning," "midday," "the evening," "the tempest," "the hunt," "the philosopher," "the hen," "the bear," and so on. (4) He says nothing of the manner in which the overture, both operatic and non-operatic, became more and more "illustrative" at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century; he does not refer to the works of Beethoven in which the "illustrative" function is very apparent, such as the Battle of Vittoria, the Leonora overtures, the Egmont, the Coriolan, the Ruins of Athens, the King Stephen, and so on. (5) He blindly accepts Beethoven's nonsensical remark about the Pastoral Symphony being "more the expression of feeling than painting." The imitations of the nightingale, the cuckoo, and the quail may or may not be a Beethoven joke; but if they are not specimens of "painting" in music it is difficult to say what deserves that epithet. If the peasants' merrymaking, again, the brawl, the falling of the raindrops, the rushing of the wind, the storm, the flow of the brook—if these are not "painting" but merely the "expression of feeling," well, so is the hanging of Till Eulenspiegel, the death-shudder of Don Juan, and the battle in Ein Heldenleben. (6) Even supposing that Beethoven's words could be taken literally, even supposing that in his music he had not given them contradiction after contradiction, still this would not settle the matter. Music did not end with Beethoven, and he might have detested "illustrative" music to his heart's content without that fact being an argument against the writing of it by other people. It is curious that the men who always tell admiringly the stories of Beethoven breaking through the fetters in which his contemporaries would have bound him, should try to use the same Beethoven as a barrier against all future innovations. He was great because he refused to write in any way but his own; we are to be great by submitting our convictions to those of a hundred years ago. With all respect, and without any irreverent desire to pluck the beards of our fathers, we are unable to regard the question as finally settled by what Beethoven said. He himself would surely have been the last man to play the ineffective Canute, and dictate to the art the exact spot on the beach to which its flood might rise. There is no evidence that he meant his words to be a judicial condemnation of anybody or anything; there is no evidence that he had ever given much critical thought to the question; and it is quite certain that no matter how much he had thought about it he could not have seen in it all that we, with our later experience, can see.

III

One fact alone should make opponents of programme music think seriously of their position. The most significant feature of the problem is the way in which the practical musicians have dealt with it. Whereas most of the older orchestral music of any value was absolute music, most of the later orchestral music of any value is programme music; and the momentum of the latter species seems to be increasing every year. It will not do to pooh-pooh a phenomenon of this kind, nor to seek to fasten upon it the explanation that some of the new men write music depending upon literary or pictorial subjects because they cannot write music of the other kind. This is like saying that Shakespeare pusillanimously wrote dramas because he could not write epics— which is probably a true saying, but quite irrelevant. The point is, why should Shakespeare, with a gift for good drama, force himself to write bad epics? And if a man's musical ideas spring from quite another way of apprehending life than that of the absolute musician, why should he abjure his own native form of speech in order to mouth and maul unintelligently the phrases and the forms of another musician whose mental world is wholly foreign to his? In any case, while some of the critics have been paternally warning young composers against falling into the toils of programme music, and recommending them to keep to the lines of structure as they were laid down by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the musicians themselves have been flinging programme music right and left to the world. One has only to take up a catalogue of the Russian, French, German, Belgian, American, or even English music published during the last twenty years to see how enormously this form of art has grown, and how the really big men all display a marked liking for it. You may regret, if you like, that so many modern musicians should prefer programme music to absolute music; but you cannot settle the big Æsthetic problem involved by shrugging your shoulders and invoking Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, nor by airily flinging out a formula or two of moribund Æsthetic. And as bad Æsthetic, bad argumentation, are accountable for most of the confusion upon the subject, let us try to analyse it more closely down to its foundations.

Programme music—by which we mean purely instrumental (i.e. non-vocal) music that has its raison d'Être in a definite literary or pictorial scheme—is not an ideal term for this kind of art; but since all names which we can give it are open to objections of some kind, we may as well use this as any other. It must be remembered, too, that though programme or representative music is indeed differentiable from abstract or self-contained music, it is not absolutely differentiable. All programme music must indeed be representative, but it must also be, in part, self-contained; that is, a given phrase must not only be appropriate to the character of Hamlet or Dante, or suggestive of a certain external phenomenon such as the wind, or the fire, or the water, but it must also be interesting as music. [20] On the other hand, in thousands of works that have been written without a formal programme, the expression—it may be throughout the work, or only in parts of it—is so vivid, so strenuous, so suggestive of something more than an abstract delight in making a beautiful tone-pattern, that it spontaneously evokes in us images of definite scenes or characters or actions. Surely no one can listen to the C minor symphony, for example, and feel that Beethoven's only concern was with the invention and interweaving of abstract musical themes; here at any rate we feel that there is much truth in Wagner's contention, that behind the mere tones a kind of informal drama is going on. The expression comes, at times, as close to the suggestion of definite thought and definite action as any symphonic poem could do. Thus some of the qualities of programme music are found in absolute music, and vice versÂ; there is no hard-and-fast line of division between the two. Even in the most mathematical music that ever pedant misconceived, a human accent will sometimes make itself heard; and even the most human music—the music that has its fount and origin and its final justification in the veracious expression of definite human feeling—must be bound together by some mathematical principle of form. But we all understand what we mean by the broad distinction of absolute and poetic music. [21] In the latter we have a definite literary or pictorial scheme controlling (a) the shape and colour of the phrases, (b) the order in which they appear, (c) the way in which they are played off against each other, (d) their relative positions at the end. This it is, roughly speaking, that distinguishes it from absolute music, where the manner in which the themes are handled depends upon no conception, external to the themes themselves, that could be phrased in words.

Now we are often told that when music takes upon itself to represent or narrate, as in programme music, it is "stepping beyond its legitimate boundaries." We are told that it is "passing out of its own sphere;" that it is abdicating the purely musical function, and trying to do what it is the function of literature or of painting to do; that a piece of music ought to be comprehensible from its music alone; that its whole message should be written plainly on the music, without the necessity of calling in the aid of a programme. If there is anything in this thesis it will dispose of programme music at once. But I shall try to show that there is nothing whatever in it—that it is not argument, but pure assertion. I shall try to show in the first place that so far from being a passing disease of the present generation, the desire to write programme music is rooted in humanity from the very beginning; and in the second place that the argument just outlined could be made to dispose not only of programme music, but also of the song and the opera.

IV

The late Sidney Lanier, a critic of unusual sanity and freshness of vision, contended that so far from being a late and excrescent growth, programme music is "the very earliest, most familiar, and most spontaneous form of musical composition." We need not go quite so far as this, for it seems to me that it is impossible to date either kind of music first in order of time. Just as one early man placed straight and curved lines in such relations that they pleased the eye by their mere formal harmony, while another placed them in such relations that they pleased by suggesting some aspect of man or nature, so did early music spring with one musician from the mere pleasure in the successions and combinations of tones, with another from the desire to convey in sound a suggestion of the thoughts aroused in him by his intercourse and his struggles with his fellow-men and with the world. Lanier's statement is evidently a slight exaggeration; but I think he has invincible reason with him when he goes on to ask, "What is any song but programme music developed to its furthest extent? A song is ... a double performance; a certain instrument—the human voice—produces a number of tones, none of which have any intellectual value in themselves; but, simultaneously with the production of the tones, words are uttered, each in a physical association with a tone, so as to produce upon the hearer at once the effect of conventional and of unconventional sounds. [22]... Certainly, if programme music is absurd, all songs are nonsense." This, I think, is the key to the problem. Let us look at it a little more closely.

Let us imagine two primitive men, each with the capacity for expressing feeling in musical sound. One of them manages to find a phrase of a few notes that gives him pleasure. Because it gives him pleasure he repeats it. Having repeated it a number of times he finds the mere repetition of it becoming monotonous; so next time he repeats it in a slightly different way. He now experiences, without understanding why, a subtler form of pleasure. If you told him he was making a very practical demonstration of the law that a great deal of Æsthetic delight consists in realising unity in variety, he would not grasp your meaning; but all the same that is what he is doing. He still has his old pleasure in the agreeable succession of tones; but this pleasure is intensified, subtilised, by another—the pleasure of detecting the theme in the disguises it assumes. This primitive man has made the first step towards sonata form; he is assisting at the birth of absolute music. From this root there grows up all our pure delight in agreeable tunes for their own sake, in the embroidery of them, in the juggling with them; in a word, all our delight in absolute music. [23] Now take the other man. He starts along another line. When he begins to trace his rude melodic curve, it is not primarily because he finds an all-absorbing delight in the curve itself. He begins because some definite experience has moved him emotionally, and the emotional disturbance must find an outlet in tone; his melodic curve must suggest the experience. Let us say it is the death of a friend. Here is a much more definite impulse than was acting upon the other man; and it accordingly leads to a more definite expression. The curve the melody takes is now determined not merely by the musical pleasure it gives by going this way or that, but primarily by the need to make the melody representative of a definite feeling, or suggestive of the being or the event that aroused the feeling. This man is at the turn of the road that leads to poetical music—to the song, the opera, and the symphonic poem. (I do not allege, let me say again, that there is an absolute line of demarcation between absolute music and poetic music, or between the states of mind from which they flow; the two are always crossing and re-crossing into each other's territory. I am simply throwing into high relief the element in each that gives it its peculiar significance.) In absolute music, as Wagner pointed out, the essential thing is "the arousing of pleasure in beautiful forms." In poetic music the essential thing is the veracious rendering in tone of an emotion that is as definite as the other is indefinite. Take two concrete examples. The opening phrase of Beethoven's 8th Symphony refers to nothing at all external to itself; it is what Herbert Spencer has called the music of pure exhilaration; to appreciate it you have to think of nothing but itself; the pleasure lies primarily in the way the notes are put together. [24] But the sinister motive that announces the coming of Hunding, in the first act of the Valkyrie, appeals to you in a different way. Here your pleasure is only partially due to the particular way the notes go; the other part of it is due to the veracity of the theme, its congruence with the character it is meant to represent. And, to go back to our two primitive men, the first of them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the opening of the 8th Symphony, while the second of them was in the mood that would ultimately give birth to the Hunding motive.

Any one who takes the trouble to analyse the phrases of an ordinary symphony and those of a modern song will perceive a broad difference between the kinds of ideas evoked by them. In the old symphony or sonata a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having specific reference to actual life—not attempting, that is, to get at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression, but influencing and affecting us mainly by reason of its purely formal relations and by the purely physical pleasure inherent in it as sound—was stated, varied, worked out and combined with other themes of the same order. Take a thousand of these themes—from Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven, for example—and while they affect you musically you will yet be unable to say that they have taken their rise from any particular emotion, or that they embody any special reflection upon life. It is the peculiarity of music that while on the one hand it may speak almost as definitely as poetry, and refer to things that are cognised intellectually, as in poetry, on the other hand it may make an impression on us, purely as sound, to which the words of poetry, purely as words, can offer no parallel effect. A verse of Tennyson with the words so transposed as to have no intellectual meaning would make no impression when read aloud; no pleasure, that is, would be obtainable merely from the sound of the words themselves. But play the diatonic scale on the piano, or strike a random chord here and there, and though the thing means nothing, the ear is bound to take some pleasure in it. Musical sound gives us pleasure in and by and for itself, independently of our finding even the remotest mental connection between its parts. This connection may be great, or small, or practically non-existent; and the greater it is, of course, the more complicated becomes our pleasure; but it is not essential to our taking physiological delight in music considered purely as sound. Now it is quite possible to construct a lengthy piece of music that shall have absolutely no emotional expression, in the sense of suggesting a reference to human experience—that shall be purely and simply a succession and combination of pleasurable sounds. In the nature of the case, it is clear that not much of the actual music that is written could be of this order throughout. Emotion of some quality and degree is sure to intrude itself here and there into even the most "mathematical" music; but it is quite unquestionable that while some music is alive with suggestions of human interest, of actual man and life, there is an enormous quantity of very pleasant music from which the interest of actuality is wholly absent, that reaches us through physiological rather than through psychological channels, or at any rate, if this is putting it unscientifically, through quite other psychological channels.

Compare with music of this kind the phrases of a highly expressive modern song, or of such a piece as Wagner's Faust Overture, or of one of Liszt's or CÉsar Franck's symphonic poems. Here the inspiration comes direct from some aspect of external nature or from some actual human experience; and the musical phrase becomes correspondingly modified. While there still remain (1) the physiological pleasure in the theme as sound, and (2) the formal pleasure in the structure, balance, and development of the theme, there is now superadded a third element of interest—the recognition of the veracity of the theme, its appropriateness as an expression of some positive, definite emotion, something seen, some actual experience of men. And music with a content of this kind, it is important to note, can depart widely from the manner of expression and of development of absolute music, and still be interesting. The proof of this is to be had in recitative. Here there is a very wide departure from the more formal music in every quality—melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic. Attempt to play an ordinary piece of recitative as pure music, without the voice and without a knowledge of the words, and its divergence from music of the self-sufficing order generally becomes obvious. The justification of recitative is to be sought not in its compliance with the laws that govern pure non-dramatic instrumental music, but in its congruence with a definite literary idea that is seeking expression through the medium of tone; and our tolerance of it and appreciation of it are due to this supplementing of the somewhat inferior physical pleasure by the superior mental pleasure given by the sense of dramatic truth and fitness. So again in the song. Let any one try to imagine how little the ending of Schubert's Erl-King would suggest to him if he were totally ignorant of the words or the subject of the song, and he will realise how the literary element at once modifies and supports music of this kind. As a piece of absolute music, the final phrase of the Erl-King means nothing at all; it only acquires significance when taken in conjunction with the words; and the justification of its relinquishment of the mode of expression of pure self-sufficing music is precisely its congruence with the literary idea. To go a step further, the phrases typical of Mazeppa in Liszt's symphonic poem, both in themselves and in their development, would probably puzzle us if we met with them in a symphony pure and simple; they only become such marvels of poignant and veracious expression when associated in the mind with Mazeppa. And, to go still further, and to show not from the structure of a theme but from the treatment of it the change that may be induced by a "programme," I may instance the repetitions in the last movement of Tchaikovski's "Pathetic" Symphony, which, though unwarrantable in a symphony of the older pattern, seem to many of us surcharged with the most direct psychological significance. Right through, from recitative to the symphonic poem or the programme symphony, we see that the fusion of the literary or pictorial with the musical interest necessarily leads to a modification of the tissue of the musical theme and of the musical development. You could not, if you would, express the story of Mazeppa in such phrases as those of the "Jupiter." So that, while we thus have an a priori justification of the programme phrase, we begin to understand the difficulties that attend programme development, and some reasons for its many failures in the past. Much of the work that had been done by the older men in consolidating and elaborating the form of the symphony was found to be of little help to the new school. A new type of phrase had to be evolved, and with it a new method of development.

No one, I think, will dispute the broad truth of the principles here laid down. That absolute music per se and vocal or programme music per se have marked psychological differences between them, and that, while the older bent was towards the one, the modern men show a marked preference for the other—these are fairly obvious facts. Hence the necessity of urging it upon the classicists that it will not do to apply the formal rules of the old music to the new en bloc, as if they were equally valid in both genres. If the modern men reject the classical forms, and try to produce new ones of their own, it can only be because their ideas are not the classical ideas, and must find the investiture most natural and most propitious to them. When Wagner rejected the current opera-form, and strove to attain congruence of the poetical and the musical schemes at all points of his work, the pedants told him that he avoided the long-sanctioned forms because he could not write in them. They did not see that it would have been much less trouble for him, as a mere musician, to shelter himself behind the old forms than to evolve a consistent new one, and that he aimed at a new structure simply because he had something quite new to say. Similarly, when the pedants lay it down that the programmists choose the programme form because it is an easier one to work in than the absolute form, they fail to see how much originality of mind is needed to get veracity of expression in the song or the symphonic poem, where the work, besides having to satisfy our musical sense, will be tested by the standard of the literary utterance or the literary idea with which it deals.

V

Without making too wide a digression into the Æsthetics of music, we can see that the tendency to write the one kind of music is as deeply rooted in us as the tendency to write the other kind. Some musicians, by constitutional bias, take the one route, some the other; but neither party has the right to assume that the kind of music it prefers is the only kind. Hence it is an error to say that music is stepping out of her own province when she becomes programme music. Her real province includes both absolute and programme music; the one is as inherent in us as the other.

But for reasons that will become apparent later, the absolute branch of the art developed more rapidly than the poetical branch. Even by the time absolute music had come to its magnificent climax in Beethoven, programme music had really done nothing at all of any permanent value. Many composers seemed to have a vague idea that purely instrumental music could be made to convey suggestions of real life just as poetry does, and just as the song does; but they had not yet learned where to begin and where to end, what was worth doing in this line and what was not worth doing. Their attempts at programme music were mostly crude imitations of external things, in a language not yet rich enough to express what they wanted to say; they contain, for our ears, rather too much programme and rather too little music. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the minds of the men who tried to write poetic music for instruments alone, ran in two main directions. They either wrote pieces musically interesting in themselves, and gave them fanciful titles, such as "Diana in the wood," "The virtuous coquette," "Juno, or the jealous woman," and so on, or they frankly began with the intention of representing appearances and events in music. Thus in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book we have pieces with the titles, "Faire wether," "Calm wether," "Lightening," "Thunder," and "A clear day." These things were not confined to one country; they are met with all over Europe. Occasionally the programme writers worked through vocal as well as instrumental forms. Muffat wrote pieces of the "Diana in the wood" order. Jannequin described the battle of Malegnano in music, Hermann the battle of Pavia. In the seventeenth century Carlo Farina wrote orchestral pieces in which the voices of animals were imitated. Buxtehude wrote seven klavier-suites, describing in music the nature and quality of the seven planets. Frescobaldi did a battle capriccio. Frohberger wrote a suite showing the Emperor Ferdinand IV. making his way up into heaven along Jacob's ladder. Frohberger, indeed, was realistic beyond the average. He not only painted nature, for example, but indicated the locality as accurately as a geography or a guide-book could do; and it was not merely humanity in general that moved about among his scenes, but the Count this or the Prince that. In some suites, that are unfortunately lost to an admiring world, he painted a storm on the Dover-Calais route, and gave a series of pictures of what befell the Count von Thurn in a perilous journey down the Rhine. [25]

All this seems very crude now, but the very prevalence of the practice points to a widespread feeling in those times that music could be made to serve as an art of representation. Indeed, a much earlier example of this tendency can be quoted, showing that even the ancient Greeks had their programme-music writers. There is a passage in the Geography of Strabo, in which he describes what he heard at Delphi. Here, he says, they had a musical contest "of players on the cithara, who executed a pÆan in honour of Apollo. The players on the cithara were accompanied by players on the flute, and by citharists, who performed without singing. They performed a melos (strain) called the Pythian mood. It consisted of five parts—the anacrusis, the ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and dactyls, and pipes. Timosthenes, the commander of the fleet of the second Ptolemy, and who was the author of a work in ten books on Harbours, composed a melos. His object was to celebrate in this melos the contest of Apollo with the serpent Python. The anacrusis was intended to express the prelude; the ampeira, the first onset of the contest; the cataceleusmus, the contest itself; the iambics and dactyls denoted the triumphal strain on obtaining the victory, together with musical measures of which the dactyl is peculiarly appropriated to praise and the iambics to insult and reproach; the syrinxes and pipes described the death, the players imitating the hissings of the expiring monster." [26] The unsympathetic may say it is to be hoped that the gentleman was a better admiral than he seems to have been a musician.

But to get back to modern Europe again. These crude imitations of birds and beasts and the rolling of the waves are not programme music; they are the rawest part of the raw material out of which programme music is made. The difficulty is to make the piece interesting both as music, and as a representation of what it purports to describe. A composer may fling a phrase before us and tell us this represents Hamlet, or Othello, or a death-rattle, or the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, or anything else he likes; but unless the phrase has an interest of its own, and unless he can satisfy our musical as well as our literary sense by the way he handles and combines and transforms it in the sequel, he will not arrest our attention. The great problem, indeed, of both the modern symphonic poem and the modern opera is to tell a story adequately and at the same time to satisfy our desire for interesting musical development. If the composer fixes his attention too exclusively on the literary part of his subject, his work will lack organic musical unity; if he is too intent on achieving this, he will probably fail in dramatic definiteness. This, I shall soon try to show, is really the crux both of opera and of programme music; and if we rarely succeed in solving so knotty a problem, it is not to be wondered at that the solution did not come to the men of the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth century.

As a matter of fact, however, one old composer did try to effect a union of the programme purpose with some real sense of musical form. This was Johann Kuhnau (1660?-1722), who, in his six Bible Sonatas, describes "the fight between David and Goliath," "the melancholy of Saul being dissipated by music," "the marriage of Jacob," and so on. Kuhnau was a really remarkable man. He was a good musician who could write interesting clavier-pieces apart from any programme scheme. He was moreover a keen-witted man who tried to think out seriously the problem of the union of musical expression and poetical purpose, so far as any man in those days could do so. In the preface to the Bible Sonatas he points out that the musician, like the poet, prose-writer, and painter, often wants to turn his hearers thoughts in a particular direction. If he wants to express in his music not merely sadness but the sadness of this or that individual—to distinguish, as he says, a sad Hezekiah from a weeping Peter or a lamenting Jeremiah—he must employ words in order to make the emotion definite. But not necessarily, be it observed, by writing the music to the words, as in a song. His own plan is to illustrate his subject in music, and make his poetic purpose clear to us by giving a detailed verbal account of it. Thus he prefaces each of his Bible Sonatas with an elaborate account of the event it deals with, and then summarises the main motives. This, for example, is the summary of the first Sonata, after a long general introduction. The Sonata expresses, he says—

1. The stamping and bravado of Goliath.
2. The trembling of the Israelites, and their prayer to God at sight of their awful enemy.
3. The courage of David, his desire to break the proud spirit of the giant, and his childlike trust in God's help.
4. The contest of words between David and Goliath, and the contest itself, in which Goliath is wounded in the forehead by the stone, falls down, and is slain.
5. The flight of the Philistines, and how they are pursued by the Israelites, and slaughtered with the sword.
6. The jubilation of the Israelites over the victory.
7. The chorus of the women in praise of David.
8. And, finally, the general joy, finding vent in vigorous dancing and leaping.

It will be seen at once that the programme here is of a different kind from those of some of Kuhnau's predecessors and contemporaries. It does indeed aim at representing some external things—such as the stamping of Goliath, the impact of the stone against his head, and so on—but they are not inherently absurd or impossible; while he gives a great deal of his space to the really emotional moments of the story. Throughout the sonatas, however, it is the poetic purpose that directs the music, determining both expression, sequence, and form. Every episode that occurs in the story has to be represented in the music; and Kuhnau is careful to print, in his score, the verbal indication at the precise point where the music follows it. He tells us the exact bar at which the stone is aimed at Goliath, and the bar in which the giant falls down; where Laban begins to practise his deceit on Jacob, where Jacob is "amorous and contented," and where "his heart warns him that something is wrong"; and so on—thereby setting an example to composers like Strauss, who foolishly give the purchaser of such a score as Till Eulenspiegel no guide to the various adventures of the hero. Some of Kuhnau's devices provoke a smile, as in the Fifth Sonata—"Gideon, the Saviour of the People of Israel." The sign to Gideon was that the fleece was to be wet with dew, but the ground dry; the next night the ground was to be wet and the fleece dry. Kuhnau naÏvely expresses the second sign by giving the theme of the first sign in contrary motion. But all naÏvetÉs apart, a great deal of the music of the Sonatas is very fine; and it is noteworthy that Kuhnau points out, in his general preface, that the writer of programme music must be allowed more liberty than the absolutist to break a traditional "law" when the expression demands it. [27] Kuhnau, indeed, was on the right path. He was a man born before his due time; had he lived in our days, and had at his command all the resources of modern expression and our enormous orchestras, he might have taken up very much the same position towards music as the modern programmists.

John Sebastian Bach, who succeeded Kuhnau at the Thomas Church in Leipzig, made one, and only one, experiment in the same line. This was the "Capriccio on the departure of my dearly beloved brother." The first movement, he says, depicts "The cajoleries of friends, trying to induce him to give up the idea of the journey"; the second is "a representation of the various things that may happen to him in foreign lands"; the third gives utterance to a "general lament of his friends as they say good-bye to him"; and the finale is a fugue on the postillion's signal.

Bach, however, made no further attempt to develop along these lines. The work he had been sent into the world to do was of another order.

About the same time Couperin, in France, was cultivating the programme genre with some success. He not only wrote harmless little things with titles like "La Galante," but also connected pieces of musical delineation, such as "The Pilgrims." Like Kuhnau, he justified his principles in a preface. "In the composition of my pieces," he says, "I have always a definite object or matter before my eyes. The titles of my pieces correspond to these occasions. Each piece is a kind of portrait."

In Rameau again, we get such things as "Sighs," "Tender Plaints," "The Joyous Girl," "The Cyclops," etc.; and at a slightly later date Dittersdorf (1739-1799) wrote twelve programme symphonies, illustrating Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "The War of Human Passions."

Mozart's father wrote a musical description of a sledge-journey, in which the ladies are represented shivering with the cold; but Mozart himself avoided the programme form as positively as Bach. Haydn, however, dabbled in it more extensively, as I have already pointed out.

Beethoven's position in the history of programme music is somewhat peculiar. Just about that time, when the Napoleonic wars had familiarised every one with the pomp of armies, there was a perfect deluge of battle pieces. There was probably not a battle of any importance in those days that had not a fantasia written upon it, each differing from the others in little else but its title. In a weak moment Beethoven succumbed to the general temptation and wrote his "Battle of Vittoria," which is not only one of the least significant of his works, but one of the least significant works in the history of programme music. Beethoven's real contributions to this form of art were indirect rather than direct. He told one of his friends that he had always a picture in his mind when composing; and if this could be taken quite literally, it would seem as if we were on the trail of programme music pure and simple. But we shall probably never know the extent to which Beethoven relied on poetic suggestions for his musical inspiration; and if we look at the internal evidence of his music, we shall see that although it often deals with poetic subjects, it treats them from the standpoint of the old forms rather than from that of the new. So far as their intellectual origin is concerned, the superb Leonora, Egmont, and Coriolan overtures are poetic music; that is, they aim, in a musical texture, at sketching a character or telling a story. But so far as the form is concerned in which the composer has chosen to work, the procedure is determined almost entirely by the laws of absolute music. Wagner has drawn attention to this in a well-known passage in his essay on "Liszt's Symphonic Poems." He shows what the formal laws of the old symphony were, and how necessary they were to give logical coherence to abstract music. But, he says, when these laws were applied uncompromisingly to a different kind of art-work—the overture—a disturbance occurred at once between the aims of the overture and the demands of the symphonic form. All that the latter was concerned with was change—the constant representation of themes in new lights. The overture had, in addition to this, to concern itself with dramatic development. "Now it will be obvious," he says, "that, in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this form, the necessity must at once arise either to sacrifice the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former." He goes on to praise Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis overture for the skilful way it keeps the dramatic development from being spoiled by compliance with extraneous laws of form. Then, he says, Beethoven, working on a bigger scale and with a more stupendous imagination than Gluck, nevertheless came to grief on the rock Gluck managed to escape. "He who has eyes," says Wagner, "may see precisely by this overture (i.e. the great Leonora No. 3), how detrimental to the master the maintenance of the traditional form was bound to be. For who, at all capable of understanding such a work, will not agree with me when I assert that the repetition of the first part, after the middle section, is a weakness which distorts the idea of the work almost past all understanding; and that the more, as everywhere else, and particularly in the coda, the master is obviously governed by nothing but the dramatic development. But whoso has brains and lack of prejudice enough to see this, will have to admit that the evil could only have been avoided by entirely giving up that repetition; an abandonment, however, which would have done away with the overture-form—i.e. the original, merely suggestive, symphonic dance-form—and have constituted the departure-point for creating a new form."

Wagner is undoubtedly right. Beethoven hovered uncertainly at times between the demands of poetic expression and the demands of absolute form. To write poetic music pure and simple, of course, was not his mission in the world. That was reserved for other men. One side of his powerful genius was to be taken up by Wagner and pushed to its logical conclusion in the music-drama. Another side, cultivated by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss, comes to its logical end in the symphonic poem; and just as Wagner criticised the Beethoven overture from the standpoint of music-drama, I propose, shortly, to criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic poem. I shall try to show that so far from the Wagnerian opera representing, as Wagner thought, the ideal after which the music of Beethoven was striving, it is really only a transitional form; and that the symphonic poem is the completely satisfactory, completely logical form, to which the Wagnerian opera stands in the same relation as the Leonora overture does to Tristan and Isolde.

VI

Before embarking on this Æsthetic argument, however, let us briefly conclude our historical view of the development of programme music. It was with the Romantic movement that the infusion of poetry into music became complete, and at the same time the vocabulary and the colour-range of music became adequate to express all kinds of literary and pictorial ideas. The older musicians could not, if they had tried, have written the modern symphonic poem or the modern song. And this for several reasons. In the first place, they were pretty fully occupied with making music the language it now is; they had to form a vocabulary and think out principles of architecture; and the last thing they could have done was to leave the safe and formal lines of their own art—safe because they were precise and formal—and plunge into a mode of expression that would have seemed to them to offer no coherence, no guiding principle. In the second place, they lacked one of the main stimuli to the development of modern programme music, the suggestion of a vivid, living, modern, highly emotional and picturesque poetry. A Schumann, a Brahms, a Franz could not have written such songs as they have done in any century but this; for the mainspring of their songs has been the emotional possibilities contained in the words. It was only when composers really felt the deepest artistic interest in the words they were setting, instead of regarding them as merely a frame for musical embroidery, that they attained the modern veracity and directness of phrase. You cannot do much more with words like those of the older song or opera than set them with a view to their purely musical rather than their musico-poetical possibilities; and if you persist, out of deference to a foolish tradition, in setting to music the words of a foreign and relatively unfamiliar language, you will perforce become more and more conventional in your phrases and in your general structure. It was the peculiar advantage of the modern German song-writers that they could set lyrics of their own language, alive with every suggestion that could lend itself to musical treatment. The emotion was intense, the form concentrated and direct, the idea definite and concise; and the musicians, having by this time a fully developed language for their use, set themselves to reproduce these qualities of the poem in their music. Hence the new spirit that came into music with the Romantic movement, and that reacted on opera, on piano music, and on the symphonic poem.

Another great difference between the pre-Romantic and the post-Romantic composers was that the latter were, on the whole, much more cultured men than the former. This was due, of course, not to any particular merit of their own, but to the changed social circumstances of the musician. The system of patronage in the eighteenth century, while it undoubtedly helped the musician to develop as a musician, must have retarded his development in other ways. Under that system, where he was often little better than the servant of some aristocrat, he must often have been debarred from studying the world at first-hand, meeting it face to face, looking at it through his own eyes. Neither Haydn [28] nor Mozart, for example, stood on the level of the best culture of the time. The great German historian of music, Ambros, has pointed out how, in Mozart's letters from Italy, the talk is all of the singers and dancers; "he scarcely seems to have noticed the Coliseum and the Vatican, with all that these contain." And Ambros goes on to say that the modern musician reads his Shakespeare and his Sophocles in the original, and knows them almost by heart. He reads Humboldt's Cosmos and the histories of Niebuhr and Ranke; he studies the dialectic of Hegel as well as, or perhaps more than, the art of fugue; and if he goes to Italy he does not trouble himself about the opera, but occupies himself with nature and the remains of classic art. He is, in fact, says Ambros, "Herr Microcosmos." [29]

For a fair picture of the ordinary life of a musician in the house of his patron in the eighteenth century we have only to turn to the Autobiography of Dittersdorf. Among them all, indeed, Gluck and Handel seem to be the only musicians who possessed much culture, [30] and who strike us as

being, apart from music, the intellectual equal of the great men of the time—of Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Diderot, Lessing, and the rest. There is no evidence that Beethoven was either a man of wide culture, or a respectable thinker outside his own art. It is, indeed, probable that the enormous musical power of many of these men, and the centuries of progress through which they rushed music in comparatively a few years, was due to their being nothing else but musicians, to the concentration of all their faculties, all their experiences, upon the problem of making sound a complete, living, flexible medium of expression. But the later musicians were of another order. The Romantic movement bred a new type of musician. He no longer sat in the music-room of an aristocrat, clothed in the aristocrat's livery, and spun music out of his own inner consciousness. He moved about in the world and saw and learned a good deal. He associated with poets; he frequented the studios of painters. We get men like Hoffmann, at once novelist, painter, musician, and critic; like Liszt, pianist, composer, author; like Schumann, musician and musical critic; like Wagner, ranging greedily over the whole field of human knowledge, and mixing himself up—in more senses than one—with every possible and impossible subject under the sun. I am not using the term in any offensive or disparaging sense when I say that the average modern musician, in matters outside music, is a much better educated and more all-round man than his predecessor; he knows more, sees more, reads more, thinks more. Men like Wagner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Bruneau, stand much closer to the general intellectual life of their day than any of the older musicians did to the intellectual life of his day. I am not for a moment contending that they are any greater musicians merely on this account; I simply state it as a psychological factor in their work, as something that determines, to a great extent, the quality of that work, and certainly determines their choice of subjects.

The way it does this is by making them anxious to express in their music all the impressions they have gathered from the world and from their culture. But in order that they might do this, two things were necessary, as we have already seen. The vocabulary of music—its range of melody and harmony—had to be increased, and the capacity of the orchestra had to be enormously developed. It is folly to laugh at the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for not getting on further with poetical music. They had not the means at their disposal to do so. Sonata-form grew up to a great extent on the piano and the violin; and the nature of these instruments largely determined what could and should be uttered upon them. It was not till harmony got richer and deeper and fuller, and men had learned to extract all kinds of expression from the orchestra, that programme music in the true sense of the word became possible.

The broad historical facts, then, are that the stimulus to poetic music in the nineteenth century came from the wider education of the musician, the great development of the means of musical expression, and the incessant stimulation of the musician by poetry and literature in general. [31] As we know, the new spirit broke out in three forms—in the highly emotional song of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Franz, and the others; in the poetical music-drama of Wagner; and in the symphonic poems or programme symphonies of Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovski, Raff, and a dozen others, leading up to Richard Strauss. Even the men who did not actually dabble much in the last-named form helped the cause of instrumental poetic music in other ways. Schumann, for example, with his poetic little piano pieces, his delicate sketches of character in the Carneval and Papillons and elsewhere, was really following up the same trail as led to Liszt's Mazeppa, Berlioz's Harold en Italie, and Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel.

VII

On two lines of inquiry, then, we have found the case for programme music somewhat stronger than its hasty opponents have imagined. On the one hand, we have seen that when the nature and origin of music are psychologically analysed, there are two mental attitudes, two orders of expression, and two types of phrase, from one of which has arisen absolute, from the other, programme music. On the other hand, we have seen that, from a variety of reasons, programme music could not have been cultivated by the great masters of the eighteenth century who beat out the form of the classical symphony; while its fascination for the modern men is due to its being the only medium of expression for a certain order of modern ideas. It is quite time, then, that not only critics but composers realised that when the brains are out the form will die; that you cannot write a symphony in the form of Mozart or Beethoven unless your mental world is something like theirs, and that if the literary, or pictorial, or dramatic suggestion is all-potent with a composer, it is folly for him to throw it aside, and try, by using a form that is uncongenial to him, to get back into an emotional atmosphere it would be impossible for him to breathe.

The change that came over music about the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that first came to full fruition in Wagner's operas, is best described in the oft-quoted words of Wagner himself, as "the fertilisation of music by poetry." He felt that there was considerable evidence of the action of poetry upon music in Beethoven, though, as can be seen from the passages on the Leonora overture already quoted, in Beethoven the reins are still too tightly clutched by absolute music. He always, no matter what the origin of his conceptions may have been, worked them out within the limits of symphonic form. Berlioz, roughly speaking, went the other way, always keeping his eye fixed intently on the lines of his poetic scheme. Wagner's criticism upon this practice of Berlioz is interesting, even if not final. In listening to music of this kind, he says, "it always happened that I so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of exertion could I re-find and knit it up again." His point was this, to put it in words of our own: if he was listening to a Berlioz work, he could not get complete pleasure out of the music, as mere music, because it was not developed along purely musical lines; the chief theme, let us say, gave him pleasure on its first announcement, but he could not see the rationale of its future treatment, as one can always see the rationale of the return of the themes in a symphony. This was because the course of the music was determined not by abstract musical intentions, but by poetic intentions which were not made clear to him; and the result was, as it were, that he fell between two stools. "I discovered," he says, "that while I had lost the musical thread (i.e. the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as indicated in the programme. Indisputably these motives existed in Shakespeare's famous balcony scene" (Wagner is speaking of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet); "but in that they had all been faithfully retained, and in the exact order given them by the dramatist, lay the great mistake of the composer." And Wagner's contention was this, that when a composer wants to reproduce in music a certain scene from a drama, he must not take the thing as it stands and move on from point to point in exactly the same way as the poet did. What was right for the poet would be wrong for the musician. He must tell his story or paint his scene according to the laws and capacities of music, not those of poetry; and Wagner goes on to praise Liszt for having, by superior artistic instinct, avoided the pitfall that nearly proved fatal to Berlioz. Liszt, instead of trying to tell us in music precisely what the poet had already told us in verse, rethinks in music what the poet has said, and gives it out to us as something born of musical feeling itself.

Now we need not go into the question of how far Wagner is right in what he says of Berlioz. This, at all events, is certain, from his own words in praise of Liszt, that Wagner had no À priori objection to the symphonic poem, but only to the symphonic poem when it went on what he took to be the wrong lines. All that is needed is for the proper compromise to be agreed upon between the poetic purpose and the musical form. This, I think, Richard Strauss has effected, and it would be interesting to have had Wagner's criticism of Strauss. But since we cannot get that, we may criticise Wagner from the standpoint of the symphonic poem.

VIII

Before doing this, however, let us briefly touch upon one or two other main issues.

The first point I lay stress on is this, that "form" in programme music cannot mean the same thing as form in absolute music; and for this reason. So long as you work in one medium alone, the form is controlled simply by the necessities and potentialities of that medium. In a symphony or a fugue you have to consider nothing but the nature of absolute music; in the drama, you have to worry about no problems except those that lie in the nature of drama. But as soon as you begin to work in a form that is a blend of the two, each of them wants to pull the other along its own road, and a compromise has to be arrived at. This is why it is easier to satisfy our sense of form in a drama or a symphony than in an opera or a symphonic poem. We see the same thing in prose literature. If you are going to write a pure romance, concerned with nothing but romance, your course is fairly easy. If you are going to write a treatise on society, again, you are bound by no laws but those pertaining to this kind of work. But if you want to combine the two—if you want to write a novel that shall not only depict character but also enforce a sociological lesson, as in Zola's novels or some of the stories of the American Frank Norris, then there is a wrench between the two tendencies. The sociology is apt to spoil the fiction, and the fiction the sociology. So it is in poetic music; the poetry wants the music to go its way, the music insists on the poetry going its way. In the case of the sociological novel, what really happens is this. We admit that Zola's DÉbÂcle is not so artistic a piece of work as, say, R. L. Stevenson's Prince Otto; but we make allowances; we give up a little purely Æsthetic pleasure in consideration of getting a great deal of another kind of pleasure—that of seeing a bigger picture of a more real life put on the canvas. If we can only get the larger human quality in fiction by giving up a little of the Æsthetic gratification that comes from perfect form—well, being reasonable creatures, there are times when we will cheerfully accept the situation and make the compromise.

And so it is in poetic music. Wagner's TannhÄuser overture and the Tristan prelude are not so satisfactory, from the point of view of pure form, as a movement from a Beethoven symphony. We get the repetitions of the themes determined by poetic rather than musical necessities. Push the principle a little further, and you will get almost no musical continuity at all, but a continuity of picture only. If we examine the prelude to the Dream of Gerontius, we see that the order of the themes follows a poetic or scenic purpose rather than a musical purpose. This is legitimate so long as it does not go too far, so long as we are not made to feel that the musical continuity is absolutely thrown overboard to secure didactic or literary continuity. But the broad principle is, that a piece of musical development, like the Tristan or Gerontius prelude, that would not be altogether satisfactory in absolute music, is quite satisfactory in poetic music. It tells the literary story well enough, and yet does not starve our musical sense.

IX

This brings us to a second point. We are often told that programme music is all right if it is so conceived and so handled that it suffices as pure music, whether we know the programme or not. And as this seems to many people like a fair compromise, and as programme-musicians have been ill-treated so long that some of them are positively thrilled with gratitude now for not being kicked, there is a tendency to accept this quasi-solution of the problem as something like the final one. The programmist is willing to admit that a number of themes, no matter how agreeable, do not constitute symphonic music unless they have some emotional connection and some logical musical development; while the absolutist graciously allows that a concrete subject may be the basis of a symphony, if only the music is of such a kind that it will appeal to the hearer just as much, although he may not know what the subject is.

It is precisely against this compromise that I think we ought to protest, for it seems to me to be based on a complete misunderstanding of the natures of absolute and of programme music. Not only does it ignore the difference in intellectual origin between a phrase such as that which opens the finale of the Jupiter symphony, and such a one as that which symbolises Till Eulenspiegel, but it overlooks the fact that along with this difference in the thing expressed there must necessarily go a difference in the manner of expressing it. It is impossible to subscribe to the insidious compromise that programme music ought to "speak for itself," without a knowledge of the programme being necessary. [32] We not only need the programme—the statement of the literary or pictorial subject of the composition—but this is at once answerable for half our pleasure and a justification of certain peculiarities of form which the music may now safely assume. If the shape and colour of the themes of a piece of music, the order of their occurrence, and the variations they undergo, are all determined by the composer having a certain picture in his mind, it is surely necessary for us to be told what that picture is. If it was necessary for him when he was composing, it is necessary for us if we are to listen to the music as he meant us to listen to it. To put a symphonic poem before us without telling us all the composer's intentions in it, is as foolish as to make us listen to the music of a song or an opera without hearing the words. In the opera and the song, things go this way or that because the poetic purpose requires it, and the justification of them is precisely their appropriateness to the poetic purpose. Similarly, things go this way or that in the symphonic poem because the poetic purpose requires it; and here also we require to know what that poetic purpose was before we can justify or condemn what the musician has done. Let us examine a simple case, say the Romeo and Juliet overture of Tchaikovski, and see whether this particular work could be equally understood and appreciated, as pure music, by the man who knows and the man who does not know the programme.

There is not the slightest doubt that the Romeo and Juliet would give intense pleasure to any one who simply walked unpremeditatedly into a concert room and heard the overture without knowing that it had a poetical basis—who listened to it, that is, as a piece of music pure and simple in sonata form. But I emphatically deny that this hearer would receive as much pleasure from the work as I do, for example, knowing the poetic story to which it is written. He might think the passage for muted strings, for example, extremely beautiful, but he would not get from it such delight as I, who not only feel all the musical loveliness of the melody and the harmonies and the tone colour, but see the lovers on the balcony and breathe the very atmosphere of Shakespeare's scene. I am richer than my fellow by two or three emotions in a case of this kind. My nature is stirred on two or three sides instead of only one. I would go further, and say that not only does the auditor I have supposed get less pleasure from the work than I, but he really does not hear Tchaikovski's work at all. If the musician writes music to a play and invents phrases to symbolise the characters and to picture the events of the play, we are simply not listening to his work at all if we listen to it in ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may hear the music, but it is not the music he meant us to hear, or at all events not heard as he intended us to hear it. If melody, harmony, colour and development are all shaped and directed by certain pictures in the musician's mind, we get no further than the mere outside of the music, unless we also are familiar with those pictures. Let us take another example. The reader will remember that the overture opens with a religioso theme, in the clarinets and bassoons, that is intended to suggest Friar Lawrence. In the ensuing scenes of conflict between the two opposing factions, this theme appears every now and then in the brass, sometimes in a particularly forceful and assertive manner. The casual hearer whom I have supposed would probably look upon this simply as a matter of counterpoint; Tchaikovski has invented two themes, he would say, and is now simply combining them. But here again he would be wrong. These passages certainly give us musical pleasure, and are as certainly meant to do so, but they are intended also to do something more. The reappearance of the "Friar Lawrence" theme has a dramatic as well as a musical significance. Taken as it is from the placid wood-wind and given to the commanding brass, and made to stand out like a warning voice through the mad riot that is going on all round it, it tells its own tale at once to any one with a knowledge of the subject of the overture. So again with the mournful transformation of the love motive at the end of the overture. Tchaikovski does not alter the melody and the harmony in this way for merely musical reasons. He has something more in his mind than an appeal to the abstract musical faculty; and I repeat that the hearer who is ignorant of this something more not only gets less than the full amount of pleasure from the work, but really does not hear the work as Tchaikovski conceived and wrote it, and intended it to be heard. The same argument holds good of the song. Imagine one of the most highly and subtly expressive of modern songs—say the "O wÜsst' ich doch" or the Feldeinsamkeit of Brahms—sung to you at a concert without your having the slightest knowledge of the words. Some pleasure, of course, you could not help feeling in the music; but it would be nothing compared with the sensations you would have if you knew the words or could follow them in a programme. Then you would find not only that certain passages that seemed to you the least interesting before, as mere music, are poignantly expressive, but these apparent peculiarities are justified, and indeed necessitated, by the poetry. Now imagine that you hear the same song three months later. You have forgotten the actual words point by point; but you still retain the recollection of the emotional moods they suggested; and so you are still responsive to each nuance of expression in the music. Listening to a song under these conditions is precisely the same as listening to a symphonic poem. In Die Ideale, for example, Liszt divides Schiller's poem into sections of different intensity or different timbre of feeling, and places each of these in the score before the section of the music that illustrates it. Die Ideale is, in fact, an extension of the song-form, in which the words are not sung but are either suggested to us or supposed to be known to us. But it is folly to suppose that either in the Brahms song or Die Ideale the man who does not know the literary basis can get the same pleasure as the man who does.

We have only to treat all other symphonic poems in the same way as we have just treated Tchaikovski's Romeo and Juliet—to ask ourselves what the composer meant us to hear, and how much of it we really do hear if we do not know his poetical scheme—to see the folly of holding up absolute music as the standard to which programme music ought to conform. Occasionally, however, the objection is put in the inverse way, and we are told that programme music is absurd because it does not speak intelligibly to us, does not carry its story written upon it so plainly that no one can mistake it. The charge of absurdity must be really laid at the door of the composer. The plain truth is that a composer has no right to put before us a symphonic poem without giving us the fullest guide to his literary plans. It would be ridiculous of Wagner or Schubert to think their business was ended when they had simply given their music the title of, say, The Ring of the Nibelung or The Erl-king; it is equally ridiculous of Strauss to call a work Till Eulenspiegel or Don Juan, and leave us to discover the rest for ourselves. If Strauss, for example, put together the Don Juan theme (the one on the four horns) in that particular order not merely because he liked the sequence of sounds, but because they accurately limned the picture of Don Juan which he had in his eye at that moment, it is folly of him to throw it before us as a mere self-existent sequence of sounds, and not to tell us what aspect of Don Juan it is meant to represent.

As for "the inherent stupidity of programme music"—to which opinion one critic was led by having, in the innocence of his heart, thought the motive just mentioned signified one thing, while, he afterwards discovered, it signified quite another—I would put it to him that he is never likely to go wrong again over this phrase, and that each time he hears Don Juan he will, to this extent, be nearer seeing what the composer meant him to see than he ever was before. And if he had an equal certainty of the meaning of all the other subjects in Don Juan, would he not then be able to recreate the whole thing in accordance with Strauss' own ideas? And would not all difficulty then vanish, and the "inherent stupidity" seem to be in those who cursed the form because they had not the key to the idea? Let any one listen to Till Eulenspiegel with no more knowledge of the composer's intentions than is given in the title, and I can understand him failing to make head or tail of it. But let him learn by heart the admirable German or English analyses that can now be had in almost any programme-book, and if all does not then become as clear to him as crystal, if then he cannot follow all the gradations of that magical piece of story-telling—well, one can only say that nature has deprived him of the symphonic-poem faculty, just as she makes some people insensitive to Botticelli or Maeterlinck. He does but throw an interesting light on his own psychology; the value of the musical form remains unassailed.

Now why does not Strauss, or any other composer of programme music, spare himself and us all this trouble by showing us, once for all, the main psychological lines upon which he has built his work? The composer himself, in fact, is the cause of all the misunderstanding and all the Æsthetic confusion. Nothing could be clearer than the symbolism of the music in Strauss' Don Quixote, when you know the precise intention of each variation; but the fact that Strauss should give the clue to these in the piano duet and omit it all from the full score shows how absurdly lax and inconsistent the practice of these gentlemen is. Also sprach Zarathustra, again, is quite clear, because indications are given here and there of the precise part of Nietzsche's book with which the musician is dealing; while Ein Heldenleben, in the absence of an official "Guide," simply worries us by prompting futile conjectures as to the meaning of this or that phrase. Wagner would not have dreamt of throwing a long work before us, and simply telling us that the subject of it was Parsifal. Why, then, should the writer of symphonic poems expect us to fathom all his intentions when he has merely printed the title of his work? If the words of the opera are necessary for me to understand what was in Wagner's mind when he wrote this or that motive, surely words—not accompanying the music, but prefixed to it—are needful to tell me what was in Strauss' mind when he shaped the violin solo in Ein Heldenleben. If it is absurd to play to me a song without giving me a copy of the words, expecting me to understand the music that has been born of a poetical idea as if it had been written independently of any verbal suggestion, it is equally absurd to put before me, as pure music, an orchestral piece that was never conceived as pure music. If the poem or the picture was necessary to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to his work.

It is curious, again, that people who can defend Wagner as against the absolutists cannot also see that they are implicitly justifying Strauss and his fellows. Thus another critic writes that "Wagner saw that the intellectual idea could not be conveyed by music alone; that together with the colour—the music—must go the spoken word to make clear what was meant." So far, good. But then he quarrels with Strauss for trying to make his themes expressive of something more than music pure and simple, and giving us a programme to help us. Why, where in the name of lucidity is the difference between singing to a phrase of music the words that prompted it, and printing these words alongside the phrase or at the beginning of the score? Does it matter whether the composer writes a love-scene and has the actual words sung by a tenor and a soprano, or merely puts the whole thing on an orchestra, and tells us that this is a scene between two lovers, and that their love is of such and such a quality? For the life of me I cannot see why the one proceeding is right and the other wrong. And once more, if it is essential that we should not be left in the slightest doubt in the case of the opera as to who the protagonists are and what is the nature of their sentiments, it is equally essential, in the case of the symphonic poem, that we should not be left in ignorance of any of the points that have gone to make the structure of the music what it is. No symphonic poem ought to be published or performed without the fullest analysis of it by the composer himself, just as he would never think of publishing the music of his song or his opera without the words. There is no compromise possible. If the song and the opera are legitimate blends of literary ideas and musical expression, so is the symphonic poem, and if the literary basis has to be given us in full in the case of the opera, we equally need it in the other case as completely as it can be set before us. The great trouble is that composers like Strauss so often do neither the one thing nor the other; they neither put their work before us as music pure and simple, nor give us sufficient clue to what the representative music is intended to represent.

And now let me try to show briefly that Wagner misunderstood the meaning of his own reforms, and that the ideal poetic art-form after which he was striving was not the opera but the symphonic poem.

X

To make the following argument clearer I will state its conclusion at once; I am going to try to show that Wagner's own analysis of the natures of poetry, music and drama conclusively proves that if there can be said to be such a thing as the ideal form of art, it is not the opera but the symphonic poem. I am not going to criticise Wagner's theory, except for a moment here and there. I am going to accept it broadly just as it stands, assume it to be perfectly founded on facts and perfectly logical in the bulk of its exposition, and prove from it that he stopped short at the final conclusion—that had he been quite consistent to the end he would have seen, all through his own argument, the finger of demonstration beckoning him on to a point further than that of opera, to a point still higher up the road, where the symphonic poem was awaiting him. And to draw this conclusion I think we do not need to call in the aid of anything but his own words.

In A Study of Wagner (1899) I contended that, owing to the structure of his mind, Wagner was to a large degree insensitive to the charms of poetry purely as poetry and of music purely as music. He did not, that is, and could not, get from poetry or from abstract music the precise sensations, completely satisfactory in themselves, that a lover of poetry or a lover of abstract music would get. Poetry to him had something unsatisfactory, imperfect, incomplete in it, unless it reached out a hand to music; music was similarly defective unless it was born of a poetic stimulus. To dispute this is to be blind to the plain evidence of Wagner's prose works; the mere assertion to the contrary of his more uncritical admirers counts for simply nothing against the numerous passages that can be brought up in proof. Remarks such as this, "What is not worth the being sung, neither is it worth the poet's pain of telling," or this, "that work of the poet's must rank as the most excellent, which in its final consummation should become entirely music," or this, "A need in music which poetry alone can still," or this, "If the work of the sheer word-poet appears as a non-realised poetic aim, on the other hand, the work of the absolute musician is only to be described as altogether bare of such an aim; for the Feeling may well have been entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression, but it could not be directed," [33]—remarks such as these are not to be explained away. Nay, Wagner's very notion of an art-work that should embrace all the arts was a sure proof of there being a specific something in each art to which he was impervious.

This, then, is the prime fact in Wagner's artistic psychology. When a poetical idea occurred to him, it was one that cried out for the emotional colour of music to complete it; when a musical idea occurred to him, it was one controlled and directed from the start by a poetic concept. Hence not only his dramatic work but his theoretical work is simply the expression of this psychological bias. His opponents did him an injustice when they said he worked out certain theories and then wrote operas to illustrate and justify them. The fact was that the theories and the operas were only two branches from the same trunk—not cause and effect, but two effects of the same cause. In the operas and the prose works alike he was simply seeking self-expression. But muddled thinker as I hold Wagner to have been upon most of the subjects his busy brain took up, he was perfectly clear as to what he wanted to do in opera, and what he wanted to say in explanation of it. Even the distressing opacity of his style, that makes the reading of him so severe a trial to one's literary sense, cannot prevent the big outlines of his system standing out in perfect clearness. In that system he thought he had demonstrated three things—(1) that at a certain stage of its evolution poetry has to call in the aid of music in order fully to realise its desires, (2) that music for the same reason has at a certain stage to call in the aid of poetry, and (3) that in the musical drama we get the best powers of music and of poetry exerted to the fullest, and combined in a harmonious whole. (He also held that the scene-painting, the stage-setting, and the gestures of the actors gratified adequately our other Æsthetic senses; but we need not concern ourselves with this aspect of his theory here.)

Let me first make it quite clear that Wagner wished to get an ideal musical-poetic art-form by shearing off from music all that did not tend towards poetry, and from poetry all that did not tend towards music. "Unity of artistic Form," he says in Opera and Drama, "is only thinkable as the emanation of a united Content: a united Content, however, we can only recognise by its being couched in an artistic expression through which it can announce itself entirely to the Feeling. A Content which should prescribe a twofold expression, i.e. an expression which obliged the messenger to address himself alternately to the Understanding and the Feeling—such a Content could only be itself a dual, a discordant one. Every artistic aim makes primarily for a united Shape.... Since it is the instinctive Will of every artistic Aim to impart itself to the Feeling, it follows that the cloven Expression is incompetent to entirely arouse the Feeling...." "This," he goes on to say, "This entire arousing of the Feeling was impossible to the sheer Word-poet, through his expressional organ; therefore what he could not impart through that to Feeling, he was obliged to announce to Understanding, so as to compass the full utterance of the content of his Aim: he must hand over to Understanding, to be thought out, what he could not give to be perceived by Feeling." Thus poetry falls to the ground, as it were, between two stools; the poet wants to make a direct appeal to Feeling, but he is partly defeated by having to make this appeal through the medium of words, which are more the organ of Understanding than of Feeling. The one thing to be done, then, is to supply this deficiency of Feeling by a resort to music, whose appeal par excellence is to the Feeling.

But per contra, music itself, as abstract music, is incomplete; because, although it does indeed move us, it leaves us in doubt as to the cause and purpose of the emotion. "If the work of the sheer Word-poet," says Wagner, "appears as a non-realised poetic Aim, on the other hand the work of the absolute Musician is only to be described as altogether bare of such an Aim; for the Feeling may well have been entirely aroused by the purely-musical expression, but it could not be directed." Or, as he phrases it in another place, instrumental music had worked away at its regular sound-patterns until it "had won itself an idiomatic speech—a speech which in any higher artistic sense, however, was arbitrary and incapable of expressing the purely-human, so long as the longing for a clear and intelligible portrayal of definite, individual human feelings did not become its only necessary measure for the shaping of those melodic particles."

So much, then, is clear; according to the Wagnerian theory, mere poetry needs music to help it to make its direct appeal to Feeling; mere music needs the concrete suggestions of poetry to give it order and direction. Even in the later works of Beethoven the pendulum shifts from absolute, abstract musical tone-weaving to the effort to say more definite things; there awoke in him, says Wagner, "a longing for distinct expression of specific, characteristically individual emotions," and he "began to care less and less about merely making music." The climax of this impulse to blend musical feeling and poetic purpose in the one art-work was, of course, to be the Wagnerian opera or music-drama.

This line of argumentation leads to two other propositions:—

(1) In the first place, given that music and poetry are to co-operate to make one product, and given that the most perfect art-form is that which makes a single, undivided, undistracting appeal to us, it follows that the more intimately the two factors are blended the better the result will be. There must be no little bit of music that hangs out, as it were, and declines to meet the poetry on equal terms; there must be no little bit of poetry that refuses to be amenable to musical expression. The compromise must be perfect; there must be just so much poetic purpose as is necessary to keep the musical utterance definite and unmistakable, and just so much musical outpouring as is necessary to lift all the poetry into the ideal realm of Feeling; just so much in each case and no more. There must be a complete "emotionalisation of the intellect"; or, to use yet another of Wagner's phrases, we must have "a truly unitarian" form. And in answer to the question, "Has the poet to restrict himself in presence of the musician, and the musician in presence of the poet?" he says that they must not restrict each other, "but rouse each other's powers into highest might, by love...." "... If the poet's aim—as such—is still at hand and visible, then it has not as yet gone under into the Musical Expression; but if the Musician's Expression—as such—is still apparent, then it, in turn, has not yet been inspired by the Poetic Aim." In the Zukunftsmusik he puts the same idea in other words: the ideal text can be achieved only by "that poet who is fully alive to Music's tendency and exhaustless faculty of expression, and therefore drafts his poem in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken thought entirely dissolve into the Feeling."

(2) In the second place, the new circumstances must sanction a new form. What was quite right in the symphony, having regard to its peculiar purpose, will be quite wrong in the music-drama, where the purpose is altogether different. Nowhere, perhaps, is Wagner on safer ground, or more illuminative in his reasoning, than he is here. He shows how the symphony—like all purely abstract musical utterances—must adopt certain definite formal methods of procedure if it is to hang together at all. The growth of sonata-form in the eighteenth century was determined not by the arbitrary desires of individuals here and there, but by a deep underlying logic—a logic of the emotions—that ran unconsciously through them and through their hearers. It was this obscure, intuitive logic that made the need felt for a second subject in contrast with the first, for an exposition of these two subjects, for their working out, and for their final recapitulation; it was this logic that determined the contrast of character between the different movements. The kaleidoscope had to be perpetually bringing the picture before us in new aspects; the essence of dramatic working is development; the essence of "all forms arisen from the March or Dance" is change. Thus the new form for dramatic music must be sought in the nature of that genre, not in the nature of a quite alien genre. In the essay On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems, Wagner points out, as we have seen, how the laws of drama and the laws of symphony are at variance. Let me quote the gist of his remarks again. "It will be obvious that, in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this (symphonic) form, the necessity must at once arise to either sacrifice the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former"; whereupon follows the criticism of the Leonora overture which I have already quoted. When he reaches the point that a new form would have been necessary to allow free and consistent play to Beethoven's ideas in the Leonora, he asks, "What, now, would that form be?" and replies, "Of necessity a form dictated by the subject of portrayal and its logical development."

Having briefly sketched out the two leading principles of Wagner's theory, let us now leave the second, which is perfectly clear in itself and in all its implications, and return to the first, the implications of which are perhaps not quite so clear. Wagner himself held that as he grew in artistic wisdom, his opera-poems came closer and closer to the ideal form, in which there should be just as much music as the poetry required, and just as much poetry as the music required. He admitted that the poems of Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, TannhÄuser, and Lohengrin were not quite all they should be; they were simply stages in his evolution. But he was willing to submit the poem of Tristan to the severest possible test of conformity with his ideal. "Upon that work," he says, "I consent to your making the severest claims deducible from my theoretic premisses: not because I formed it on any system, for every theory was clean forgotten by me; but since here I moved with fullest freedom and the most utter disregard of every theoretic scruple...."

What now is the great advantage, according to Wagner's theory, that the musical dramatist has over the poet or the novelist? Simply this, that he can discard all the more or less uninspired matter that they require in order to make their purpose clear, and plunge at once into the heart of his subject. Take, as an example, this very poem of Tristan and Isolde. The poet or the novelist, before he can begin to move you, must descend to a relatively unemotional plane in order to acquaint your understanding with certain positive facts it is essential it should know. He must tell you who Tristan and Isolde were, when and where they lived, what was their relation to the other people of the drama, and a score of other things that can hardly be made emotional in themselves. A long poem or drama is bound, by the nature of the case, to have a certain amount of dross scattered about among its gold; the beautiful appeals to Feeling are only made into a coherent story or picture by the use of this less emotional tissue. From this difficulty the musical dramatist escapes; in music he has a powerful engine that enables him to dispense with all these mere wrappings of his Feeling, and reach directly and immediately to the Feeling itself. He avoids the arbitrary, and takes up his stand at once in the centre of the "purely human." Thus Wagner needs no preliminary fumbling about for his tragedy; the first bar of the overture transports you at once into the world and the mood to which the poet must drag you through twenty explanatory pages. "All that detailed description and exhibition of the historico-conventional which is requisite for making us clearly understand the events of a given, remote historical epoch, and which the historical novelist or dramatist of our times has therefore to set forth at such exhaustive length—all this I could pass over." He concerns himself not with historical subjects but with the simple myth or legend, for "the legend, in whatever age or nation it occurs, has the merit of seeing nothing but the purely human content of that age and nation, and of giving forth that Content in a form peculiar to itself, of sharpest outline, and therefore swiftly understandable." The musician, in fact, must discard everything but the purely human; he must take a poetical subject of which this is the core, and then kindle it into incandescence by means of music. In Tristan, says Wagner, "I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outward form. A glance at the volume of this poem will show you at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearings of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." The object, of course, was—to recur to a previous order of imagery—to reduce the amount of dross in the work and to increase the amount of pure gold; all the available space ought to be devoted not to demonstrations or recitals of fact but to the evocation of feelings, to "exhibiting the inner springs of action, those inner soul-motives which are finally and alone to stamp the Action as a necessary one."

So much, then, is clear. Without questioning one of Wagner's contentions—accepting his theory as true, without disagreeing with his data or his reasoning—we come to these positions:—

1. Poetry without music is lacking in expression, in appeal to Feeling: music without poetry is lacking in the power to give a definite direction to Feeling.
2. An art-form therefore must be sought that will be an amalgam of the two, with the advantages of each and the defects of neither.
3. In proportion as the advantages are retained and the defects eliminated will the new art-form approach ideal perfection.
4. The musical defect to be guarded against is the attempt to subject dramatic music to the laws of symphonic music: this is easily overcome, and there only remains the poetic defect to be avoided, i.e.
5. All poetic or verbal material that cannot be "musicalised," or caught up into the spirit of music, is superfluous and harmful; therefore in proportion as the music-drama is perfected will this kind of material tend to disappear.

So far, so good. The point remaining to be considered is this: can we ever totally eliminate this non-musical material from opera? Let us say, for example, in terms of the Wagnerian Æsthetic, that a good opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet will be nearer artistic perfection than Shakespeare's play, because it will dispense with all the poet's clumsy methods of reaching the Feeling through the viscous waters of the Understanding—that it will concern itself only with the "purely human," with the "inner springs of action" of the souls of the characters, and that it will raise these—to use a term borrowed from electrical science—to the highest potential, the highest incandescence. Granting all this, let us then press our question a point further still. There will, let us admit, be less non-emotional matter in the opera than in the drama, less hard, incalcitrant material that cannot be emotionalised, but that has to be there because without it the structure cannot hang together. Admitting that there will be less of it, will any one venture to say that there will be none of it in the opera? I think not. Â priori considerations apart, an appeal to practical experience will soon disillusionise us. Of all the thousands of operas that have been written since opera began, not one, outside the works of Wagner, will pass successfully through the ordeal. Of Wagner's operas, Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, TannhÄuser, and Lohengrin are, by his own admission, as I have already shown, put out of court. The Ring will certainly not stand the test; Parsifal certainly will not; The Mastersingers certainly will not. There only remains Tristan, of the form and substance of which he himself was justly proud. It will pass the judges with a lighter sentence than any of the others; but will it be dismissed without a stain on its character? By no means. Even in the pure, dazzling, magnificent metal of Tristan itself we find embedded, here and there, a refractory piece of alien ore, of raw material not yet put through the subtle alchemy that must divinise it. If then this last straw fails us, where shall we look for salvation? The only answer can be that salvation on these lines is impossible. Reduce the coarser, explanatory, unemotional matter of opera—the merely utilitarian stuff, the paste that binds the more precious things together—reduce this as you will, some of it you are still bound to retain in opera, for without it opera cannot have enough intellectual, dramatic consistency to ensure our getting hold of it. And if (1) granting the premisses, the reasoning by which the Wagnerian theorem is supported has been flawless, and (2) the brain that strove to embody that theorem in practical art was an organ mightier than anything the sons of men are likely to see for a very long time to come—then, I take it, there is only one conclusion possible, that the failure occurs through attempting to realise the theory in the wrong medium. To phrase it differently, the logic of the case is not rigorously enough applied at the last stage, when it comes to be pushed to its ultimate conclusion. Always bearing in mind that, according to Wagner, the strong point of the musical drama, as compared with any other poetic art-form, is that the non-emotional matter in it can be reduced to a minimum, let us ask ourselves whether a form cannot be found in which even this minimum can be dispensed with. The answer will be that the necessary conditions are united in the symphonic poem, which is therefore the true heir of Wagner's theory, and has been too long kept out of its lawful inheritance.

Two points now fall to be considered: (1) Can the affiliation of the symphonic poem to the Wagnerian theory be properly established, and the superiority of its rights of succession over those of its half-brother opera be fully demonstrated; and (2) are there no defects, suggested by Wagner himself, that unfit the symphonic poem to hold sway over opera?

The first point need not detain us long; least of all can the thorough-going Wagnerian here have much right to protest. If Wagner's reasoning is right his conclusion must be accepted—namely, that the less waste matter you have in your poetic music the better. Now he himself attributed the failure to "musicalise" the poetic subject completely to this cause, that instead of addressing the Feeling we were too prone to address the Understanding. He tells us, too, that words are the channel through which the Understanding operates. In all cases, then, where words are employed, there is a strong probability of their carrying us with them further along the path of mere Understanding than the ideal art requires; and diminish this feature as much as you can, some of it is still bound to persist. So that your only resort is to find a form that shall make use of all the advantages of poetic music and keep clear of this one defect. This form is unquestionably the symphonic poem. It does eliminate the defects that attend the use of words, for it dispenses with words; it meets Wagner's demand that music shall not sing merely for its own sake, but for a poetic purpose; it can order its structure upon the same lines as opera, i.e. the themes are conceived at once in terms of musical beauty and in terms of poetic appropriateness, and they suggest, by the modifications they undergo, the changing aspect of the personages and scenes of the drama. A symphonic poem is the concentrated essence of opera; it is to the opera as Bovril is to the ox.

But Wagner himself, it may be said, expressly warned us against programme music as being an artistic error. That is quite true. Wagner's argumentation here, however, is exceptionally weak. It is clear that he had no properly thought-out principles to guide him at this point. To begin with, his differentiation of programme music from the symphonic poem is thoroughly fallacious. If programme music is music based upon a programme—i.e. upon a literary subject—then every symphonic poem, nay, every opera, necessarily belongs to that category. The truth probably is that Wagner clung to this false distinction because he thought it would help him out of an embarrassing situation. He found himself compelled to say something publicly upon Liszt's symphonic poems; and I am afraid his essay on that subject is hardly a model of the ingenuous. To condemn Liszt was, of course, impossible for many reasons. At all costs he had to be commended; but if we critically examine the essay of eighteen pages, we shall find that surprisingly little of it really deals with Liszt's work. There is much declamation, and much Æsthetic theorizing—most of it very good; but surprisingly little rational criticism of Liszt's symphonic poems. Practically all that Wagner does is (1) to admit the  priori proposition that it is just as sensible to write a symphonic poem as a symphony—he asks "whether March or Dance ... can supply a worthier motive of form than, for instance, a mental picture of the ... characteristic features in the deeds and sufferings of an Orpheus, a Prometheus, and so forth," and whether it is not nobler for music to take its Form "from an imagined Orpheus or Prometheus motive, than from an imagined march or dance motive"; and (2) to contrast disparagingly the procedure of Berlioz with that of Liszt. But the final impression the essay leaves on me is that it was a duty which Wagner performed rather unwillingly. He did not want to say too much for Liszt's music; so on the one hand he argued that at any rate the symphonic poem was permissible, and on the other hand that it was preferable to the programme music of Berlioz.

Here his distinctions and his reasoning will not hold. He objected in Berlioz, as we have seen, to the way in which the musician followed the literary clues of his subject, without recasting these so as to fit them in with a scheme that was musically logical. Now it is absurd to condemn programme music en masse because a particular man blunders in it; Berlioz may quite well be wrong [34] and programme music still be right. But take Wagner's criticism as it stands, and correlate it with the previous arguments of this paper, and what is the conclusion to be drawn? Just this, that if Wagner could not, as he says, "hold on to scenic motives not present" before his eye, he was not listening to the music in the proper way. It is not necessary, for most of us, to have a poetic scene put visibly before us; we can easily reconstruct it in imagination; and what the symphonic poem does is to give us the musical feeling the opera aims at giving us, and to tell us to imagine the occasion of it all, instead of putting this occasion on a stage before us. The prelude and finale of Tristan constitute a rudimentary symphonic poem, in the hearing of which we never ask to hear a word or see an actor. A more explicit symphonic poem does the same thing on a larger scale. We can, if we like, make a three-act opera out of Romeo and Juliet, but on Wagner's own principles the essence of the thing is contained in Tchaikovski's concert overture. And if I am told that this theme is to be associated with the lovers, this with Friar Lawrence, and so on, then during the playing of the overture the whole drama is acted in my brain, and is quite as real for me as if I beheld artificial men and women acting artificially in an artificial stage-setting. So with Ein Heldenleben. Nothing would be easier than to make an opera out of this subject; but who wants the opera, with its eking out of the parts that really do matter with a number of parts that really do not matter, with all its stage absurdities, its posturing actors? We have the diffuse emotions of three or four hours concentrated into the rich emotions of forty minutes. We have the whole life of the hero just as we would get it in the opera; but the small basket of strawberries has fewer pieces of grit in it than the bigger basket. [35]

I hope I shall not be taken to mean that the opera is a false and useless form, and that composers should henceforth all work frenziedly at the manufacture of symphonic poems. My position is that for certain purposes we must have opera; by it alone can certain needs of our soul be satisfied, just as—though Wagner did not know it—for the satisfaction of other needs we must resort to pure poetry and pure music. But for certain other satisfactions we must have recourse to the symphonic poem; and this form, I contend, is the only form that can be deduced logically from Wagner's own Æsthetic theory. As I have tried to show, in the symphonic poem alone can you get music fertilised by a poetic purpose, and yet, by eliminating the actual words, avoid the intrusion even of the minimum of non-emotional substance. In The Ring and the Book, Browning describes how the artificer has to fashion a gold ring. In order to make his material workable, he has to blend an alloy with the gold; but when the circle is complete he drives out the alloy with a spirt of acid, leaving the pure metal only. That is the symphonic poem; the opera is the ring with the alloy left in it. If perfection of form is what we want—the consummate, intimate transfusion of matter and form, the "truly unitarian" form to which Wagner aspired—then it is in the symphonic poem that we must look for it, not in the opera.

Only one objection that Wagner might urge against this has, I believe, not yet been considered. He expressly laid it down, it may be pointed out, that it is not sufficient for us to carry the external, moving, concrete features of the drama in our heads; they must be set before us, in the fulness of real life, on the stage. "Not a Programme," he says in Zukunftsmusik, "which rather prompts the troublous question 'Why'? [36] than stills it—not a Programme, then, can speak the meaning of the symphony; no, nothing but a stage performance of the Dramatic Action itself." This was an opinion he always maintained; but after all is it anything more than a mere obiter dictum? Wagner had a passion for seeing anything and everything upon the stage—a passion that at times becomes rather childish, for he was quite unconscious of a number of the absurdities of his characters and his situations that are painfully evident to the audience. Truth to tell, his notions of the stage were just a little crude at times; in any case he did not see that even the best acting in opera is per se bound to be inferior to the best acting in drama—people cannot sing and at the same time be wholly natural in demeanour. I take it, then, that his predilection for stage-settings was a purely personal one; it has no logical relation to his general Æsthetic theory; and we can refuse to be bound by it. We all like opera, and we tolerate its absurdities and its intellectual deficiencies because we know these are inseparable from it; but once more it has to be said that from these stage absurdities the symphonic poem is free. Mr. Arthur Symons has recently pointed out the strain that is put on our sense of the ridiculous when what should be merely a symbol is thrust visibly before our eyes. The Stranger in Ibsen's Lady from the Sea is very impressive as a symbol of the call of the sea to the blood of Ellida Wangel; but when an ordinary human being in a tourist suit comes on the stage and purports to be the symbol incarnate, our sense of the poetry of the thing is severely tried. So with the scene where Wotan attempts to bar Siegfried's progress with his spear, and Siegfried shatters it with his sword. This is all very fine as a symbol of "the last ineffectual stand of constituted authority against the young, untrammelled individuality of the future"; but what the candid eye sees on the stage is a young man chopping in two a piece of stick held by an old man, who picks up the pieces, walks off with them, and says, "Advance! I cannot stop thee!" What is very impressive, merely conceived imaginatively as a symbol, becomes unimpressive when narrowed down to ordinary men with legs and arms, holding "property" swords and spears.

Opera, indeed, has no lack of absurdities, and this will always prevent it taking rank as the highest form of dramatic art; and Wagner, as I have said, must be held to have taken some of his own stage absurdities and puerilities with quite abnormal seriousness. It stands to reason, too, that the symphonic poem suffers from no such disabilities. If Wagner's theory be correct, then a symphonic poem on a given subject can follow, as regards its musical form, the lines laid down for it by the poetic impulse, just as efficiently as an opera on the subject could do; while it avoids the "padding" that is inseparable from opera by simply giving us, in our programme, an outline of the poetic subject, instead of daubing the subject over, from head to foot, with pseudo-poetry that rarely rises above the level of rhymed or rhythmic prose. As for the inability to follow the poetic motives of the subject from the programme—well, I fancy we are not all so imperfectly endowed with imagination as Wagner seems to have been here. I quite admit that there are minds like his in this respect, to which poetic music conveys little or nothing without speech and action—that are unable, while they listen, say to Ein Heldenleben, to keep all the details of the story moving at equal pace with the music; but the sufficient answer to such people is that other people can do this. To sum it all up, the symphonic poem is theoretically deducible from Wagner's own Æsthetic; while in practice, if we miss in it some of the elements that make opera interesting, we are compensated by the absence of other elements that make opera tedious and absurd.

XI

One point still remains to be discussed, though we need only touch on it very briefly. How far can music represent external things—ought it, indeed, to try to represent external things at all? It was Schopenhauer, I think, who said that music was not a representative but a presentative art. But that was very superficial psychologising even in his day, and it is still more superficial in ours. The whole problem is exceedingly simple if people, in their anxiety to prove that music cannot "imitate," would not confuse it unnecessarily. Heaven only knows how much bastard Æsthetic has been born of that unfortunate remark of Beethoven's about the Pastoral Symphony, which we have already had occasion to examine. As a specimen, look at this quotation from Victor Cousin, intended to demonstrate, in its own way, that music must not be "painting," but only an "expression of emotion." "Give the wisest symphonist a tempest to render. Nothing is easier than to imitate the whistling of the winds and the noise of the thunder. But by what combination of ordered sounds could he present to our sight the lightning flashes which suddenly rend the veil of night, and that which is the most terrific aspect of the tempest, the alternate movement of the waves, now rising mountain high, now sinking and seeming to fall headlong into bottomless abysses? If the hearer has not been told beforehand what the subject is, he will never divine it, and I defy him to distinguish a tempest from a battle. In spite of scientific skill and genius, sounds cannot represent forms. Music, rightly advised, will refuse to enter upon a hopeless contest; it will not undertake to express the rise and fall of the waves and other like phenomena; it will do better; with sounds it will produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest. It is thus that Haydn will become the rival, even the conqueror of the painter, because it has been given to music to move and sway the soul even more profoundly than painting." [37]

The point is, be it observed, that unless you were told beforehand, you could not say whether a given orchestral piece was meant to represent a tempest or a battle; the composer is therefore advised not to try to paint a tempest, but to "produce in our soul the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest." Why, how in the name of all Æsthetic innocence does this help us? How are we, in the absence of a verbal indication, to distinguish "the feelings which successively arise in us during the various scenes of the tempest" from the feelings which would arise in us during the various scenes of a battle? We only hear, that is, a certain mass of sound; how are we to know, from the mere "feeling" this arouses in us, that it refers to a battle or a tempest or anything else? What man, for example, listening to solemn music, can possibly know whether it is meant to describe the death of Napoleon, the funeral of Mr. Gladstone, the poetic contemplation of nature, the opening of the St. Louis Exhibition, the life-work of John Stuart Mill, or anything else under the sun? The "feelings" are perfectly incompetent to pierce through the indefinite tone to the definite scene that inspired it. What the composer has to do is to tell us what this definite scene is; nobody, for example, would have guessed that the fourth movement of Schumann's Rhenish symphony had its origin in the installation of the Archbishop of Geissel as Archbishop of Cologne, if the composer himself had not told us so. Nobody would have known that a certain part of the Pastoral Symphony represents a peasant's gratitude after a storm, if Beethoven had not said so himself. The "feelings" are no more reliable guides in cases of this kind than the "painting" is. And if the composer has to give us a verbal clue in order to let us know definitely what feelings he is representing, he has only to give us a verbal clue to make it quite clear to us what his painting is intended to represent; and there is no more odium in needing the verbal clue in the latter case than there is in the former.

No one in his senses has ever pretended that music alone could depict external things so accurately that we could recognise them infallibly at once, without any assistance from the sight, as in opera, or from a verbal accompaniment. As M. Alfred Ernst has put it: "It is not a question of painting an object—music could not succeed in doing that; nor is it a question of reproducing exactly the sounds of nature, such as the murmur of flowing water, the rumbling of thunder, the song of birds; but, when these phenomena are in the subject that is being treated, of recalling them to the mind by means of tone.... Thus conceived, music does not materialise itself in becoming descriptive; it would be more accurate to say that it spiritualises the phenomena of nature...." And he shows how Mozart, for example, employs description. "In his Don Juan he has more than once translated the gesture, the mimic, of his personages. We may cite, for instance, the ascending scales in the orchestra in the duel between the Commandant and Don Juan. The figures in the bass refer to the old man, those above to Juan; each time that one of the two adversaries steps towards the other and attacks, this figure comes out, strident, quick as the thrust of a sword, and at the moment when Don Juan presses the Commandant, lunges at him time after time, strikes him and kills him, the violin scales succeed each other without giving the auditor time to breathe.... At the beginning of the sextet, when Leporello tries to slip away, fearing to be taken for Don Juan, the orchestra reproduces his stealthy movements; we see the unhappy wretch creeping along cautiously, his back bent, feeling round for a way out." [38] Nor does one need to be reminded of the numerous pieces of "description," of "imitation," in Wagner—of the water-music, the fire-music, the swish of Klingsor's spear, the voices of the forest, and so on. Every dramatic, or, indeed, vocal writer is full of passages of this kind; it simply cannot be avoided in music that aims at something beyond abstract note-spinning.

But in every case, as we can see, the music is not left to tell its story alone; we are not compelled to guess the subject represented merely from the tones themselves. The subject is told us in some way or other—we see Don Juan thrusting at the Commandant, or the spear flying at Parsifal's head, or the fire licking the couch of Brynhilde; or else there is, in the words of the song or opera, some suggestion of the external thing that is being illustrated in the music. And in the symphonic poem, all that we require in order that everything may be perfectly clear is a statement, in the programme, of the picture upon which the music is based. I am not expected to know, merely from the tones alone, what the "giant" motive in the Rheingold is meant to represent; but when I am told that it relates to the giants, I can take delight in the expressiveness of its lumbering, unwieldy movements. Similarly I must be told that the opening pages of Also sprach Zarathustra are meant as a representation of the majesty and spaciousness of Nature. And—again to draw upon the argument of the foregoing pages—there is nothing that can be done in this line in the song or the opera that cannot be done quite as effectually in the symphonic poem, if composers would only give their hearers the same full insight into their literary intentions as the song or opera writer does, and if hearers would only take the trouble to master these intentions before they listen to the music that is based upon them. If they would do this, their pleasure in the symphonic poem would be enormously increased; everything in it would be alive to them. For myself, at any rate, to listen to Till Eulenspiegel or Ein Heldenleben or Don Quixote is not only to enjoy the music but to see the whole action as clearly as if I were reading it in a book or watching it on the stage. I get none of the boredom, none of the unfortunate provocations to laughter, that are inseparable from that artificial, stagey form of art, the opera. I miss, of course, some of the factors that make opera so glorious—the inexpressible thrill communicated by the human voice, the quickening of the pulse that is given by the movements of the actors and the catastrophes of the stage; but on the other hand I am spared a great many things, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that my sense of form is receiving the purest, most undiluted pleasure it is possible for it to receive in poetic music. The case for programme music is quite as strong as the case for opera or for the symphony. That many stupid things have been done in its name, that many fools and weaklings have fought under its banner, counts for nothing; how many symphonies, how many operas, are there that the world would willingly let die! The rightness of the form is not affected by the wrongness of the people who choose to work in it; and that the form itself is essentially right, I have, I hope, given adequate proof. Finally, to the question of how far music is justified in trying to suggest external things, we can only say that it is better not to be too dogmatic. Things that would have seemed impossible a hundred years ago are done with ease to-day. Who would believe that a windmill could be represented in music? Yet Strauss's windmill in Don Quixote is really extraordinarily clever and satisfying; he suggests wonderfully, too, the caracoling of the horse as the knight puts him through his paces. His pictorial faculty, indeed, is something unique in the history of music; Wagner's is only an imperfect instrument by the side of it. The representative power of music is growing day by day. The only Æsthetic fact we can be sure of is this, that no piece of representation will be tolerated unless it is at the same time music. That is the ultimate test; the imitative passages that make us smile are the passages that are merely imitative, without sufficient musical charm to keep them alive for us. But here, of course, we simply get back to the position already advanced in this article—that in all poetic music there must be as thorough a satisfaction as possible not only of the literary or the pictorial but of the musical sense.