Chapter IX: Appendix: Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mr. Ashton Ellis 305 (6)

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] See an interesting article by Max Vancsa--_Zur Geschichte der Programm-Musik_--in Nos. 23 and 24 of _Die Musik_ (1903).

[20] The reader will of course not take this to mean that a piece of programme music should sound just as well when played as absolute music, _i.e._ should be as interesting to the man who does not know the programme as to the man who does. Against that current fallacy I argue further on.

[21] The term "poetic" is used as a kind of verbal shorthand. A piece of music may be suggested by a drama, a novel, a historical event, a poem, a philosophical treatise (like _Also sprach Zarathustra_), or anything else. The one phrase "poetic music" will conveniently cover the æsthetic facts involved in all these modes of suggestion.

[22] That is, sound _quâ_ sound (music), _plus_ sound congealed into definite symbols (words).

[23] I am not, of course, putting this forward as the way in which music actually and historically developed. I am simply disengaging from the historical facts, in order to throw it into stronger relief, the psychological element underlying them; just as in economics we try to understand what has actually been the course of events by isolating from the other factors of human nature the factors that concern the desire of gain, and arguing deductively from these.

[24] There is emotion, of course, at the back of the notes; the reader will not take me to mean that the pleasure is merely physical, like a taste or an odour. But the emotive wave is relatively small and very vague; it neither comes directly from nor suggests any external existence.

[25] I take some of these historical facts from the article of Max Vancsa, already cited.

[26] See Strabo's _Geography_, Bohn edition, vol. ii. p. 120.

[27] The Bible Sonatas, together with Kuhnau's other piano works and his prose writings, may be had in vol. iv. of the _Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst_, carefully edited by Karl Päsler. Mr. Shedlock, in his book on _The Pianoforte Sonata_, gives a pretty full account of Kuhnau; but it is a pity he could not have found space for a complete translation of the preface to the Bible Sonatas.

[28] "He was and remained," says Wagner, "a prince's musical officer, with the duty of catering for the entertainment of his pomp-struck master.... Docile and devout, the peace of his kind and cheerful temper stayed unruffled till advanced old age; only the eye, that looks upon us from his portrait, is suffused with a gentle melancholy."

[29] See Ambros: _Die Grenzen der Musik und Poesie_ (1885), iv. v.

[30] It is significant that even the sturdy, independent Gluck too fell a victim to princely patronage in the very middle of his career. After striking out for himself in _Telemacco_ (1749) and _La Clemenza di Tito_ (1750), and apparently being well on the way to the reform of the opera, he became, in 1754, Kapellmeister at Vienna. From that date to 1762, when _Orfeo_ was produced, he wrote, not like Gluck, but like a court servant. See a pithy paragraph on the subject in Mr. Hadow's book, _The Viennese Period_ (vol. v. of the Oxford History of Music), p. 90.

[31] The development of the opera, too, was an important factor. It was not till men had mastered dramatic musical expression in association with words that they could properly aim at the same kind of expression without words.

[32] Even Berlioz, in a weak moment, said he hoped that the music of the _Symphonie fantastique_ would itself "have a musical interest, independent of the dramatic intention," though he insisted on the title, at any rate, of each movement being given to the audience. See his Preface to the Symphony.

[33] Here, and elsewhere in this article, I venture to make my quotations from Mr. W. Ashton Ellis's translation of Wagner's prose works.

[34] I am not, of course, agreeing with Wagner's criticism of Berlioz; it seems to me quite superficial and unilluminative, but to discuss it would be foreign to our present purpose.

[35] The reader will understand that I am not founding my case on the actual musical value of _Ein Heldenleben_; I am only using that work as an illustration of an æsthetic theory. In the actual _Heldenleben_ there is rather more grit than I like; but there is no real need for it to have been put there. In the article on Strauss in the present volume I have tried to show how he has needlessly weakened his scheme by not keeping to the one piece of portraiture throughout.

[36] _i.e._ the troublous question as to what the music "means" poetically.

[37] _Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien._ I make the quotation from Mr. Basil Worsfold's little book on _Judgment in Literature_.

[38] _L'Œuvre dramatique de Berlioz_, pp. 30-34, etc.

_To ALFRED WILLIAMS_

HERBERT SPENCER AND THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC

I

It is now nearly fifty years since Spencer first published his celebrated essay on "The Origin and Function of Music." That essay has been elaborately assailed from many quarters; it has been objected to as insufficient from the standpoint of æsthetic psychology, and as at variance with some of the known facts of musical history. Nevertheless Spencer, in accordance with his general intellectual habit, always clung tenaciously to his theory, and, without modifying it at all, returned to the subject in later years only in order to re-asseverate his doctrine and to repel the critical assaults that were made upon it. He had no difficulty in dealing with the counter-theory of Darwin--that music sprang from the amorous rivalry of the males in the presence of the females of certain species--for Darwin's brief excursion into the alien field of musical æsthetic was as humorous and unprofitable as a discussion of bimetallism by Tchaikovski would have been. Then Spencer dealt with the redoubtable objections of the late Edmund Gurney and those of Dr. Wallaschek, undoubtedly scoring at times against them when they had needlessly overstated their own case, though not, it seems to me, removing the impression that they had successfully attacked the central point of his theory. Towards the very end of his days he returned yet again to the subject, in his _Facts and Comments_, and did me the honour to combat the brief criticism of his theory which I had put forward in my _Study of Wagner_, asserting that I exhibited a "confusion between the origin of a thing and the thing which originates from it," and that some of my criticisms "went far towards conceding" what I denied. I can only say that while I considered that Spencer passed over in silence certain of the stronger points I had urged against him, aiming at a merely dialectical victory here and there by interpreting my words in a different sense from that intended by me, I was still quite unconvinced, even by his later arguments, of the truth of his original theory. I shall try to show that that theory rests on a misunderstanding of the real nature of music, and on too ready an assumption of a causal connection between phenomena that are really only similar, and that it is helped out by unintentional misstatements as to some of the main factors of the problem. The question has an interest above and beyond Spencer's connection with it. The speech-theory of the origin of music has here and there been adopted as an established æsthetic fact, and æsthetic deductions have been made from it that must affect our views of current developments of the art. Wagner--working of course on lines of his own--contended that song is "just speech aroused to highest passion," and admiring commentators innumerable have followed him in his error. It is worth while therefore, as a contribution to a rather obscure point in musical æsthetic, to try to demonstrate the falsity of the speech-theory, and at the same time to place over against it a theory of the origin and nature of music that squares better with the facts of history and psychology; and this is best done by examining the speech-theory in the hands of its strongest advocate.

Briefly, Spencer's theory is this: "Variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling," since "all feelings ... have this common characteristic, that they are muscular stimuli." Thus according to the intensity and the quality of the feeling, the tones in which it is expressed will vary in loudness, in _timbre_, in pitch, in width of intervals, and in rapidity. "These vocal peculiarities, which indicate excited feeling, are those which especially distinguish song from ordinary speech." In other words, excited speech merges into recitative, and recitative in its turn merges into song; and song "originally diverged from emotional speech in a gradual, unobtrusive manner." Against this view I argued, in my _Study of Wagner_, that "it errs in supposing that, because song exhibits some of the characteristics of speech, the one has necessarily taken its rise from the other. The resemblances between the external characteristics of speech and those of song are only what might be expected, seeing that both are phenomena of sound, and sound can only vary in the ways indicated by Spencer.... The mere resemblance of song and speech in their most external characteristics is not a proof that one is the outcome of the other, but simply that they have certain causal phenomena in common; while the internal differences between them are greater than their resemblances." The careful reader will observe, in fact, that Spencer unconsciously sophisticates his argument from the very commencement. It is quite true that "variations of voice are the physiological results of variations of feeling"; it is also quite true that the "vocal peculiarities which indicate excited feeling"--such as loudness, high pitch, increased resonance, and so on--are more pronounced in song than in ordinary speech. But it does not at all follow from this that _song took these peculiarities from speech_--that speech got them first, then developed them into recitative, and then still further into song. To make a symmetrical but artificial chain of this kind is to beg the question at the outset. Spencer never put before himself the obvious alternative--"Could not, and would not, song have had all these peculiarities even if speech had never been invented? Given, that is, the capacity of men to feel emotion in varying degrees, would not a strong emotion naturally express itself in louder, more varied, more resonant tones than a weak emotion--and this even if man had as yet no language?" Spencer, in fact, simply details the characteristics of _tone_ as the expression of feeling, and then illegitimately appropriates them, in the first place, to one order of tone, namely speech. No one would dream of disputing the physiological facts which he established in his essay with his usual patient and scrupulous accuracy. It is unquestionable that, on the whole, a loud tone in speaking and a loud tone in singing both indicate heightened feeling; and that in all the other respects enumerated by him, song and speech exhibit precisely the same characteristics. But this does not authorise us, in any way, to assert that song has "grown out of" speech. Spencer argued too hastily from a mere analogy to a cause. We are prepared to admit--to state the foregoing argument in another way--that in moments of emotional excitement the ordinary speech of men becomes more rhythmical, acquires a more pronounced _timbre_, and generally varies in the ways Spencer has enumerated. What we are _not_ prepared to admit is that this is either a lower form of music or the stuff out of which music has grown. Our contention is that while the difference between speech and excited speech is one of degree only, _the difference between speech and music is one not merely of degree, but of kind_--we are dealing with similar physiological but widely separated psychological phenomena; and that this is true not only of modern music, as Spencer seems to admit, but of that primitive music out of which our complex modern art has grown.

Moreover, Spencer ignored the new light which modern physio-psychological research has thrown upon the question, some of which I referred to in the _Study of Wagner_. Stricker, in his _Du Langage et de la Musique_ (1885), has, among a lot of statements and conclusions that need to be taken with caution, at all events made out a good case for believing that the organs of speech and the organs of song are controlled by different cerebral spheres. Wallaschek's conclusions, again, are too important to be passed over in silence by any advocate of the speech-theory. I venture to quote in full from my _Wagner_ the passage in which I condensed Wallaschek's argument: "Further, it is now not only placed beyond dispute that the faculty of articulate speech has its distinct cerebral centre, but it has been localised in the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain;" and Dr. Wallaschek, in a brilliant paper, has striven to show that there must be another centre that controls musical thought and speech.[39] Without going into Dr. Wallaschek's theory in detail, it may be sufficient here to note some of his facts and conclusions: (_a_) "the forming of concepts goes on in a different part of the brain, and the concepts travel along other channels, than the expression of the feelings and the merely automatic processes;"[40] (_b_) children with aphasia (_i.e._ destruction or disturbance of the faculty of articulate speech) are yet able to sing;[41] (_c_) patients with aphasia, who cannot speak connectedly upon ordinary occasions, can sometimes articulate the words when singing a song--the words being brought up into consciousness by association with the melody;[42] (_d_) the third left frontal convolution (which controls articulate speech) is very small in idiots and lower races, who yet are highly susceptible to music;[43] (_e_) the faculty of musical memory may be destroyed without disturbing the other mental faculties;[44] (_f_) consequently "we express ourselves and hear in quite a different manner when we sing and when we speak."[45] All this evidence Spencer ignored to the last.

Nor does it ever seem to have occurred to him to analyse the state of mind of a musician at the moment of composition, and to utilise the result thus obtained in order to throw light on the origin of music. Had he done this he would have seen the force--which his criticism of me showed he had _not_ seen--of M. Combarieu's remark that "Mr. Spencer neglects or ignores everything that gives to the art he is studying its special and unique character; he does not appear to have realised what a musical composition is, what are the rules it obeys, what is the nature of the charm and the beauty we find in it. In short, we can bring against him a fundamental fact, in comparison with which everything else has only a quite secondary value: that is, the existence of a musical manner of thinking (_une pensée musicale_). The musician thinks with sounds, as the literary man thinks with words."[46]

Here, indeed, is the crux of the disagreement between Spencer and those who reject the speech-theory as an absolutely inadequate explanation of the origin of music. What was his criticism of this criticism? "Here," he says, "we have a striking example of the way in which an hypothesis is made to appear untenable by representing it as being something which it does not profess to be. I gave an account of the _origin_ of music, and now I am blamed because my conception of the origin of music does not include a conception of music as fully developed. What is every process of evolution but the gradual assumption of traits which were not originally possessed?" It will be seen, I think, that Spencer quite missed the true point of M. Combarieu's objection. We do not expect that from a theory of the origin of music among primitive men one should be able to forecast all the later _forms_ into which music has branched; but we do expect that, since evolution is a continuous process, the theory of the earlier music should not be at variance with all the main psychological features of the later music. We say to Spencer, "Take your theory, and we are unable to work it out in detail. You assert that the expression of musical thought and emotion has taken three successive forms--excited speech, recitative, and music. Well, we find it impossible to leap to this conclusion, as you have done, merely because there are certain resemblances, due to physiological causes, between speech and song. We cannot trace such a process historically--for your own sketch of the supposed historical process is demonstrably inaccurate in evidence and hasty in inference--nor can we even _imagine_ the process psychologically. To us, there is a great psychological and æsthetic gulf fixed between excited speech and song--_not only between the speech and the song of to-day, but between the ruder speech and ruder song of primitive man_. On the other hand, we have a theory that imposes no such strain, either historical or psychological, upon us. That theory is, that music arises from a peculiar set of stimuli and peculiar organs of expression of its own, with which speech not only has nothing whatever to do now, but never had anything to do, as _fons et origo_. Allowing for all the differences between our music and that of the savage who blows his reed and thumps his tam-tam, and for all the differences of general mental structure between him and us, we can still see that the same causes which incite us to music incited him. Now no one will for a moment contend that there is any but an infinitesimal resemblance between a Bach fugue or a Strauss symphonic poem and excited speech; neither can we perceive that there was ever any but the faintest resemblance between the causes that provoked the savage to excited speech and those that impelled him to his rude kind of music. But _your_ theory, while it disregards the plain fact that no demonstration could deduce a Bach fugue from excited speech, and overlooks the mental elements in primitive man from which the Bach fugue _could_ develop step by step, invites us to believe that music grew out of something with which we are unable to correlate it either now or in the most primitive times."

"But," it may be objected, "all this is pure assertion. You simply take music as it is written to-day, attribute this to something which you call a 'musical faculty,' or a 'musical manner of thinking,' and then, having invented this convenient faculty, blandly assume that it is from a similar faculty that the rude music of primitive man originated. What you have to do is to prove the existence of this musical faculty, this specifically musical way of conceiving and expressing things, that, on your assumption, is innate in the human mind, and needs no help from speech even in the earliest days of the race." Well, no one, I think, will question the existence in us, at the present day, of something that may well be called, in general terms, the musical faculty. For the musician as we now know him--and, indeed, have known him for some centuries--music is a means of emotional expression that can function without the aid of poetry or even of speech. It takes its rise from its own order of feelings; it has its own self-sufficient manner of expressing them; it tells its own story to the mind of the hearer; and neither the feeling, nor its manner of expression, nor its effect on the auditor, suggests any dependence on speech. The musician, in order to begin composition, has not to receive a preliminary stimulus either from poetry, or from any concept or sentiment that could for a moment be expressed in words. (He may, of course, set poetry to music; but on the other hand he may not; and it is the self-existing order of music we are now discussing.) The musician, under the influence of an inward stimulus of some very obscure kind, may take three or four tones--say those of the opening subject of a sonata or a fugue--and build with them a structure ordered and controlled by certain laws purely its own, having for its object the susciting in our minds of a series of feelings from which all thought of speech is absent. The musician joys in building tones together in this way; we in our turn joy both in the process of building and in the finished edifice itself.

"So far, so good," the opponent may say; "this is what music now is, as the result of a long course of evolution from its original germ. But will you assert that primitive man was impelled to _his_ rude music by the workings of some similar faculty--that, without any reliance, even in the earliest days, upon speech, and without any intermediate stage of recitative, he _produced music_, bearing the same relation to his emotions as the music of Bach and Beethoven did to theirs?" Well, this is precisely what we do assert; nor do I see any difficulty in the way of the theory that primitive man came to utter himself in his rude music by the same psychological processes by which we utter ourselves in ours to-day. Speech had no more to do with the impulse to his music than it has with the impulse to ours. Spencer's theory would have it that first man spoke, then he advanced to excited speech, that this became more rhythmical and more definite and thus expanded into recitative, and that from this there emerged song "in a gradual, unobtrusive manner"--so gradual and so unobtrusive, I am afraid, that we can neither trace it emerging nor imagine it doing so. Is it not more reasonable to believe that music first came into the world when the savage took delight in any tones--those of the human voice, of a reed, or of a drum--purely _as_ tone, and began to take a further simple delight in the relations between tones? Need we concern ourselves at all with speech, excited or torpid? Can we not begin with mere feeling venting itself in mere sound--as we know it must have done at first--and draw a line from this straight through all the music of all the world? Why should we assume that for man to express his feelings in tone he must first have invented speech, and then have developed the emotional side of this until it was able to cut itself loose and commence life on its own account, by some process that is really unimaginable? We know that feeling vents itself in sound, and that waves of feeling vent themselves in waves of sound, as may be observed in the vague crooning of an infant over its toys, or the moaning of a man in pain. This is one fundamental fact in the origin of music. Another is the indisputable fact that men, whether civilised or savage--that many animals, indeed--are susceptible to tone _purely as tone_; and a further fact is that the primitive organism takes pleasure in the relations between tones, as may be seen in the boy who keeps on thumping two tin cans that happen to give out different sounds. There is surely no need to insist upon the point that both tones and the relations between tones _in themselves_ interest and charm, in a minor degree, the savage as they do us. It is from this phenomenon, I should imagine, not from excited speech, that music took its rise; and the evidence from the music of primitive tribes, upon which Spencer drew in support of his theory, does nothing to invalidate mine. In his original essay he quoted, from his own _Descriptive Sociology_, a number of passages relating to the song-customs of various undeveloped races. I cannot, among all these quotations, see one that suggests that the music of these people was simply a hyper-excited form of speech. On the contrary, it is clear from his own citations that their delight was in music purely as music; that their feelings spontaneously flowed, as ours do, into a system of tones and relations between tones that existed in and by and for itself, with only the same kind of dependence upon the words that is exhibited in a song by Brahms or a chorus by Handel.[47] No doubt the general course of the words controls the general course of music in some degree, as it does in our own song-writing; but there is nothing whatever to contradict the view that savage music, even as our own, springs spontaneously from a non-verbal emotion, and seeks an expression either absolutely independent of speech or only remotely influenced by it. The East African, says Spencer, "in singing, contents himself with improvising a few words without sense or rhythm, and repeats them till they nauseate." If this does not betoken a state of mind fundamentally analogous to that of the absolute musician, it is hard to say what the words mean. Plainly, what sets the East African singing, what determines that one note shall follow another, what makes him so indifferent to the sense or nonsense of the words, is simply the delight in tone _as_ tone, in the relations of tones _as_ relations of tones, simply the need for what he feels to vent itself in precisely that way and no other--in a word, the primitive _pensée musicale_, the primitive "musical manner of thinking."[48] Abundant evidence can be had to corroborate this, and I quoted some of it in my _Wagner_. "Speaking of the Iroquois, Dr. Morgan says that their war-songs are in a dead language, or, at all events, they are unable to interpret them.... Mr. Baker, too, observed the meaninglessness of the Indian song."[49] There is not much trace here of excited speech first becoming recitative and then musical song.[50]

Dr. Wallaschek's conclusions, again, as to the music of savages are as follows:--

(1) "In primitive times vocal music is not at all a union of poetry and music. We find, on the contrary, vocal music among tribes which, owing to the insufficient development of language, cannot possibly have any kind of poetry. Thus the position of vocal music is quite independent of any other art. (2) It is impossible that in these cases music arose as a direct imitation of the natural accents ready made in speech. (3) Because these texts are neither themselves a language, nor could the melody _alone_ have been taken from a developed language, for in such case the words would have been borrowed together with the music. Entirely meaningless words simply serve to facilitate the vocalisation." Further, "another striking feature of these savage songs is _the liberty with which the composer treats the grammatical structure of the sentence and the logical order of words_. Thus in many of the Andamanese songs the words in their poetic form are so mutilated to suit the metre as to be hardly recognisable.... If negroes sing they keep strict time, and do not allow themselves to be hindered by any obstacle in the use of the words." Other evidence of the same kind might be adduced, from which it is quite clear that we are face to face with a phenomenon on which Spencer's theory throws no light at all. There seems to be no doubt that there is in the savage, though of course in a relatively undeveloped form, the same musical sense as in ourselves, something that has always flown directly, for its expression, to a mode of utterance of its own, compounded of tones, relations of tones, and rhythm, which is the natural language of this sense, and which never needed to pass through the intermediate stage of imitation or exaggeration of the accents of speech.[51]

Look for a moment at the two theories and their implications side by side. We know that primitive man, like the animal,[52] is susceptible to tone, sequences of tone, colour of tone, and rhythm; and that, from purely physiological causes, a number of his feelings tend to express themselves in vocal sounds. Now these are all the elements we require in order to construct modern music. The composer feels strongly, and is impelled to find an outlet for his emotions in tone. According to the line of his emotion, so to speak, is the line of his music--the pure feeling takes hold of the sounds through which alone it can utter itself, and shapes them, in form, in colour, in sequence, in intensity, after its own image. We have in primitive man, in a rude and undeveloped stage, all these elements out of which the modern music-maker builds his gorgeous palaces. According to the intensity of the emotion of the savage will be the width of the intervals of his voice, the resonance, the colour of it; according to the shade of his feeling will be the shade of his rude melody; and from the _ensemble_ of the qualities of the sounds in which he is uttering himself will his hearers be able to guess what mood it was that animated his song. Here, then, are all the elements out of which music _could_ grow, even if man had never learned to speak three connected words. Yet we are asked by Spencer to believe that these elements, _sufficient in themselves to give birth to music_, remained dormant in the human breast for untold centuries, until man had evolved a fairly elaborate system of speech--for it must be remembered that Spencer's theory presupposes not the rude and merely utilitarian speech of the man only one remove from the beast, but a comparatively highly organised language, capable of expressing connectedly a savage's thoughts about something more than his daily physical wants. Some such abstract, æsthetic, reflective form of speech we are compelled to postulate if we are to grant the probability of music arising, as Spencer says it did, from the excited speech of man. Then, when man has slowly and painfully learned to speak, and had plenty of practice in speaking excitedly, we are invited to believe that by some mysterious process _music_ arose, the expression of feeling in organised tone, the delight in tone _quâ_ tone, in sequences and relations _quâ_ sequences and relations. And all this time the elements out of which this organised system of sound _could_ grow, which were innate in man from the very first, by reason of the fact that he had nerves, muscles, and vocal organs, have been doing absolutely nothing! Though they required only the stimulus of feeling to call them into being, and though they were receiving this stimulus day by day, hour by hour, they had to deny themselves for centuries upon centuries, until they could receive precisely the same kind of stimulus _after_ man had learned to speak! Is this credible?

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