Chapter VIII: Epilogue: the Meaning of Music 203 (4)

One of the constant temptations of the biographer is that of seizing on some salient trait in his subject, magnifying it beyond all relation to others which supplement or modify it, and portraying an eccentric rather than a rounded personality, a monster rather than a man. Human nature is complex, many-sided, even self-contradictory to any but the most penetrative view; and so slender are the resources of literature for dealing with such a paradox as a man, that writers, resorting to simplification, sacrifice fullness to intelligibility. In books Napoleon is apt to be denied all scruples, Keats all virility, Marcus Aurelius all engaging folly; the real men were probably not so simple. It is certain, at any rate, that Tschaïkowsky, the greatest of Russian musicians, one of the two greatest of all composers since Wagner, cannot have been the mere incarnation of concentrated gloom that his critics have drawn. Some worthier powers than that of eloquent lamenting must have contributed to mold him. He was not simply a sort of neurasthenic Jeremiah with a faculty for orchestration.

It is only too easy and plausible, to be sure, to label him with one of those insidiously blighting epithets, «neurasthenic,» «decadent,» or «morbid.» He was, in fact, of an unfortunate heredity; his grandfather was epileptic, and his own symptoms pointed to an inherited nervous irritability. He was troubled more or less, all his life, by sleeplessness, fatigue, depression; and in his thirty-seventh year had a complete nervous collapse. But to discredit a man's insight by pointing out his physical misfortunes is as misleading as it is unkind. The fact that Schopenhauer, with whose temperament Tschaïkowsky's had much in common, had some insane and idiotic ancestors, and suffered much from his own unusual sensitiveness, does not in the least abate the truth of his philosophic teaching, though it may call attention to its one-sidedness. And so with the musician; knowledge of his personal twist ought not to make us deaf to whatever is universal in his utterance. We may remember that he reports but one aspect of the truth; but if he reports that truly, we may supply the other, and need not carp at the way he got his information. And indeed is it not, after all, an artificial circumscription of life to ignore its sadder verities, however moral Pharisees may stigmatize the perception of them as «morbid»? Has not disease, as well as health, its relation to our fortunes? Is not man's weakness an organic part of his strength, his fear of his courage, his doubt of his faith? That mere facile optimism which smiles blandly at all experience, with unseeing eyes, is as partial and false as the unrelieved pessimism into which the contemplation of it sometimes drives the sensitive. The world is no more all light than it is all shadow. All human life, with its suffering as well as its happiness, is one, and every sincere human experience has its own weight. And so Tschaïkowsky, in spite of grandfathers and symptoms, has a right to be respectfully heard.

The tendency to depreciate men like Tschaïkowsky and Schopenhauer generally rests on a confusion between what may be called sentimental and rational pessimism. The sentimental pessimist, the weak malcontent, who sees everything through the blue spectacles of egotism, or, like the cuttlefish, muddies his world with a black humor of his own, deserves indeed nothing better than a shrug. Like all other forms of sentimentality, his pessimism is based on selfishness. It is an emanation, not an insight. It is that form of colic, to use the figure of Thoreau, which makes him discover that the world has been eating green apples. Quite different from such a sentimentalist, however, is the sensitive man who feels impersonally the real evils of life. Such a man's experience is viewed by him, not as the end, but as the means, of insight. His own pains, however keen, appear to him but as symbols of the universal suffering of humanity, and however much his view may be subjectively jaundiced, it does not terminate in, but only begins with, the petty self. He is not a devotee of the luxury of woe. «A very noble character,» says Schopenhauer, «we always conceive with a certain tinge of melancholy in it--a melancholy that is anything but a continual peevishness in view of the daily vexations of life (for such peevishness is an ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of maliciousness), but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight into the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfulness of all living, not alone of one's own fortune.» And Tschaïkowsky, in describing Beethoven's Choral Symphony, writes, one can see, from precisely the same standpoint: «Such joy is not of this earth. It is something ideal and unrealizable; it has nothing in common with this life, but is only a momentary aspiration of humanity towards the holiness which exists only in the world of art and beauty; afterwards, this vale of earth, with its endless sorrow, its agony of doubt and unsatisfied hopes, seems still more gloomy and without issue. In the Ninth Symphony we hear the despairing cry of a great genius who, having irrevocably lost faith in happiness, escapes for a time into the world of unrealizable hopes, into the realm of broken-winged ideals.» Now undoubtedly these passages, especially the latter, are guilty of false emphasis; undoubtedly one can truly reply to Tschaïkowsky that the ideal is necessarily fairer than reality, as the flower is fairer than the soil from which it springs, that «this vale of earth» is not «without issue,» however gloomy, since it does in fact produce the ideal world of art and beauty, and that it is precisely the glory of hopes that they are unrealizable, and of happiness that it exists only on a level higher than that of finite life. But, however one-sided may be the opinions expressed, the attitude of mind is free from the taint of petty selfishness; it is frank, open-eyed, and manly. Such utterances proceed only from natures nobly human, however burdened with a greater sensibility than is common among men.

Of the extraordinary sensibility of Tschaïkowsky, his emotional intensity and impetuosity, which, discerning truly, critics have so often falsely interpreted, there can be no doubt. He was the subject and in some ways the victim, of hereditary instability, a tendency, so to speak, to go off at half-cock. In his life no trait comes out more conspicuously, and its association with his powerful intellect, with which it was always at odds, goes far to explain the anomalies and paradoxes of his music. We see it constantly in his acts, where, if we always remember that we are studying a great nature, which must be analyzed respectfully and without vulgar curiosity, we may learn much from observing it.

Peter Ilyitch Tschaïkowsky was born in a small Russian town in 1840. As a very small boy he showed his ardent patriotism by kissing the map of Russia, in his Atlas, and spitting at the rest of Europe. When his French nurse remonstrated, he explained that he had been careful to cover France with his hand. There already is his temperament--passionate and tender. The Tschaïkowsky family early moved to St. Petersburg, where Peter at first entered the School of Jurisprudence, and later obtained a post in the Ministry of Justice. All through his youth he was indolent, popular, fond of society, a graceful amateur who played _salon_ pieces at evening parties. That his serious interest in music was first aroused by his cousin's showing him how to «modulate» is rather amusing when we remember the virtuosity and daring of his mature harmonic style. «My cousin said it was possible to modulate from one key to another,» he says, «without using more than three chords. This excited my curiosity, and to my astonishment I found that he improvised whatever modulations I suggested, even from quite extraneous keys.» In 1861 he wrote to his sister that he was meditating a musical career, but was still in doubt whether he could pursue it successfully. «Perhaps idleness may take possession of me, and I may not persevere.» But a little later all doubts had vanished, he had given up his official work, withdrawn from society, and thrown himself with characteristic ardor into his studies. He now sometimes sat up all night working, and Rubinstein, his composition teacher at the Conservatory, tells how on one occasion he submitted no less than two hundred variations on a single theme. He made such good progress that in 1866, a few years after his graduation, he was appointed professor of harmony in the Moscow Conservatory.

From about this time date his first important compositions. «When first he came to live in Moscow,» writes his friend M. Kashkin, «although he was then six-and-twenty, he was still inexperienced and young in many things, especially in the material questions of life; but in all that concerned his work he was already mature, with a particularly elaborate method of work, in which all was foreseen with admirable judgment, and manipulated with the exactitude of the surgeon in operating.» M. Kashkin's testimony is a valuable corrective to the widespread impression that Tschaïkowsky composed in a mad frenzy of passion. No good work, in art any more than in science, is done without that calm deliberation which his strong mental grasp made possible to him. His early compositions were for the most part operas, and, it must be added, unsuccessful operas. «The Voievoda,» written in 1866, did not satisfy him, and he burned the score. «Undine,» composed in 1870, was not accepted by the theatrical authorities, who moreover mislaid the manuscript; Tschaïkowsky, years later, recovered and destroyed it. In 1873 «Snegourotchka,» a ballet, in spite of some musical beauty, failed for lack of dramatic interest. The success of «Kouznetz Vakoula,» produced a year later, was ephemeral. Thus it was not until «The Oprichnik,» which still holds the stage in Russia, was brought out, when Tschaïkowsky was thirty-four, that he made a pronounced success. The persistence with which he continued to labor during these years seems to be overlooked by those who consider him a mere prophet of lassitude and discouragement. Nor would such a man have undertaken and discharged the drudgery of journalistic criticism as did Tschaïkowsky in the four years from 1872 to 1876, when he was writing critiques for the Moscow papers. Whatever fluctuations of mood he may have undergone in these early years, and we may be sure they were many, his outward life was an example of equability, diligence and patience.

In 1877, however, there was some sort of tragic happening. That it was somehow connected with an unhappy marriage, that it resulted in a complete nervous breakdown, these things we know.[E] It is unnecessary to probe for more specific details; it is enough to note that for a long time he was broken and despairing, that through all the rest of his life his mental temper, never bright, was shadowed with a pathological gloom. He left the Conservatory suddenly, and was abroad a year. He wrote one of his friends, «On the whole, I am robust; but as regards my soul, there is a wound there that will never heal. I think I am _homme fini_.... Something is broken in me; my wings are cut and I shall never fly very high again.» He says that had he remained a day longer in Moscow he should have drowned himself, and it is said that he did go so far, in his terrible depression, as to stand up to his chest in the river one frosty September night, «in the hope of literally catching his death of cold, and getting rid of his troubles without scandal.»

But he took the better way; indeed, the best years, the quietest and most fruitful years, of his life were yet before him. As robust in character as he was sensitive and impetuous in temperament, he pulled himself together, and wrote in the next year his masterly Fourth Symphony, his best opera, «Eugene Oniegin,» said to be the second most popular opera in Russia, and many other strong works. He returned also, in the fall of 1878, to his post at the Conservatory, but, by the generosity of an anonymous lady,[F] was soon enabled to give up teaching and devote himself entirely to composition. From this time on, except for a conducting tour through western Europe in 1888, and one to America a few years later, he stayed chiefly in the country, in studious solitude. His mode of life at Maidanova, a little village where in 1885 he took a house, has been described by M. Kashkin, who often visited him. After working all the morning, and taking a simple but well-cooked dinner, Tschaïkowsky always went for a long walk, no matter what the weather. «Many of his works were planned and his themes invented,» we are told, «in these long rambles across country.» After tea he worked again until supper-time, and after supper the two friends, ordering a bottle of wine and dismissing the servant, would devote themselves to playing four-hand music. M. Kashkin tells one or two interesting stories of Tschaïkowsky at this period. His impulsiveness, it seems, took the form in money matters of a fairly reckless generosity. So lavishly did he shower coppers on all the peasant children in the neighborhood, that he could not go for his walk without being surrounded by them. In one afternoon he is said to have dispensed fourteen shillings of his own and all of M. Kashkin's small change. A friend once asked him where he «invested his capital.» Convulsed with laughter, he answered that his last investment of capital had been in a Moscow hotel, and that where his next would be he did not know.

The events of his tour in 1888 he has himself narrated with characteristic modesty and charm, in a fragment of diary. One can read between the lines that he was everywhere the center of admiring interest, but with fine literary instinct he constantly subordinates himself to the people and events through which he moved. How lovable are his vainly continued efforts to enjoy the music of Brahms, his eagerness to record the little kindnesses of his friends, his dignified reticence about his enemies, his hearty appreciation of work far inferior to his own! «I trust,» he says, «that it will not appear like self-glorification that my dithyramb in praise of Grieg precedes the statement that our natures are closely allied. Speaking of Grieg's high qualities, I do not at all wish to impress my readers with the notion that I am endowed with an equal share of them. I leave it to others to decide how far I am lacking in all that Grieg possesses in such abundance.» This warm appreciation of others, combined with so pathetic a lack of self-confidence that on more than one occasion he burned the score of a work which was coldly received, was so extreme in Tschaïkowsky that one of his friends pronounced him the least conceited of composers. Like all sensitive people, indeed, he was painfully conscious of social bonds; what was due him from others, and what in turn was due them from him--these intangibles, so easily forgotten by most men, were to him heavy realities. It is touching to see how dependent he was on the friendliness of the orchestra he was leading, and he was so impressible by criticism that long after his fame was established he could repeat word for word Hanslick's and Cui's early attacks upon him. On the other hand, M. Kashkin says that when he was conducting the works of others he was so sensible of his responsibility that his face wore a look of physical pain. When he was dying of cholera, in terrible agony, he thanked all about his bedside for the consideration they showed him, and his last remark reminds one of Charles the Second's «I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying.» He turned to his nephews after an unusually severe attack of nausea with the exclamation, «What a state I am in! You will have but little respect for your uncle when you think of him in such a state as this!» He died at St. Petersburg, in October, 1893.

By this time it will be clear enough that this was no puling complainer, but a delicate, high nature of great emotional intensity, subjected to a cruel interaction of temperament and circumstances, and yet capable of nobly constructive artistic work. His life, candidly examined, reveals modesty, dignity, elevation of ideal and of character. Yet it does illustrate, too, in many ways, that lack of emotional balance which underlies the peculiar quality of his music.

His mere method of approaching his art, in the first place, is significant. All his early efforts, as we have seen, were operas; he wrote altogether ten operas, and the Pathetic Symphony is the last fruit of a genius dramatic rather than symphonic. At thirty Tschaïkowsky was unable to read orchestral scores with ease, and preferred to study the classics through four-hand arrangements, while his distaste for the purest form of music was so great that he protested he could hardly keep awake through the performance of the masterly A-minor Quartet of Beethoven. This attitude toward the string quartet, which is in music what engraving or etching is in representative art, is very anomalous in a young composer, and shows so disproportionate an interest in the merely expressive side of music that it is hard to understand how Tschaïkowsky ever became so great a plastic master as his last two symphonies, for all their freight of passion, show him to be.

He never, in fact, wholly outgrew certain peculiarities which are direct results of his emotional instability, his slavery to mood. His persistent use of minor keys, for example, is, as the doctors say, symptomatic. The minor is naturally the medium of vague, subjective moods and fantasies, of aspiration, longing, and doubt; it is the vehicle of morbidly self-bounded thoughts, whose depressing gloom is equalled only by their seductive and malign beauty. Such thoughts we find too often in Chopin, Grieg, and, it must be added, in Tschaïkowsky. Of the first thirty songs he wrote, seventeen are in the minor mode. Of course too much should not be argued from a detail of this sort, but the major system is so naturally the medium of vigorously objective thought that we instinctively suspect the health of a mind which harps continually upon the minor. By a somewhat similar tendency towards self-involution, the natural result of intense emotionality, Tschaïkowsky inclines to monotony of rhythm; he gets hypnotized, as it were, by the regular pulsation of some recurring meter, and he continues it to the verge of trance. An example is the long pedal-point on D, in the curious 5-4 measure of the second movement of the Pathetic Symphony. This is like the wailing and rocking of the women of a savage tribe over the death of a warrior; it is at once wild and sinister. But perhaps the most striking evidence of this servitude to passion we are trying to trace in Tschaïkowsky is his constant use of climax. It seems to be quite impossible for him to preserve a mean-tone; he is always lashing himself into a fury, boiling up into a frenetic fortissimo, after which he lapses into coma until some phrase of melody or impulse of rhythm jostles his imagination again, and he presses on toward a new crisis. The effect of these cumulative whirlwinds of passion is often tremendous, is unique, indeed, in music; yet one longs sometimes in the midst of them for a less turbulent attitude, for the equable beauty of Bach or Mozart. The atmosphere is surcharged. One feels that this noble but willful spirit has sat too long in the close chamber of personal feeling, that one must throw wide the windows and let in the fresh winds of general human existence.

Yet, after all, the imperfections of Tschaïkowsky's music are due rather to the overwhelming richness of his emotions than to any shortcomings of mind; his case is an artistic embarrassment of riches, and his critic must avoid the fallacy of supposing, because his constructive power is sometimes inadequate, that it is ever meager. On the contrary, he is a man of great intellectual force. It is too bad to be so busy with Tschaïkowsky the pessimist that one forgets Tschaïkowsky the artist. His melodic fertility alone is enough to rank him with the great constructive musicians. His devotion to Mozart, and to the Italian opera-writers, was no accident; by the spontaneity and beauty of his melodies he has «approved himself their worthy brother.» Few more inspiring tunes can be found anywhere than the opening theme of his B-flat minor Piano Concerto, with its splendid and tireless vigor, or the broad, constantly unfolding cantilena of the second theme in the Fifth Symphony. His pages are plentifully scattered with phrases of rare grace, of a fresh and original charm. His harmony, too, for all its radicalism, is generally firm and well controlled, and his rhythm, however monotonous at times, is never vague. In polyphony (the simultaneous progress of different melodies) he is a powerful master, as any one may see by examining, for example, the masterly variations in his Orchestral Suite, opus 55. He is probably, on the whole, a greater master of general construction than any of his contemporaries except Brahms.

It is evident, then, that this curiously paradoxical personality was gifted with an intellectual strength that went far toward dominating the turbulent passions which, on the whole, it could not quite dominate. But one needs, after all, no careful statistical proof of the rationality of Tschaïkowsky's music. The fact that it survives, that it is widely listened to and loved, proves _a priori_ that, however tinged it may be with personal melancholy, it is not ultimately pessimistical or destructive in effect. For it is the happy fortune of art that it cannot fully voice the destructive forces of anarchy and despair. Its nature precludes the possibility, for anarchy is chaos, despair is confusion, and neither can be the subject of that clearly organic order which is art. The artist may, of course, express sadness; his work, if it is to be comprehensively human, must be reflective of the ebb as well as the flow of vital power. But it cannot mirror complete dejection, the absolute lapse of power; for without power there is no organization, and without organization there is no art. The melodic invention, the harmonic grasp, the rhythmic vigor, in a word the powerful musical articulation, everywhere present in Tschaïkowsky's best work, remove it far from the inarticulate moanings of despair. Such faculties as his are anything but disintegrating or decadent; however much individual sadness may attend their exercise, they are upbuilding and creative. Tschaïkowsky commands our admiration more than our pity because, in spite of the burdens of his temperament and the misfortunes of his experience, he contributed to beauty, and beauty is the standing confutation of evil.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Much of Tschaïkowsky's early work was for
piano, but most of his piano pieces are light if not trivial in
character. They are amusing to play over, but do not fairly represent
his genius. Seventeen of them are to be had in an album in the
Collection Litolff. The Sonata, op. 37, on the other hand, in spite
of its marked resemblance to Schumann's F-sharp minor Sonata, is
one of the finest of modern sonatas for piano. The Concertos are
masterly, but very difficult. Most of the important orchestral works
are arranged for four hands. The most interesting are the Pathetic
Symphony, the Fifth Symphony, which should be equally well known, the
Orchestral Suites, particularly the third, op. 55, with its charming
_Tema con Variazioni_, and the Overture, Romeo and Juliet. Of the
chamber-works, the third String Quartet, op. 30, and the Trio, are
especially good. Twenty-four of Tschaïkowsky's songs are published in
an album by Novello, Ewer & Co., and many separately by G. Schirmer
and others.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] Since the present paper was written, the biography of Tschaïkowsky by his brother has shown that in this unhappy marriage the only fault we can attribute to the composer was a quixotic chivalry in marrying a young woman who had declared her love for him. He married her from sympathy without loving her. Of course such a step could lead to nothing but misery; but however unwise, it was at least generous and honorable.

[F] This lady, according to the new biography, was Frau von Meck, the widow of a wealthy railway engineer. Her interest in Tschaïkowsky's work, and her generous gifts of money, were of great value to him all his life.

VII
JOHANNES BRAHMS

VII
JOHANNES BRAHMS

Of all the figures of modern music, brilliant and varied as they are, impressing one with the many-sidedness and wide scope of the art, there is perhaps only one, that of Johannes Brahms, which conveys the sense of satisfying poise, self-control and sanity. Others excel him in particular qualities. Grieg is more delicate and intimate, Dvořák warmer and clearer in color; Saint-Saëns is more meteoric, Franck more recondite and subtle, and Tschaïkowsky more impassioned; but Brahms alone has Homeric simplicity, the primeval health of the well-balanced man. He excels all his contemporaries in soundness and universality. In an age when many people are uncertain of themselves and the world, victims of a pervasive unrest and disappointment, it is solacing to find so heroic and simple a soul, who finds life acceptable, meets it genially, and utters his joy and his sorrow with the old classic sincerity. He is not blighted by any of the myriad forms of egotism,--by sentimentality, by the itch to be effective at all costs, or to be «original,» or to be Byronic or romantic or unfathomable. He has no «message» for an errant world; no anathema, either profoundly gloomy or insolently clever, to hurl at God. He has rather a deep and broad impersonal love of life; universal joy is the sum and substance of his expression.

It is hard to say whether the unique greatness of Brahms depends more on this emotional wholesomeness and simplicity or on the intellectual breadth and synthetic power with which it is combined. Probably the truth is that true greatness requires the interaction of the two. At any rate, Brahms is equally remarkable, whether considered as a man or as a musician, for both. In his personal character frankness, modesty, simple and homely virtue were combined with the widest sympathy, the most far-ranging intelligence, extreme catholicity and tolerance. In music he prized equally the simplest elements, like the old German folk-songs and the Hungarian dances, and the most complex artistic forms that are evolved from them by creative genius. Like Bach and Beethoven, he spanned the whole range of human interests; deep feeling fills his music with primitive expressiveness, and at the same time great intellectual power gives it the utmost scope and complexity. Lacking either trait he would not have been himself, he could not have performed his service to music.

There are many anecdotes illustrating the simple, large traits of the man. His pleasures were homely, his ambitions inward and vital. He cared little for fame, and was annoyed by the foolish adulation of the crowd. To a long and flowery speech addressed to him on the presentation of some sort of tribute he answered, with admirable brevity and utter prose, «Thank you very much.» Once when a party of his friends were gathered together to sample a rare old wine, somebody pompously announced, «What Brahms is among the composers, this Rauenthaler is among the wines.» «Ah,» snapped out Brahms, «then let's have a bottle of Bach now.» He often remarked that one could never hope to get upon the level of such giants as Bach and Beethoven; one could only work conscientiously in one's own field. He had the disgust of shams that one expects in so sincere a lover of the genuine, and the armor of roughness and sarcasm with which he protected himself against the pretentious was formidable. When the University of Cambridge offered him a degree, suggesting that he write a new work for the occasion, he replied that if any of his old works seemed good enough to them he should be happy to receive the honor, but that he was too busy to write a new one. There was about him something shaggy, bear-like, and one can imagine the foxes and weasels scattering at his growl.

But for everything fresh and genuine Brahms had the heartiest love. He is one of the innumerable army of great men of whom biography loves to relate that they always carried candy in their pockets for the children, and a lady described in a letter how she had seen him on the hotel piazza, on all-fours, clambered over by young playmates. He was on cordial terms with waiters and servants, and told Mr. Henschel with emotion the story of a serving-maid who lost her position in order to shield a careless postman, who, being married, could not afford to lose his. Another pretty story, showing at once his modesty and his catholicity of taste, recounts how all the musical friends of the wife of Johann Strauss, the great waltz composer, were writing their names, with phrases from their works, on her fan. When it was his turn, the composer of the German Requiem wrote the opening phrase of the «Blue Danube» waltz, and underneath it the words, «Not, I regret to say, by your devoted friend, Johannes Brahms.» Thus wholesome and unaffected was the character of this great man.

Outwardly, Brahms's life was uneventful. His father was a contrabass-player in the theatre orchestra of Hamburg. In him his son's positiveness of character seems to have been foreshadowed, for we learn that when the conductor once directed him not to play so loud, he replied with dignity: «Herr Capellmeister, this is my contrabass, I want you to understand, and I shall play on it as loud as I please.» Brahms was born at Hamburg in 1833, and from his earliest years was trained for music as a matter of course. His early acquaintance with the best works was of incalculable value to him. Mr. Hadow points out that the eclecticism and solidity of his style was doubtless largely due to the study of Bach and Beethoven that he made in youth under Marxsen. He had the advantage, too, of early practical experience. When he was only twenty he made a concert tour with Reményi, the Hungarian violinist, during which he gained much training and confidence. A feat he performed during this trip showed even more virtuosity than that of «le petit Saint-Saëns» already recorded. Having to play the Kreutzer Sonata on a piano too low in pitch to suit Reményi, who disliked to tune down his violin, he transposed it up a semi-tone, and though playing without notes, performed it accurately and with spirit. To this feat, which aroused the admiration of Joachim, Brahms owed his acquaintance with the great violinist, and through him with Liszt and Schumann. His experience with the former, then in the height of his fame, was unfortunate, but characteristic. Brahms, who was worn out with travel, fell asleep during one of the most moving parts of Liszt's Sonata, which the great virtuoso was so condescending as to play. Though Brahms was only a boy at the time, he was evidently, even then, undazzled by worldly glory.

His meeting with Schumann was much more happy; indeed, it was one of the important events of his life. Probably no young composer ever received such a hearty welcome into the musical world as Schumann extended to Brahms in his famous article, «New Paths.» «In sure and unfaltering accents,» writes Mr. Hadow, «he proclaimed the advent of a genius in whom the spirit of the age should find its consummation and its fulfilment; a master by whose teaching the broken phrases should grow articulate, and the vague aspirations gather into form and substance. The five-and-twenty years of wandering were over; at last a leader had arisen who should direct the art into 'new paths,' and carry it a stage nearer to its appointed place.» It is not surprising that Schumann, whose generous enthusiasm often led him to praise worthless work, should have received the early compositions of Brahms so cordially. Their qualities were such as to affect profoundly the great romanticist. Although the essential character of his mature works is their classical balance and restraint, these first compositions show an exuberance, a wayward fertility of invention, thoroughly romantic. His first ten opuses, or at any rate the three sonatas and the four ballades for piano, are frequently turgid in emotion, and ill-considered in form. The massive vigor of his later work here appears in the guise of a cyclopean violence. It is small wonder that Schumann, dazzled, delighted, overwhelmed, gave his ardent support to the young man. Brahms now found himself suddenly famous. He was discussed everywhere, his pieces were readily accepted by publishers, and his new compositions were awaited with interest.

But fortunate as all this was for Brahms, it might easily, but for his own good sense and self-control, have turned out the most unfortunate thing that could happen to him. For consider his position. He was a brilliant young composer who had been publicly proclaimed by one of the highest musical authorities. He was expected to go on producing works; he was almost under obligation to justify his impressive introduction. Not to do so would be much worse than to remain a nonentity; it would be to become one. And he had meanwhile every internal reason for meeting people's demands. He was full of ideas, conscious of power, under inward as well as outward compulsion to express himself. Yet for all that, he was in reality immature, unformed, and callow. His work, for all its brilliancy, was whimsical and subjective. If he had followed out the path he was on, as any contemporary observer would have expected, he would have become one of the most radical of romanticists. At thirty he would have been a bright star in the musical firmament, at forty he would have been one of several bright stars, at fifty he would have been clever and disappointed. It required rare insight in so young a man, suddenly successful, to realize the danger, rare courage to avert it. When we consider the temptation it must have been to him to continue these easy triumphs, when we imagine the inward enthusiasm of creation with which he must have been on fire, we are ready to appreciate the next event of the drama.

That event was withdrawal from the musical world and the initiation of a long course of the severest study. When he was a little over twenty-one, Brahms imposed upon himself this arduous training, and commanded himself to forego for a while the eloquent but ill-controlled expression hitherto his, in order to acquire a broader, firmer, purer, and stronger style. For four or five years, to borrow Stevenson's expression, he «played the sedulous ape» to Bach and Beethoven, and in a minor degree to Haydn and Mozart. The complex harmonies of his first period gave place to simple, strong successions of triads; for an emotional and often vague type of melody he substituted clearly crystallized, fluent, and gracious phrases, frequently devoid of any particular expression; the whimsical rhythms of the piano sonatas were followed by the square-cut sections of the Serenade, opus 11. Of course the immediate effect of all this was a great sacrifice of what is called originality; had Brahms not had complete faith in the vitality of his genius he could not have surrendered so much of immediate attainment for the sake of an ultimately greater mastery. It is a profound lesson in the ethics of art that a man who could write the fourth of the Ballades, opus 10, should have been willing to follow it up with this Serenade, opus 11. Yet Brahms knew what he was about, and his first large work, the Piano Concerto, opus 15, shows his individuality of expression entirely regained, and now with immensely increased power and resource.

Nothing could exhibit better than this dissatisfaction with his early work and withdrawal from the world for study, that intellectual breadth which we have noted as characteristic of Brahms. He was not a man who could be content with a narrow personal expression. No subjective heaven could satisfy him. His wide human sympathy and his passion for artistic perfection alike, compelled him to study unremittingly, to widen his ideals as his powers increased. No fate could seem to him so horrible as that «setting» of the mind which is the æsthetic analogue of selfishness. Originality, which so often degenerates into idiosyncrasy, was much less an object to him than universality, which is after all the best means of being serviceably original. Dr. Deiters, in his reminiscences, after describing this period of study, continues: «Henceforth we find him striving after moderation, endeavoring to place himself more in touch with the public, and to conquer all subjectiveness. To arrive at perspicuity and precision of invention, clear design and form, careful elaboration and accurate balancing of effect, now became with him essential and established principles.»

From this time until the end of his life, in fact, a period of only a little less than forty years--he died in 1897--Brahms never departed from the modes of work and the ideals of attainment he had now set himself. He labored indefatigably, but with no haste or impatience. He was too painstaking and conscientious a workman to botch his products by hurrying them. He thus described to his friend, Mr. Henschel, his method of composing: «There is no real _creating_ without hard work. That which you would call invention, that is to say, a thought, is simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible, which is no merit of mine. Yes, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work. And there need be no hurry about that either. It is as with the seed corn: it germinates unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I, for instance, have found the first phrase of a song, I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and perhaps not think of it again for months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; I can now really begin to work at it.» Another inkling of the severity of his standard we have in a remark he made after pointing out certain imperfections in a song of Mr. Henschel's. «Whether it is beautiful also,» he said, «is an entirely different matter; but perfect it must be.» With such a standard, we need not be surprised that he imposed so severe a training upon himself at twenty-one, or that he continued all his life the practice of writing each day a contrapuntal exercise, or that he wrought for ten years over his first symphony, that Titanic work. Thus laboring always with the same calm persistence, returning upon his ideas until he could present them with perfect clarity, caring little for the indifference or the applause of the public, but much for the approval of his own fastidious taste, he produced year by year an astonishing series of masterpieces. No one has better described the kind of work that made Brahms great than Matthew Arnold in those lines about labor

«which in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes; accomplished in repose;
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.»

A just conception of this broad scheme of Brahms's ideal and of his thoroughness in working it out is necessary, we must insist, not only to appreciation of the man himself, but to any true understanding of his relation and service to music. Brahms was enabled, by the tireless training to which he subjected his fertile and many-sided genius, to couch romantic feeling in classic form. In order to grasp the full significance of such a work, it is necessary to bear in mind those fundamental principles of musical effect and facts of musical history which have been presented in the Introduction. Music has resulted from the gradual formal definition, by time and pitch relations, of those vague gestures and utterances by which men expressed their primitive feelings. It has been, in a word, the product of two human instincts, neither of which alone would have sufficed to produce it--the instinct for expression and the instinct for beauty. But these instincts have not worked with precisely equal efficacy at all times. In fact, so limited is human attention, so few things can men attend to at once, every great development of expression has generally disturbed the equilibrium requisite to beauty, and every great advance in beauty has generally, for the time being, restrained the eloquence of expression. Musical history is a series of reactions between man's primal emotional impulse and his desire for intelligibility. First, urgency of feeling drives him to a formless cry; then the wish to be understood and the love of beauty induce him to formulate this cry; finally, as soon as the formula is felt to be inadequate to further expression, it is discarded in favor of one more elastic and complex. The conventions that are helpful at one stage prove hindrances in the next. The same forms that subserve growth up to a certain point, beyond that point hamper it. Accordingly, in the history of music, formulation has always been followed by relaxation of the formulæ to admit of new expression; and when new expression has been thus evolved, a new and more complex form has had to be worked out to regulate and fix it.

Such a period of relaxation was that which intervened between Beethoven and Brahms. The romanticists, headed by Schumann, seized upon the possibilities of poignant expression that they were quick to recognize in their heritage from Beethoven, and developed an extraordinarily mobile and eloquent instrument for voicing personal emotion. At the same time they inevitably lost the perfect control of form, the transparent lucidity of structure, that had characterized Beethoven. In some respects more moving, they were on the whole less intelligible. They were enriching their art, and must leave the perfect subordination of the new material to their successors. It is most interesting to trace the analogy between this development of musical expression and the growth of emotional life in the individual, and to observe how in both the period of experience, in which emotion is felt in all its immediate stress, inhibiting all else and being therefore conceived in no relations, but merely as a single and ultimate fact, is followed by the period of meditation and self-inspection, when the whole emotional life is grouped into order, and the man learns to see the significance and the spiritual value of his feelings. With the romanticists music necessarily became more and more the medium of personal passion, less and less the revealer of universal order.

Browning, himself a romanticist through and through, has summed up the spirit of romanticism in a single stanza of his «Old Pictures in Florence»:

«On which I conclude, that the early painters,
To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?'
Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters,
And paint man, man, whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?'»

The individualism, the subjectivity, the mystical distrust of definite forms, so stirringly championed in these lines, are vital principles in the work of all the composers of the generation after Beethoven. Thus in Schumann's music, for example, the generality of the emotional burden of classical music is changed to something far more individual and introspective. Expression is more tinged by temperament; the work of art exhales a personal fragrance. Schumann tells us not merely of love, longing, and passion, but of Robert Schumann's love, longing, and passion. His work, for all its beauty, is much less inclusive and complete than the classical masterpieces. In the same way Chopin filled his nocturnes and preludes with the lovely but often unhealthy poetry of the isolated dreamer, and Wagner, separating the passion of love from the other interests of the heart, and thus throwing out of balance the spiritual economy, sacrificed as much in health as he gained in potency. And of the men we have been studying, Grieg, Franck, and Tschaïkowsky also illustrate in various ways the tendency to «paint man, man, whatever the issue,» to let the «flesh be frayed» and the «visible go to the dogs.» It is hardly necessary to say that all these men have their legitimate place. Their message of passion and unrest, already audible in Beethoven, was the inevitable and indispensable expression of one of those self-conscious phases in man's growth when he freshly realizes his finitude. Their utterances make a deeply pathetic appeal to us, because they reveal all the terrible sadness of personal life which as yet finds no resting-place in the universal. Aspiration and disappointment, bitter grief and blind pain, speak in their fragmentary loveliness. The romanticists will never want for our love, since they interpret to us a part of our own experience.

But, as we have said, after man suffers emotion he reflects upon it; after he feels the parts he learns the whole; after musicians have developed new capabilities of expression they proceed to subordinate them to plastic beauty. Adjustment follows discovery, and the romantic takes on classical perfection. The chaos of one age is thus the order of the next; and after Schumann and his fellows had enriched the world with their beautiful but fragmentary and wayward feelings, it remained for Brahms to essay a further conquest; to commence at least (and perhaps he has not done more) the task of making these new feelings more intelligible, of clarifying their turgidity, of subordinating their conflicts in a more complex harmony. Or, to state his function in more specifically musical terms, he had to discover how rugged melodic outlines, bold harmonic progressions, and the large-spanned phrases of modern musical thought could be organized and brought into that unity in variety which is beauty.

We are now in a position to grasp the full significance of that severe training to which Brahms subjected himself in his youth. Without it he would have gone on doing brilliant work of the romantic order, like his first compositions, but he would never have attained the grasp and self-control that raised him above all his contemporaries and that made possible his peculiar service to music. That period of training was the artistic counterpart of what many men undergo when they discover how many sacrifices and how long a labor are necessary to him who would find a spiritual dwelling-place on earth. Many pleasures must be renounced before happiness will abide; evil and suffering are opaque save to the steadfast eye. So, in music, effects and eloquences and crises must be the handmaids of orderly beauty, and tones are stubborn material until one has learned by hard work to make them transmit thoughts. Technic is in the musician what character is in the man. It is the power to stamp matter with spirit. Brahms's long apprenticeship was therefore needed in the first place to make him master of his materials; in the second place to teach him the deeper lesson that the part must be subordinated to the whole, or, in musical language, expression to beauty.

He achieved this subordination, however, not by the negative process of suppression, but by conquest and co-ordination. In his music emotion is not excluded, it is regulated; his work is not a reversion to an earlier and simpler type, it is the gathering and fusing together of fragmentary new elements, resulting in a more complex organism. Thus it is a very superficial view to say that he «went back» to Beethoven. He drew guidance from the same natural laws that had guided Beethoven, but he applied these laws to a material of novel thought and emotion that had come into being after Beethoven. Had he repudiated the new material, even for the reason that he considered it incapable of organization, he would have been a pedant, which is to say a musical Pharisee. One masters by recognizing and using, not by repudiating. And just as a wise man will not become ascetical merely because his passions give him trouble, but will study to find out their true relation to _him_ and then keep them in it, so Brahms recognized the wayward beauties of romanticism, and studied how to make them ancillary to that order and fair proportion which is the soul of music.

To this great artistic service he was fitted by both the qualities which have been pointed out above as co-operating to form his unique nature. His deep and simple human feeling, which put him in sympathy with the aims of the romanticists and enabled him to grasp their meaning, would not have sufficed alone; but fortunately it was associated with an almost unprecedented scope of intellect and power of synthesis. Brahms's assimilative faculty was enormous. Like a fine tree that draws the materials of its beauty through a thousand roots that reach into distant pockets of earth, he gathered the materials of his perfectly unified and transparent style from all sorts of forgotten nooks and crannies of mediæval music. Spitta remarks his use of the old Dorian and Phrygian modes; of complex rhythms that had long fallen into disuse; of those means of thematic development, such as augmentation and diminution, which flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; of «the _basso ostinato_ with the styles pertaining to it--the Passacaglia and the Ciaconna;» and of the old style of variations, in which the bass rather than the melody is the feature retained. «No musician,» Spitta concludes, «was more well read in his art or more constantly disposed to appropriate all that was new, especially all newly discovered treasures of the past. His passion for learning wandered, indeed, into every field, and resulted in a rich and most original culture of mind, for his knowledge was not mere acquirement, but became a living and fruitful thing.»

The vitality of his relation with the past is nowhere more strikingly shown than in his indebtedness to the two greatest masters of pure music, Bach and Beethoven. He has gathered up the threads of their dissimilar styles, and knitted them into one solid fabric. The great glory of Bach, as is well-known, was his wonderful polyphony. In his work every voice is a melody, everything sings, there is no dead wood, no flaccid filling. Beethoven, on the other hand, turning to new problems, to problems of structure which demanded a new sort of control of key-relationship and the thematic development of single «subjects» or tunes, necessarily paid less attention to the subordinate voices. His style is homophonic or one-voiced rather than polyphonic. The interest centres in one melody and its evolutions, while the others fall into the subordinate position of accompaniment. But Brahms, retaining and extending the complexity of structure, the architectural variety and solidity, that was Beethoven's great achievement, has succeeded in giving new melodic life also to the inner parts, so that the significance and interest of the whole web remind one of Bach. His skill as a contrapuntist is as notable as his command of structure. Thanks to his wonderful power of assimilating methods, of adapting them to the needs of his own expression, so that he remains personal and genuine while becoming universal in scope, he is the true heir and comrade of Bach and Beethoven.