LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MEANING IN MUSIC AND ART.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—Is there not some obliquity of vision about " the literary point of view" common to your Arm-Chair• Commentator and many other critics? Are "the melodies in music" "always comprehensible to the meanest capacity"? Or were it not truer to say, with Schumann, that " melody is the war-cry of Dilettantism, and, of course, without melody there can be no music. But we know well what Dilettantism means by melody : a pretty tune,' of simplest rhythm, easy to catch.' But there are melodies of quite another stamp from this : melodies which greet one with their cipipigt.coy Yiltaal.ccc,—their many-twinkling laughter•,' wherever one opens one's Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, which soon put one out of conceit with the indigent monotony of the tunes of the opera."
Again, when your Commentator lightly comprehends modern music under the same censure as the " Briar-Rose " picture, as written in a language " independent of meaning," does he not assume an analogy demonstrably false between painting, bound fast in the fetters of imitation, and instrumental music, wholly free from them ? And "music married to im- mortal verse" may be called almost free, for even if marriage were a bondage, music is here the male element; so that Goethe's dictum holds true of " The Messiah " as of the Eroica symphony, that " in music the worth of art appears most eminent, since it requires no material whose effect must be deducted; it is wholly Form and Power "—it imitates no
earthly prototype, though, to save the xciart 14.4cnarc article of our creed as devout Aristotelians, we may try to hear in it, with Darwin, the echoes of the world's love-song ; or, with Newman, " the Divine Attributes, the Magnificat of Saints, the laws of Divine government." (Goethe, too, hears in Bach "the eternal harmony, as in the bosom of the Creator before the making of the worlds.") So far, and only so far, Music is, and must be, " independent of meaning," though its subjects are, as Mendelssohn said, more definite than words.
One other word. Of good vocal music it is not true that "the words are usually not worth hearing." Let your Com- mentator abjure the English drawing-room ballad, and seek, in Schumann, Schubert, and the other great song composers, " music married to immortal verse," instead of neither " verse " nor " music," but merest twaddle.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
