For the Blood Is the Life. Francis Marion Crawford

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ we can associate with people. If none of those things really happened here, it seems very simple to imagine that they might have happened, and that is the same thing in history."

      "Absolutely the same," assented Augustus, whose favourite theory was that nobody knew anything.

      "Very good," continued the composer. "Romance is then the possibility of associating ideas of people with an object presented to the senses, apart from the mere beauty of the object. I say that much magnificent music pleases intensely by the senses alone. Music is a dialogue of sounds. The notes put questions, and answer them. In fugue-writing the second member is scientifically called the 'answer.' When there is no answer, or if the answer is bad, there is no music at all. The ear tells that. But such a musical dialogue of sounds may please intensely by the mere satisfaction of the musical sense; or it may please because, besides the musical completeness, it suggests human feelings and passions and so appeals to a much larger part of our nature. I do not think the great pyramid suggests feelings and passions, in spite of all its symmetry. It may have roused a sympathetic thrill in the breast of Cheops, but it does not affect us as we are affected by the interior of Saint Peter's in Rome, or by Westminster Abbey, or by Giotto's tower. These are romantic buildings, for they are not only symmetrical, but they also tell us a tale of human life and death and hope and sorrow which we can understand. To my mind romantic music is that which expresses what we feel besides satisfying our sense of musical fitness. I think that Mozart was the founder of that school—I laboured for it myself — Wagner has been the latest expression of it."

      "I adore Wagner," said Diana. " But it always seems to me that there is something monstrous in his music. Nothing else expresses what I mean."

      "The monstrous' element can be explained," answered Chopin. " Wagner appeals to a vast mass of popular tradition which really exists only in Germany and Scandinavia. He then brings those traditions suddenly before our minds with stunning force, and gives them an overpowering reality. I leave it to you whether the impression must not necessarily be monstrous when we suddenly realise in the flesh, before our eyes, such tales as that of Siegmund and Siegfried, or of Parzifal and the Holy Grail. It is great, gigantic—but it is too much. I admit that I experience the sensation, dead as I am, when I stand among the living at Bayreuth and listen. But I do not like the sensation. I do not like the frantic side of this modern romantism. The delirious effects and excesses of it stupefy without delighting. I do not want to realise the frightful crimes and atrocious actions of mythological men and beasts, any more than I want to see a man hanged or guillotined. I think romance should deal with subjects not wholly barbarous, and should try to treat them in a refined way, because no excitement which is not of a refined kind can be anything but brutalising. Man has enough of the brute in him already, without being taught to cultivate his taste for blood by artificial means. Perhaps I am too sensitive—I hate blood. I detest commonplace, but I detest even more the furious contortions of ungoverned passion."

      "But you cannot say that Wagner is exaggerated in his effects," argued Diana.

      "No — they are well studied and the result is stupendous when they are properly reproduced. He is great — almost too great. He makes one realise the awful too vividly. He produces intoxication rather than pleasure. He is an egotist in art. He is determined that when you have heard him you shall not be able to listen to any one else, as a man who eats opium is disgusted with everything when he is awake. I believe there is a pitch in art at which pleasure becomes vicious; the limit certainly exists in sculpture and painting as well as in literature, just as when a man drinks too much wine he is drunk. The object of art is not to make life seem impossible, any more than the object of drinking wine is to lose one's senses. Art should nourish the mind, not drown it. To say that Wagner's own mind, and the minds of some of his followers were of such strong temper that nothing less than his music could excite them pleasurably, is not an answer. The Russian mujik will drink a pint of vodka in the early morning, and when he has drunk it he is gayer than the Italian who has taken a little cup of coffee. You would probably think his gaiety less refined than that of the Italian, though there is more of it. It will also be followed by a headache — but the headache, the moral headache after an orgy of modern art is worse than the headache from too much vodka. It is like Heine's 'toothache in the heart.' He used to say that the best filling for that was of lead and a certain powder invented by Berthold Schwarz. Romantism can go too far, like everything else. The Hermes of Olympia was descended from a clumsy but royal race of Egyptian granite blocks; but he is the historical ancestor of the vilest productions of modern sculpture. Modern art is drunk — drunk with the delight of expressing excessively what should not be expressed at all, drunk with the indulgence of the senses until the intellect is clouded and dull, or spasmodically frantic by turns, drunk with the vulgar self-satisfied vanity of a village coxcomb. Ah, for Art's sake let poor art be kept sober until the heaven-born muses deign to pay us another visit!"

      "Amen ! " exclaimed Heine, devoutly. " The same things are true of literature. But I admire Wagner, nevertheless, though his music terrifies me. I think Mozart was the Raphael, Wagner the Michelangelo of the opera. Any one may choose between the two, for it is a matter of taste. But in music the development from the one to the other seems to me more rational than it has been in literature."

      "How do you mean ? " asked Gwendoline.

      "I think music has advanced better than literature. They were both little boys once, but the one has grown into a great, dominating, royal giant — the other into a greedy, snivelling, dirty-nosed, foulmouthed, cowardly ruffian. There are bad musicians and good writers, of course. The bad musicians do little harm, but the good writers occupy the position of Lot in the condemned cities — they are the mourners at the funeral of romance. The mass of fiction makers to-day are but rioters at the baptismal feast of Realism, the Impure."

      "What a sweeping condemnation!" exclaimed Augustus. " I thought that you yourself were a supporter of realism, or declared yourself to be, though your lyrics are certainly very romantic."

      "I was the renegade monk from the monastery of the romantists," said Heine. "A Frenchman once told me so. But when I grew old and married, I hankered for the dear old atmosphere, and my little French wife helped me to breathe it again."

      "Our great modern realist, Ernest Renan, says of himself, half regretfully, that he feels like a religieux manque" said Augustus.

      "I can understand that," answered Heine. " But when I was young the word romance stunk in my nostrils. It meant Platen."

      "And what does it mean to you now?" inquired Gwendoline, who wanted to lead the dead poet back to the point.

      " You would have a definition, madam ?" he replied. " Romance is a beautiful woman, with a dead pale skin, and starry eyes and streaming raven hair, and when I look into her sweet dark face I could wear a ton of armour on my back and cleave a Saracen to the chine with my huge blade for her sake, or go barefoot to Jerusalem, or even read Platen's poetry all through. But she looks so strangely at me with her great black eyes, that I am never quite sure whether she is quite real and quite serious. I only know that she is very, very beautiful, and that I love her to distraction."

      "That is a definition from fairyland," said Chopin with his soft sweet smile.

      "And you want one from the library of a student, I suppose," answered Heine. "Romance is the modern epic. I forget who said so, but it is true in a limited way. The romantic languages were those Latin tongues which were not Latin, but Berlinish."

      "In other words — slang," suggested Augustus.

      "Slang — exactly. Latinus grossus qui facit tremare pilastros, as the Roman schoolboy calls it —"

      "Please translate ! " exclaimed Lady Brenda.

      "If it means anything it means the Romantic dialect — a coarse rough Latin that would make columns СКАЧАТЬ