,,orpheus ,,orpheus ,,or ,the ,music of the ,future ,,by ,w4 ,j4 ,,turner ,author of 8,the ,seven ,days of the ,sun10 etc4 ,illustration ,,new ,,york ,e4 ,p4 ,,dutton ,,company #fha ,,fifth ,,avenue ,copyright1 #aibf ,,by ,e4 ,p4 ,,dutton ,,company ,all ,rights ,reserved ,printed in the ,united ,states of ,america ,,contents ,,chapter ,,page ,i4 ,,definition ,,of ,,music #a ,,ii4 ,,is ,,music ,,knowledge ,,or ,,life8 #ad ,,iii4 ,,the ,,general ,,idea ,,of ,,progress #bg ,,iv4 ,,the ,,idea ,,of ,,progress ,,in ,,music #cf ,v4 ,,absolute ,,value #dg ,,vi4 ,,emotional ,,significance #fd ,,vii4 ,,beyond ,,all ,,sense #hc ,,orpheus ,,chapter ,i ,,definition ,,of ,,music ,the dullest books on literature are the books which begin with a history of the alphabet4 ,a good history has its uses2 however1 this book is not a history but a phantasy or1 if you like1 a philosophy4 ,for if it be a good phantasy it will be a good philosophy since all philosophy is phantasy1 or the imagination of love4 ,amor che muove il mondo e l'altre stelle ,we know1 however1 that philosophy degenerates from that love which moves the spheres into that love of moving in the tracks of the spheres which is called the love of knowledge1 and philosophers are commonly men who spend their lives describing the old tracks in which they are running1 and teaching how you also may keep your feet in them4 ,so1 too1 musician has come to mean a man who performs music--he plays over again ,beethoven's sonatas and ,chopin's studies2 partout il parcourit et parfournit ,this performance of his is a tribute to our weakness and a sign of our imperfection1 and1 since we are weak and imperfect1 is necessary2 but ,i cannot state too clearly and decisively at the outset that music is not the playing or the hearing of symphonies and sonatas but the imagination of love4 ,if music is not the imagination of love1 if it is not a spiritual act1 what is it8 ,the commonsense reply will be that it is an ordered arrangement of sounds4 ,but two words of this definition beg the question4 ,what is meant by 8ordered10 and what by 8arrangement08 ,order and arrangement imply meaning and significance4 ,can we have an order that is an end in itself1 is intrinsically satisfying1 or beautiful1 or stimulating8 ,but to whom8 ,to man4 ,but take away love from man1 and what is he8 ,what is left is meaningless1 even indescribable1 for in love all things exist and have their being4 ,music is the imagination of love in sound4 ,it is what man imagines of his life1 and his life is love4 ,there are as many kinds of love as there are many kinds of life1 and it is possible that they may not all be imaginable in sound4 ,i say it is possible1 ,i do not say it is probable4 ,we do not know at present1 and indeed we shall only know when the common instinct of mankind has abandoned sound as a means of expression4 ,and that may happen4 ,there may be no unending future of music1 only a limited future4 ,or the world of music may be like the universe of ,einstein1 8finite but unbounded40 ,and this indeed is my belief4 ,it is a finite1 a closed world4 ,can you express the life of the vegetable world in music8 ,the imagination of a plant8 ,the tree that rises to the sun throws its shadow upon the mind of man2 you may think you cannot throw that shadow in music but you can sound forth the shadow of that shadow1 turn the impalpable ghost of light into a ghost of sound1 transform those tremulous visual waves into auditory waves--not in the laboratory of the physicist but in the laboratory of the mind4 ,the musician may do this4 ,he may do in a bar of notes what the poet does in a line of verse--make a unique sensible impression upon the mind4 ,debussy's ,prlude l',aprs-midi d'un ,faune makes this impression of a vegetable world alive in quivering hot sunshine and ,debussy's music is full of the imagination of a special order of life1 the life of trees1 streams and lakes1 the play of light upon water and on clouds1 the murmur of plants drinking and feeding in the sunlight1 and all that order of motion and movement which we are in the habit of calling physical1 all that order of emotion which we describe as belonging to the five senses4 ,i do not believe there is any sensation or feeling of which man is capable in the presence of the natural world which may not be expressed in music4 ,music is the most concrete and physical of all the arts as it is probably the earliest and most primitive4 ,beasts which cannot draw or write can make expressive sounds1 and the earliest men undoubtedly communicated by sound before they learned to communicate by written or painted signs4 ,but whether at the other end of the scale there is a limit to music's power of expression no one can say4 ,it is only possible at this stage in the history of mankind to affirm that up till now the highest1 most spiritual powers of the human mind have been able to find expression in music4 ,there is nothing in the world's finest literature that surpasses what we may find in the world's best music1 although1 as we shall see later1 music may have a virtue that is entirely its own4 ,but it will not surprise us to find ourselves limited to the work of a very few composers when we ask for music that is as highly organized as the finest poetry4 ,music in this respect has been in the past nearer to painting and to sculpture than to poetry4 ,as with the plastic arts its swifter and stronger appeal to the senses is a source of weakness as of strength4 ,it is a source of weakness because in every artist there is a natural tendency to slip into what comes easiest in his medium4 ,in music it is easier to make sounds that merely gratify or stimulate the sense of hearing and the cruder emotions than to make sounds of a more complex character which will express the subtler and finer life of a more spiritual imagination4 ,infantile music is both easier to compose and easier to hear than mature music1 so the public and the musician find themselves in a natural league in favour of the rawer kinds of music4 ,thus the song of obvious and commonplace sentiment and the jazz tune of blatant rhythm have universal popularity4 ,even an animal1 one sometimes fancies might be conscious of such music4 ,its combinations are so simple that they may certainly be understood by every human creature4 8,all ,nature hears thy voice10 one might almost say of the saxophone1 and possibly it is the sort of music to which the mountains would skip like rams could they but hear it4 ,all life moves in rhythm4 ,we know to-day that the old distinctions between spirit and matter are superficial4 ,when ,i was a student at the ,school of ,mines at the age of seventeen1 learning organic and inorganic chemistry1 we were taught ,mendeleff's ,law which showed that all the elements were multiples of a common denominator1 the atom2 and since then it has been discovered that instead of the atom being the smallest possible bit of matter1 finite and irreducible1 it is a solar system--its sun and planets being bits of positive and negative electricity4 ,all that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth century materialism has crumbled away to that word 8bits40 ,we cannot as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on 8bits40 ,our minds like our feet need a solid something beneath them4 ,it is paralysing to conceive that the floor we stand upon1 the chair we sit upon1 consist solely of rotating electrical forces1 but when we think of 8bits0 welded together we feel safe again1 although actually these 8bits0 are a pure mental fiction1 and what we stand and sit upon is motion4 ,if the motion stopped we should fall into the bottomless pit1 the famous vacuum abhorred of ,nature 7alias ,tophet in biblical language74 ,my chemistry teachers would have been as scandalized to think that at the bottom of their inorganic and organic chemistry there was nothing but motion1 as my music teachers would have been scandalized to think that at the bottom of the major and minor scales there was nothing but love4 ,they imagined that these were two entirely different worlds with an infinite chasm between them4 ,they thought that inorganic chemistry was absolutely different from organic chemistry1 although of course they would have got into a hopeless muddle had they tried to prove their belief--but then only fools and geniuses try to prove their beliefs4 ,neither my chemistry nor my music teachers could ever explain anything4 ,one was simply asked to swallow whole and regurgitate whole what was obviously mere unintelligible rigmarole4 ,those of us who had this parrot-like faculty became in our turn ,professors of ,chemistry and of ,music4 ,the great creative scientists of this age have disintegrated those old hard ideas1 and it now appears that the ,universe is a miracle of rhythm1 and that 8matter10 just like man1 is kept going1 is maintained as a co-ordinated whole by some electrical urge or spiritual impulse--at bottom it is perhaps the same thing1 although 8thing0 is a very inappropriate word4 ,the conception of the 8will to live0 has a profounder meaning for us now1 and we realize that if the 8will to live0 dies in a man the man himself dies4 ,a recent anthropologist1 the late ,dr4 ,w4 ,h4 ,r4 ,rivers1 ,f4,r4,s41 in a book on the decay of ,melanesia1 attributes the dying off of the population in certain islands1 unaffected by disease and with an abundance of food1 to life having become devoid of meaning to them after contact with an alien and unassimilable civilization4 ,they had lost faith in their old world of ideas without having the power to enter the completely new and strange white man's world4 ,with the decay of their ancient beliefs they took no pleasure in their ancient religious exercises4 ,joy and ,ritual simultaneously faded4 ,they lost the desire to live4 ,each one of us goes on living only so long as he desires to live1 and the desire varies in degree4 ,we have to admit that we use these words 8life0 and 8living0 still without knowledge of what they mean1 but it is not necessary1 nor do ,i think it possible1 to know what they mean4 ,knowledge is not important1 it is life that is important1 and we can feel life if we cannot know it4 ,the only way in which we can know life is by creating it1 and it will be my duty in a later chapter to discuss this4 ,in the meantime it is clear that the line from ,dante which ,i began by quoting3 ,amor che muove il mondo e l'altre stelle is no idle phantasy but a literal truth4 ,the world about us seems to be material1 but exists in rhythm4 ,it is a living world1 and it is kept alive by a spiritual force which we can best describe as love1 and ,i end this chapter with the definition with which ,i began it4 ,all art is the imagination of love1 and music is the imagination of love in sound4 ,,chapter ,,ii ,,is ,,music ,,knowledge ,,or ,,life8 ,what is knowledge8 ,and what is musical knowledge8 ,the latter question is no doubt included in the former1 but we shall see4 ,we know by experience that it is possible to learn the alphabet of a language4 ,the alphabet as such has no longer any meaning1 that is why it is possible to use it with meaning--in that form we call language4 ,but1 at the beginning1 these perfectly conventionalized1 perfectly meaningless symbols1 ,a1 ,b1 ,c1 ,d1 etc41 had each a meaning and a very definite meaning4 ,and those series of meanings 7which have now shrivelled into the scentless1 savourless1 unembodied twenty-six ghosts of the alphabet7 precluded by their very vitality the possibility of all other meanings4 ,their life was death to all other life and not until they were dead could others live4 ,this strange phenomenon is an element in the beautiful myth of ,orpheus and ,eurydice4 ,orpheus must not behold the face of ,eurydice when he brings her up from the underworld where she disappeared1 for in the physical vision he will be forever blinded to the spirit which is returning with him1 who is not the ,eurydice that was but the ,eurydice that is to be4 ,and the whole life of language is in this process of continuous dying4 ,words die by becoming abstract1 then when they are completely dead they come to life again as members of a more complicated life1 the life of the sentence4 ,sentences die and become idioms1 idioms ideas1 ideas theories1 theories philosophies and religions4 ,every page of prose is a harvest raised from corpses and under its flowering abundance dead bodies lie thickly buried4 ,then a time comes when these extremely complex systems break up and the words re-emerge in single units again1 but with changed countenances and expressions1 to begin a new series of death-and-life existence4 ,but the letters themselves1 of which all words are comprised1 are finally and forever dead--which is another way of saying they are immortal2 for they do not change as words change from one generation to another4 ,the 8o0 in dog does not differ from the 8o0 in god because 8o0 has no longer individuality or meaning4 ,what we call 8knowledge0 is that which has become fixed and immortal1 that which has ceased to live and have being and is immutable4 ,obviously we cannot be said to know a thing which is susceptible of change1 which may differ to-morrow from what it is to-day4 ,therefore we can only know what is unknowable1 because we only know what does not exist4 ,this is no empty paradox4 ,it is not a play on the word 8exist40 ,we may say we know the letters ,a1 ,b1 ,c1 ,d1 etc41 because they are the same for everybody2 but they are only the same for everybody because they are nothing to anybody4 ,if ,i ask you what ,a means to you it is impossible for you to tell me1 since it means no more to you than to me4 ,a in itself is nothing1 you can neither think it nor feel it1 you can only state it1 and so it is1 as ,i have said1 a fact4 ,there are in all our literature only twenty-six absolute facts4 ,and they are facts merely because there is no life in them4 ,in music there are also facts1 so there is a part of music which we can say we know4 ,the modern ,european knows a certain number of musical sounds which are the facts of music4 ,they can be described in various ways1 but as ,european musical facts they are twelve semi-tones repeated in series between two arbitrarily selected points which are the highest and the lowest notes comfortably audible to the human ear4 ,each of these semi-tones is an arbitrarily selected note or vibration number chosen out of all the masses of vibrations which we call noises by virtue of an inner unity1 a mathematical symmetry which gives it form and makes it a musical sound4 ,but even this mathematical symmetry is a fiction1 a thing made by the human mind2 and these sounds1 like the letters of the alphabet1 have no life or meaning in themselves4 ,but at this point a reservation must be made4 ,for most1 possibly for all1 the letters of the alphabet have a varied character1 a character which derives 7a7 from their different shapes1 7b7 from their different sounds4 ,the effect of their shape belongs to the world of graphic art1 the effect of their sound belongs to the world of music4 ,we may think of these impressions as the residuary fossils left by giantlike primitive emotions which have stalked through those other worlds4 ,a certain artistic use can be made of them1 and indeed we find that every new wave of artistic expression is preluded by a breakdown of the abstract combinations of symbols in which the symbols had become most completely devitalized1 and a return to a sense of a meaning1 a colour1 a life in the symbol itself4 ,this results in simplification1 which ultimately gives place to a new complication4 ,what is called progress in art consists mainly of this process4 ,whether there is another kind of progress underlying this process must be considered in another chapter4 ,now that we have become clear as to what facts are we can perceive what knowledge is4 ,but ,i must prevent the danger of a mere logomachy between reader and writer by stating at once that ,i am giving here definitions of 8knowledge0 and 8life0 to which we must both adhere4 ,if any reader likes to give the name of 8true knowledge0 to what ,i call life and says that what ,i call knowledge is not true knowledge at all1 he is welcome to do so4 ,but ,i am going to use my own terms1 and ,i shall continue to use the term 8life0 instead of so idiotic a term as 8true knowledge40 ,the knowledge of music1 then1 is the knowledge of the facts1 and the facts are1 as we saw1 the alphabet of music1 the twelve artificial semi-tones of the tempered scale4 ,if a musician knows these and knows those combinations of them which are called intervals--as the combinations of letters are called words--he knows what the man knows who knows the letters of the alphabet and has a vocabulary of words4 ,he may know them by sight1 by sound1 or by sight and sound4 ,if only by sight he is in the position of a man who can read and write but not speak the words of a foreign language2 if only by sound he is in the position of a man who can speak the words of a foreign language and understand them when spoken but cannot read or write them4 ,the reader can make this analogy more precise by subdivisions which ,i shall not bother to make here4 ,i will merely point out that the ordinary auditor1 the music-lover who is no musician1 knows the facts by sound only and may so know them with greater or less precision and depth of impression4 ,that he should not know them by sight is immaterial to his understanding what he hears1 although it prevents his communicating what he hears to anyone else4 ,he is therefore technically equipped to hear but not to compose music4 ,such knowledge may extend beyond the knowledge of the vocabulary of words or chords to those more complicated combinations which have also died and become facts--sentences1 idioms1 ideas2 or1 in music1 sequences1 harmonies1 melodies4 ,all this knowledge represents so much dead life which can be incorporated into a page of music as it can be incorporated into a page of prose4 ,when sentences1 idioms and ideas 7or sequences1 harmonies and melodies7 have been used over and over again so frequently as to have become immediately recognizable they cease to have meaning2 because1 as ,i pointed out at the beginning of this chapter1 having been used so often in so many different contexts they have shrivelled to that residuum or abstraction which fits the lot4 ,having shed all individuality they shed all expression1 and what was once life becomes knowledge4 ,for example1 what was a feeling in ,wagner becomes merely a major ninth in ,vincent d',indy4 ,when the music of ,debussy was first heard it was an emotional experience4 ,presently the intellect abstracted an element which it found commonly in that experience1 and that element was the whole-tone scale4 ,then everybody by using the whole-tone scale could write music which superficially sounded like ,debussy's2 but such music had no meaning or life1 it was dead music1 mere knowledge4 ,and ,debussy's music itself tended to become a perceptive and not an emotional experience4 ,there is a universal tendency to this intellectual formalizing1 stereotyping process which ,i have called knowledge or death2 and contrasted with it everywhere is a complementary process1 the process of creation or life4 ,but the one is necessary to the other and all experience is the one becoming the other4 ,just as life uses death--as when we eat meat and transform it into living tissue--so art uses knowledge4 ,music1 therefore1 is experience becoming knowledge and knowledge breaking up and becoming experience1 and its especial nature lies not in the experience but in the medium4 ,music is the experience of life and death in sound4 ,has sound in itself any meaning8 ,i mean by this is there a quality1 virtue1 life--call it what you will--specifically in sounds and the combination of sounds which does not exist elsewhere--in painting1 in sculpture1 in architecture1 in mathematics8 ,i think there is2 but to go further into this would be to transgress the limits ,i have set for myself1 for here we touch on perhaps the profoundest problem of philosophy4 ,i shall be content to throw a little light upon it by analogy4 ,experience in sound has an individuality which separates it from experience in the other arts4 ,this individuality in the arts is comparable to individuality in animal and vegetable life 7the different and analysable virtues of an elephant1 a butterfly1 a lily and a violet7 and to personality in human life4 ,it is an implicit and unexplained factor in all that ,i shall have to say2 but we have to remember that it is the combining1 the making of a harmony of this character or idiosyncrasy with the composer's imagination of love which makes music4 ,it is then that musical form is created4 ,what we call musical genius is related to this individuality in some mysterious and as yet unfathomable way and it would seem that there are degrees of musical genius4 ,but it is only when great musical genius is combined with great human personality that we get what we may call the great artist as distinct from the merely great musician4 ,,chapter ,,iii ,,the ,,general ,,idea ,,of ,,progress ,it may be objected that my persuasion in ,chapter ,i that music is the imagination of love in sound and in ,chapter ,,ii that music is also the experience of life-and-death in sound are two conclusions not only extraordinary in themselves but different4 ,it will be seen that they are not irreconcilable4 ,my conception of the nature of music must1 if true1 be such as to include all music1 the music of ,sullivan1 ,puccini1 ,elgar and the ,jazz-,kings as well as the music of ,bach1 ,mozart1 ,beethoven1 and ,wagner2 the songs of the folk1 old and new1 peasant and urban1 as well as the songs of ,schubert and ,hugo ,wolf4 ,there is no difficulty in this4 ,we have seen that the development of music is analogous to the development of language4 ,that this must be so is obvious when we understand that both music and language are mental structures contemporary with the human mind1 reflecting its development and having their origin in the senses of sight and hearing4 ,no arts have been founded on the sense of touch in its forms of taste and smell4 ,the reason for this gives us a clue to the character of progress in general4 ,the senses of smell and taste are too intimate1 too physically diffused1 too direct or primitive in effect to be controlled by the mind4 ,we may say that the body now short-circuits in these sensations and that the mind is cut out4 ,but when1 in the past1 the sense of touch developed into the more complicated organs of the eye and the ear#a which made touch at a distance possible1 then what the mind sensed was more highly organized and less direct and amorphous4 ,smells and tastes may be compared with noises before the mind has organized them into musical sounds1 or with sensations which have not yet passed through the imagination and become organized into emotions and ideas4 ,it would seem that the history of man is the history of this process of organization and that the organizations differ more from one another than do the senses from which they grew4 ,a ,chinaman1 for instance1 is much more like an ,englishman in his body than in his language2 he can have a child by an ,englishwoman with whom he is unable to speak4#b ,what we think is understanding ,chinese music when we hear it is merely recognition of that organization of vibration1 which we call musical sounds1 an organization common to the human ear in all mankind4 ,the major part of popular music consists of stringing these sounds together for the mere pleasure of recognizing them--pleasure in their organization as contrasted with the unorganized mass of mere noise out of which they have been selected2 also its use of them in simple combinations expressing simple emotions--sensations of rudimentary organization--which again are common to all mankind4 ,it is because language is not an organization of the merely visual or auditory sensations made by the physical eye and ear with which almost everybody is born 7there are colour-blind and tone-deaf people7 but a post-natal acquired and complicated mental construction that it is totally unintelligible until learnt4 ,so ,chinese music does not mean the same to us as to a ,chinaman1 nor does ,european music mean the same to him as to a ,european1 because it is not merely a construction of the ear1 but is also in some although in varying degree a construction of the mind4 ,just as it took a multitude of lives and deaths to evolve the human eye and ear--organs with which all men are now born--so it has taken many generations of that mental development we call culture and tradition to create a language that was more than onomatopoeia1 and a music that was more than recognizable and1 therefore1 agreeable sounds4 ,there is1 and ,i maintain there can be no absolute1 universal1 pure art immediately intelligible to all men4 ,it was the false idea that music was purely sensual which led ,pater to think that music was such an art and that all other arts should attain its perfection4 ,the development of every art is a development farther and farther away from the mere sensations upon which it is founded1 and these developments make a web of experience which is constantly being rewoven and renewed 7probably without a single strand ever being lost or destroyed7 and1 without this1 music would dissolve into meaningless sounds4 ,we look upon the eye and the ear as beautiful complex creations of life4 ,we think of them as physical entities because their creation is so far back in life that it belongs to the sub-human or animal epoch1 and so they have become physical things1 if not material objects4 ,but this power of becoming physical 7life taking on flesh1 the spirit achieving form7 or material 7electricity becoming molecules of hydrogen1 lead1 etc47 is the process which ,i have described as death2 and as that necessary and important death1 death the complement of life4 ,but1 as ,i have already shown1 a third kind of death1 other than the material and the physical1 is that of intellectual structure--known variously as tradition1 belief1 dogma1 logic1 technique or1 most comprehensively1 as knowledge4 ,just as a multitude of deaths were necessary to the evolution of the eye and the ear so a multitude of deaths 7an ,encyclopdia is a mental cemetery7 are necessary to the evolution of the mind4 ,the past experience of music which every trained musician possesses is such knowledge4 ,if he merely repeats it1 copies out of the past stored in his mind1 in the mind of his generation1 in the culture he and his generation have inherited1 he is a mere academic musician and not a creative artist4 ,but there are degrees in this as in everything else4 ,it is not the possession of the tradition which makes a musician academic and lifeless1 it is the failure to use the traditions to express himself2 and this is a failure in musical life4 ,a musical mind which is a mere body of musical tradition is like a detached ear or a plucked out eye--an ear which does not hear or an eye which does not see4 ,the life of hearing is not in the organ1 not in what has been heard--of which it is the physical representation1 the death-shape--it is in creation1 the hearing of a new thing4 ,and creation is that movement from life to death1 from soul to substance1 from the spirit to the form which is the imagining forth of love1 for love alone is a creative motive4 ,and the forms of love vary from the flowering and seeding of plants to the music of ,beethoven4 ,it is not a progress from bad to good1 it is not a retrogression from good to bad4 ,it is rather a process which fills the ,universe with death--death in myriads of lovely forms1 from the form of the wood-violet to the form of the symphony4 ,and this process is life4 ,and life increasing the varieties of death is the general principle of progress4 ,what is the purpose of this process8 ,we do not know4 ,but we can say that its purpose is delight4 ,ecstasy clothing ,himself in a thousand ,forms4 ,the ,universe delighting in itself preserves itself in death1 for in death the imagination of the spirit is made immortal4 ,,footnotes3 #a ,how was this achieved8 ,no biologist can tell us1 but we shall not go far wrong in seeing here again the created organs of ,desire4 #b ,here we can find a conclusive argument in proof of the superiority of sentiment to sense in sexual experience4 ,sentiment is non-existent among animals and it is very faint in the lower human types but in the highest ,european types it now almost completely controls the sexual sense4 ,,chapter ,,iv ,,the ,,idea ,,of ,,progress ,,in ,,music ,in the history of the world as we know it we discover that not all forms of death are immortal4 ,there are animals which are extinct1 there are plants which have disappeared1 there are flowers which bloom no more4 ,in vain has life fixed their images in that immortality of automatic repetition which we call death4 ,even death1 we seem to find1 is occasionally an illusion and its sleep is not more eternal than a man's dream4 ,it is probable that all things as things are perishable2 and we have no reason to believe that even the music of ,beethoven will last for ever1 or even for as long as man lasts4 ,but there is the problem why some things last longer than others1 and this perhaps raises the question of value1 of goodness4 ,here is a new element in the idea of progress4 ,is it possible to discover any principle in the history of music which explains why1 already1 ,bach has outlasted ,frohberger8 ,if we say that ,frohberger is superfluous because ,bach is the same as ,frohberger1 only better1 we are saying something very difficult to understand1 for how would it be possible to prove that two things can be the same and yet different1 one of them being better--except by making goodness depend on quantity8 ,but1 obviously1 to think that ,bach is three ,frohbergers is not the same as thinking he is three times as good as ,frohberger4 ,as the ordinary man speaks this is not at all what he means4 ,we definitely do think ,bach is better than ,frohberger1 not that he is ,frohberger plus a ,frohberger fraction4 ,i submit that we think so because we find all ,frohberger in ,bach plus something more which is not ,frohberger4 ,but this has a tremendous consequence for1 if true1 it means that ,frohberger is not unique4 ,he is included in ,bach4 ,and may we not think that the music which vanishes from human consciousness is the music which is not unique and that so long as a composer is unique his music will be heard8 ,i believe so4 ,it is reasonable to think that every act1 everything created has value4 ,our minds cannot imagine a ,universe in which that would not be true2 but we can imagine complex organizations incorporating simpler organizations1 which then cease to have a separate existence4 ,therefore it is possible that nothing goes out of the ,universe1 and the idea that a thing may be lost seems illusion4 ,our minds find it difficult to imagine an exit from the ,universe4 ,where8 ,but the incorporation of the lesser within the greater remains1 as stated1 a mechanical idea4 ,we can find no satisfaction in a mere increasing complexity of structure4 8,if that is all that makes ,bach better than ,frohberger0--we can imagine someone saying--8,i never want to listen to music again40 ,the process1 we feel1 must have a purpose or a meaning4 ,well1 we have forgotten one vital element4 ,delight4 ,the ,universe is the imagination of its delight4 ,if the purpose of the ,universe were merely to attain to an ever higher degree of complexity for its own sake it would not be littered with these innumerable shapes of death--the violet1 the lily1 the rose1 the cedar1 the oak1 the pine1 the butterfly1 the tiger1 the elephant1 and all other lovely and curious structures4 ,even man has not supplanted the ape1 nor has the fugue of ,bach annihilated the song of the shepherd boy4 ,we may think all these things are unique and that is why they still persist4 ,but what about ,frohberger1 was he not unique8 ,why has ,frohberger vanished8 ,for if ,frohberger was not unique how did he come to appear8 ,not to be unique is not to exist4 ,yes1 but his uniqueness may not have been in his music4 ,here at last we have it4 ,and his music does not exist since there is no music which can be said to be his4 ,this is a different kind of non-existence to that of the ,dinosaur1 the ,dodo1 the ,great ,auk4 ,although their death-shapes no longer repeat themselves upon the earth they have not completely vanished4 ,their images live in the imagination of man1 vivid1 individual1 unique4 ,we have no such image of ,frohberger's music4 ,it is a shrivelled1 meaningless ghost1 a letter in the alphabet of music1 which has in itself no life4 ,frohberger's music is not like the ,great ,auk1 an isolated death-shape of the physical world1 nor like the ,centaur1 an isolated death-shape of the intellectual world1 its position in music is that of one of those intermediates which1 like the 8missing link10 can never be found because the mind works per saltum4 ,frohberger and the 8missing link0 are for ever lost in the gaps4 ,all that is without residuary value1 all that has been completely incorporated in a new structure disappears thus because it slips through the mesh of the mind--not because the mind is not fine enough to retain the most minute differences1 but because it chooses not to perceive4 ,this reconciles the pre-,bach existence of ,frohberger's music with its present non-existence and delivers us from the apparent contradiction2 for it allows us to make what is1 philosophically1 a necessary assumption1 namely1 that no two things are ever exactly the same1 and consequently that ,bach's music does not contain ,frohberger's music absolutely4 ,therefore the equation is not3 ,bach ,b7ach7 ,f7rohberger7 but ,bach ,b 7,f-,x7 ,x being that unknown quantity which is ,frohberger's uniqueness and which we to-day cannot perceive4 ,but although art feeds on knowledge as life feeds on death at the same time creating more knowledge1 as life creates more death--,ecstasy clothing ,himself in ,forms--yet there remains much that is mysterious4 ,why there are different forms of art is a question which insistently recurs4 ,a comparison of music with the other arts in order to discover a value specific and exclusive to music is not likely to enlighten us4 ,painters talk of 8pictorial construction0 as the specifically painter's element which in all good graphic art is wedded to the illustration1 psychology1 representation or whatever other content a picture may yield1 be it ancient or modern4 ,they point out that the spectator is not emotionally moved by the representation of tears but by the rhythm of lines and the recession of planes4 ,the good writer knows that a description of a sad event is not in itself saddening1 it may even be comic2 but unlike the painter he has no technical term for this essential quality without which literature is mere verbiage--unless1 indeed1 we apply the word 8poetic0 to this quality1 as we have every right to do4 ,painting which is without this vital element--call it 8pictorial representation10 8significant form10 or what you will--is not art but knowledge or science4#c ,literature which is without this 8poetic0 quality is1 again1 mere knowledge1 mere fiction4 ,we have no need to seek for examples4 ,a dozen famous names leap to our minds4 ,rather have we to seek for that literature which is poetic4 ,similarly in music there is a specific1 purely musical quality without which music also is mere science4 ,this quality ,i will call melodic imagination4 ,and here an interesting fact emerges4 ,in all three arts the valuable element1 the element of life is linked with the imagination4 ,in painting pictorial imagination1 in literature verbal imagination1 in music melodic imagination--imagination always is the magical essence1 the power referred to in the lines3 8,in the beginning was the ,word and the ,word was with ,god and the ,word was ,god40 ,and we may be sure that there can be no art unless the word is made flesh--in the forms of painting1 literature1 or music--and dwells among us4 ,but when we ask ourselves why it should take the form of painting or of words1 or of music1 it is impossible to give an answer4 ,we can only echo3 ,why the lily1 the rose1 the violet8 ,why the tiger1 the elephant1 the antelope8 ,why the ,moon1 ,venus1 and the ,stars8 ,ecstasy clothing ,himself in ,forms4 ,and still we have failed to discover in music any principle of progress other than increasing complexity of organization and a multiplication of lovely deaths4 ,a principle which does not as yet satisfy our instincts since it seems quantitative rather than qualitative4 ,but perhaps we are on the verge of a discovery4 ,,footnotes3 #c ,such according to eminent critics is the work of the painter ,sargent and1 for my part1 ,i have no difficulty in seeing that what they say is just4 ,,chapter ,v ,,absolute ,,value ,it may appear fantastic to assert that art is the only sphere where absolute values appear1 and that the function of art in the ,universe is to create absolute values1 but it may be true4 ,it is impossible to avoid the insistent demand of the human instinct for absolute values4 ,this exists1 an insatiable craving which will not rest content with the good but demands the better4 ,and yet it is impossible to discover values that are absolute in themselves4 ,the very notion is a meaningless abstraction4 ,i do not even believe we can prove that ,beethoven's music is better music than ,mozart's or that ,shakespeare's poetry is better than ,milton's1 or vice versa1 unless we first of all limit the idea of music or poetry to something intellectually measurable4 ,for example it would be difficult to convince all music-lovers that ,bach's counterpoint was better than ,beethoven's1 or that ,palestrina's was better than ,bach's2 for what is to determine 8good0 counterpoint8 ,very few musicians would accept any individual theorist's rules--all rules being mere abstractions or generalizations from practice1 and varying according to their historic date1 so that even the academic theory of one age differs from that of another4 ,even in judging a fugue1 one has ultimately to fall back upon expression1 significance1 or meaning1 and who is to say--and on what universally acceptable principle is it to be said--that ,bach's 8,st4 ,anne0 fugue is better than ,beethoven's 8,grosse ,fuge10 ,op4 #acc8 ,there is exactly the same difficulty in poetry4 ,in an excellent and well-known book on the ,english ,sonnet a definition is given of perfect sonnet form which is intellectually satisfactory4 ,but we find that most of the greatest ,english sonnets are not written in this form1 while thousands of mediocre sonnets observe it correctly4 ,the same is true of ,bach's ,fugues4 ,you cannot value them according to their correctness4#d ,what then becomes of our 8perfect0 sonnet and our 8perfect0 fugue8 ,each is apparently an unreal abstraction--like all other attempts at creating absolute value4 ,but are these 8absolute0 ideas necessarily valueless in themselves8 ,i do not think so1 for they correspond to and are the formalization or death-shapes of desires ineradicably rooted in the human soul1 those desires which create all values1 and that profounder urge which is satisfied with none4 ,what is important to recognize is the diversity of these desires and to understand that it is the diversity 7in itself profoundly desired7 which nullifies standards4 ,we can say that this fugue is more perfect than that fugue--having made an abstract and definable conception of the fugue form and separated it from all life4 ,criticism is an application of such abstract conceptions--derived by analysis from the practice of artists--from all past works of art to one present work of art and1 again1 backwards1 from all existent works of art to one past work of art4 ,the former is historical criticism 7when a composer is judged only on what preceded him7 and the latter is1 or should be1 the absolute sthetic criticism4 ,but what prevents its being so is that it leaves out the future4 ,the work of art is judged by the present and the past but the future is unknown and the judgment is thereby vitiated and is not and cannot be an absolute judgment4 ,but this does not mean that the future does not exist now1 somewhere4 ,to demonstrate this1 however1 would take me on too far-stretching a parabola4 ,i would merely draw attention to this reservation1 and say that its relevance will appear later4 ,my belief is that when ,i say1 as ,i do emphatically say1 that ,beethoven is a greater composer than ,bach and find my assertion difficult or impossible to prove ,i am judging by an instinctive but not yet intellectually formalized sense of value1 or values1 which will only emerge in the future to take a place among all the other principles and standards--the totality of life in its sum of death-shapes so far created4 ,so we see there can be no such thing as a perfect fugue-in-itself but only the idea of one4 ,the actual fugue must have a meaning1 it must be an expression of life2 a fugue-in-itself without relation to life1 perfect and completely1 is an impossibility4 ,nevertheless a musician like ,bach finds in himself the fugue-idea as well as the fugue-emotion1 the fugue-form as well as the fugue-content1 and there is a constant struggle between them to coincide exactly and to materialize in one indivisible unity4 ,sometimes the fugue idea prevails and sometimes the fugue-emotion prevails1 and the result always is an imperfect fugue4 ,but this imperfection in all its varying degrees is the musical reality4 ,absolute perfection1 absolute unity is annihilation1 the end of all things and the attainment of ,nirvana4 ,but even the fugue-idea is not a constant unchangeable abstraction or fixed shape4 ,it is modified by the actual fugues which are created1 for it is an abstraction1 a general principle from examples1 an induction from particulars2 and as fresh particulars arise1 the induction must be modified4 ,again1 ,i spoke of the content or fugue-emotion1 but this fugue-emotion is not--except perhaps in the simplest and most feeble examples--single but1 on the contrary1 multiple4 ,who is to appraise or range in order of value these emotions8 ,how is it to be done8 ,the belief that any single judgment may do it--the mind of any one critic1 expert or practitioner--is preposterous4 ,but this does not suspend individual judgment or make it vain1 since it is through the conflict or discord of all genuine individual judgments that new conceptions or attempts at concord emerge4 ,this conflict arises from unsatisfied desire and1 in the end1 we think ,beethoven better than ,bach only because ,beethoven more profoundly satisfies our desire or satisfies a deeper desire than any satisfied by ,bach4 ,just as new conceptions emerge or are induced from discordant or unrelated conceptions so new emotions and new desires are induced from the discordance or conflict of our desires4 ,this process of organization would seem infinite--a conception which ,i1 personally1 find intolerable and incomprehensible--were it not for a strange phenomenon1 and this phenomenon is that ultimately at the core of all men there seems to be the same desire4 ,the world is not really divided as to who are its greatest painters1 sculptors1 scientists1 mathematicians1 musicians and poets4 ,we may not be able to prove to our own logical satisfaction that ,beethoven is greater than ,bach1 that ,bach is greater than ,haydn1 that ,palestrina is greater than ,verdi1 but we are all strangely certain that it is so4 ,what are we to make of this8 ,evidently there is a unity somewhere in our diversity1 and it is more than a lowest common factor--a far-away dim primitive element1 never quite lost sight of but growing ever fainter1 linking all men and all art4 ,it is not that touch of nature making the whole world kin1 for that--although it might enable us to have some sympathy with all things--would not enable us to range them in value4 ,such a minute dose of common kinship could not so vitally relate us4 ,it is1 on the contrary1 by our very essence1 by the most spiritual and intense of our desires that we are united4 ,we are not unanimous about ,scriabin1 ,puccini1 ,tchaikovsky1 ,liszt1 ,rimsky-,korsakov1 ,schumann1 ,chopin1 ,mendelssohn and ,dvorak1 just as we are not unanimous about ,aubrey ,beardsley1 ,sargent1 ,el ,greco1 or about ,byron1 ,tennyson1 and ,conrad4 ,apparently each of us carries within him a fundamental note which picks out all the notes struck upon us by nature and mankind and ranges them in a series4 ,and it is this which gives to each one his values4 ,the fundamental note which any individual carries may not be the fundamental note of mankind1 or of the ,universe1 but it must have a more or less simple relationship with them4 ,thus the values of one individual are true for all others1 within their limits4 ,they are real values though not necessarily ultimate values2 they can and will be related to all other values but can only be so related through a more fundamental note--hence the importance of such a note4 ,it is my belief that the profoundest1 most fundamental note in music1 so far1 has been struck by ,beethoven4 ,there is nothing in the music of any other composer which his does not comprehend4 ,but his1 on the other hand1 has a new foundation to which no other music reaches4 ,illustration ,but this analogy of the fundamental note must be understood merely as an analogy1 suggestive rather than explanatory4 ,of all the simpler musical intervals ,i find that of the seventeenth the most satisfying to my ear4 ,i may wonder what is the secret of the purity of its concord--so much greater than that of the perfect fifth or the perfect fourth1 which at first sight seem to be more intimate relationships4 ,then ,i discover that the ratio of the vibrations of the two notes of the seventeenth is #a3e1 whereas that of the perfect fifth is #b3c1 of the perfect fourth #c3d4 ,stated thus this may not mean much to the non-mathematically minded reader but it denotes that the seventeenth is a perfect and not a syncopated interval4 ,that is to say there is no syncopation of the vibrations of the two notes1 but they beat together in a closer more united rhythm than that of a perfect fifth or perfect fourth4 ,but the twelfth ,illustration 7,i use the tenor or ,c clef partly because it is more obscure and will annoy those who are only accustomed to the treble and bass clefs7 has a ratio of #a3c which also is not a syncopated interval but has the same kind of perfection as that of the octave 7#a3b7 and the seventeenth 7#a3e74 ,yet the twelfth is not so pleasing an interval as the seventeenth1 and the octave is inferior to them both4 ,nevertheless the twelfth and octave are mathematically closer relationships than the seventeenth4 ,evidently there is another principle to be discovered1 and ,i will call it the principle of affinity in unlikeness and illustrate it by an analogy which may seem far-fetched but which ,i believe to be illuminating and significant4 ,let us imagine that the unison or note ,a represents oneself2 that the relationship of the octave 7#a3b7 represents that of father and daughter2 the relationship of the perfect fifth 7#b3c7 that of brother and sister2 the relationship of the perfect fourth 7#c3d7 that of two brothers2 the relationship of the twelfth 7#a3c7 that of male and female cousins--in which a new element that of sexual affinity1 is introduced1 bringing with it a deeper reverberation although the blood relationship is more distant4 ,and1 finally1 the relationship of the seventeenth1 that of unrelated lovers which--although the most distant of all in blood--strikes a still profounder sympathy and beauty4 ,it is now possible to understand more clearly why my analogy of the relation of ,beethoven to the rest of music as that of a more fundamental note is not to be taken in its literal meaning4 ,with ,beethoven1 a new element came into music1 an element of such sublimity and beauty that its advent into the world of imagination is comparable in importance with that of sex in the physical world4 ,sex as we know it did not always exist2 it does not exist in the inorganic world1 hardly in the vegetable world1 but dimly in the animal world4 ,it is a human discovery1 and upon that new more fundamental note 7fundamental not in the vertical sense but in a focal sense7 rises the whole wealth of man's intellectual and physical harmony4 ,but even in sex we have not touched an absolute4 ,the presage of a still profounder intimacy trembles fitfully here and there in music throughout the historical ,european period4 ,in the music of ,palestrina1 of ,byrd1 of all the rarer spirits up to ,bach1 ,mozart and ,wagner there are fitful gleams of a more central desire until1 finally1 a love that plumbs deeper than even the love of sex rings forth unmistakeably in the music of ,beethoven and immediately creates for us a new hierarchy of values4 ,and so here we find for the time being an ,absolute4 ,the world of art1 we find1 resembles both the world of the atom and the world of solar space4 ,there are greater and lesser planets and greater and lesser satellites4 ,we can imagine that if there were inhabitants upon the ,moon they might think the ,earth was the primary fact of their being1 since it was the focal point of their orbit1 whereas the ,sun would seem so eccentrically placed as to be an irregular and incomprehensible singularity2 until by a process of more profound imagining they conceived the more fundamental though more distant relationship in which it stood to them4 ,just as the ,sun is the centre of the only system of the physical universe so far formulated--for no centre has been found to the innumerable suns of the stellar universe--so ,beethoven is our temporary ,absolute in the world of music4 ,and just as the ,sun is the source of all vegetable and animal life upon the earth1 so ,i believe that in art we find the vital spirit which animates our human life4 ,thus it would seem to be true--as ,i suggested we might discover--that the function of art in the world is to create absolute values in the imagination upon which the human species can continually re-create its intellectual1 moral1 and physical structures4 ,and if this is so it means that in the values of art we approach most nearly to ,truth4 ,,footnotes3 #d ,see ,mr4 ,harvey ,grace's excellent book on the organ works of ,j4 ,s4 ,bach4 ,,chapter ,,vi ,,emotional ,,significance ,a technical analysis of the art of music as practised in ,europe during the past few hundred years would be interesting1 but it lies outside the scope of this book4 ,what is relevant is to consider the emotional and intellectual significance of the music composed during that period4 ,folksong1 from which most great composers have consciously or unconsciously drawn1 is the emotional substratum of all ,european music4 ,at its best it is simple1 sensuous and passionate--the heart-cry of men whose desires are frustrated by the accidents of life1 whose joys are too short1 or whose griefs are too enduring4 ,where it chiefly differs from similar1 later1 more sophisticated music is in the simple intensity of the emotion4 ,in a society more subject to extreme vicissitudes of fortune than later and more stable social states it was easier1 and natural1 to believe that mere irresponsible 8accident0 or mischance separated men from happiness4#e ,in a beautiful old ,neapolitan song collected by ,madame ,geni ,sadero the singer bewails the loss of his love carried off by ,moorish pirates in a raid on the ,italian coast4 ,such a song has an extraordinary plasticity of melody1 rivalling in expressiveness the melodic invention of the greatest composers4 ,these melodies were modelled by an intense sincerity1 of a kind inconceivable to men in a more complex environment1 richly provided with compensations4 ,any attempt at such sincerity would to-day be insincere4#f ,equally insincere would be any modern composer's attempt to express the simple natural thrill of the ,sardinian shepherd boy who greets the rising of the ,sun in a wonderful song included in the ,sadero collection4 ,in our civilized society man knows that the sun will rise to-morrow as it did yesterday1 and that next year or the year after he may love again4 ,it is not ,moorish pirates1 or the accident of plague1 or the malefic interference of an unfriendly ,god that will bear away his happiness4 ,it is happiness itself that has flown away as he sits securely in the midst of his possessions and asks himself1 what he used not to ask himself3 8,why do ,i live80 ,i do not lament this change as a disaster4 ,i merely wish to point out the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the music of yesterday4 ,those who believe that music is a purely abstract art 7mere negation this1 which ,i have abundantly shown to be empty of reality7 will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man's life2 but the great composers themselves knew better3 8,the error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a ,means of ,expression 7,music7 has been made the object1 while the ,object of ,expression 7the ,drama7 has been made a means40 ,those words of ,wagner's show clearly that to ,wagner1 as ,mr4 ,newman aptly puts it3 8,to invent a theme for its own abstract sake1 to pare and shape it till it was #8workable' and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition--this was something he could not imagine himself doing1 and that he scoffed at when he found the ,conservatoire musicians engaged in4444 ,wagner always protested against the current fashion of performing ,beethoven's symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns40 ,my preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why ,wagner's instinct was right1 although his mode of expression is so inexact as to be often confusing and misleading4#g ,what ,wagner means is that intellectual forms or death-shapes are given no significance by being manipulated1 dove-tailed1 and re-arranged by the intelligence working from rules and examples4 ,it is 8life0 that gives significance1 a spiritual urge into creation1 and where this is absent there is no artistic creation4 ,we may perceive by his use of the word 8drama0 that ,wagner's conception of 8life0 was a limited one2 but he could only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his recognizing this4 ,but we shall not make the mistake of inventing an artificial and unilluminating distinction between ,wagner as a dramatic or programmatic composer and1 for example1 ,mozart or ,bach as absolute composers4 ,the difference between all these composers 7including ,beethoven7 lies mainly in inner feeling1 in spiritual life1 in the individual psyche--not in their musical faculty as composers4 ,it was natural to each one of them that his vital activity should run into the form of sound-patterns4 ,it is this idiosyncrasy which has made them all musicians and not poets1 sculptors1 or painters4 ,but this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for--to quote ,mr4 ,newman again1 since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate here than the words of a poet or sculptor1 besides being admirably clear-- 8,it is only the most superficial of psychologists and stheticians who can regard any human faculty as wholly cut off from the rest4 ,our perceptions of sight1 of taste1 of touch1 of hearing are inextricably interblended as is shown by our constantly expressing one set of sensations in terms of another1 as when we speak of the colour of music1 the height or depth or thickness or clarity or muddiness of musical tone4 ,in every poet there is something of the painter and the musician2 in every musician something of the poet and the painter2 in every painter something of the musician and the poet4 ,the character of the man's work will depend upon the strength or weakness of the tinge that is given to his own special art by the relative strength or weakness of the infusion of one or more of the other arts40 ,thus we can explain the sensuous individuality of an artist as being a result of the special and peculiar bias and intermixture of his senses4 ,but this is only a part of his character or personality1 and it is my argument that it is the minor 7though essential and indispensable7 and not the major or most important part4 ,for besides this physical individuality he has a spiritual individuality4 ,the former is the instrument1 the latter is the 8life10 and1 in the case of music1 the physical expression1 the communication1 the tangible 7eye and ear are 8touch0 at a distance7 death-shape is the musical creation or form--a ,bach fugue1 a ,beethoven symphony1 a ,mozart or ,wagner opera1 a ,schubert song4 ,the importance of ,beethoven--which ,wagner was the first to understand--lay in that stupendous stream of 8life0 within him which burst through all the old academic forms1 as the sap bursts through a tree into colour and blossom1 and strewed the history of music with those gigantic skeletons of spiritual life which we know as his works4 ,but we have yet to discover the meaning of these compositions4 ,their full meaning can only be felt1 it cannot be re-stated--except when his works are adequately performed2 but they have a characteristic to which ,i shall try to give a verbal construction because ,i think it immensely important4 ,it is not a quality for which there exists a word1 or a phrase1 or even a poem2 but it is a particular kind of desire4 8,like as a hart desireth the water-brooks so thirsteth my soul after the living ,god10 that--were it not for its association with the desires of ,baptists1 ,methodists1 ,wesleyans1 ,anglicans1 ,catholics1 ,mohammedans1 ,buddhists1 ,christian ,scientists1 ,mormons1 and all those bodies of people known to-day as 8religious0--would perhaps be suggestive4 ,at any rate it would serve to distinguish the quality of this desire or passion from the passion which created ,tristan und ,isolde4 ,and1 magnificent and beautiful as that was1 its magnificence compared with the magnificence of ,beethoven's passion is as the magnificence of a coloured duck to a black swan4 ,the simile is a totally unworthy one1 for we have nothing to which we can compare ,beethoven4 ,we can easily find similes for ,wagner1 but ,beethoven is a rara avis4 ,it is natural to the young to be idealists1 an old idealist is generally either a rogue or a fool--unless he happens to be a ,beethoven4 ,the young find something stirring in their hearts when listening to ,beethoven which they never find when listening to ,bach1 ,mozart or ,wagner1 great as these composers are4 ,beethoven awakes a feeling so romantic1 so idealistic1 of so fine and exquisite a bloom that it is guarded by everyone who experiences it as a precious secret4 ,what ,beethoven imagined inevitably lures men away from the sensuous delights of ,debussy and ,strauss1 from the fatiguing excitements of ,stravinsky and ,jazz1 from the gaieties of ,verdi and ,rossini1 from the sentimental nostalgia of ,brahms1 from the solid satisfaction of ,bach1 from the sensitive melancholy of ,mozart and from the lesser loves of ,wagner2 but why it does so we cannot tell4 8,had ,i been willing10 said ,beethoven to ,schindler in #ahbc1 in the course of a conversation about the ,countess ,giulietta ,guicciardi1 8to surrender thus my vital power and my life what would have been left of the best and noblest in me80 ,what a different ring this plain statement has beside the rhetorical pans to renunciation on the lips of ,wagner1 who was satisfied to accept what would never have satisfied ,beethoven4 ,it is a peculiarity of ,beethoven that he can use the words 8best0 and 8noblest0 without making an intelligent man laugh up his sleeve4 ,if we do succeed in laughing it is with the wrong side of our mouths4 ,the very words 8good10 8noble10 8spiritual10 8sublime10 have all become in our time synonymous with humbug4 ,in ,beethoven's music they take on a new and tremendous significance and not all the corrosive acid of the most powerful intellect and the profoundest scepticism can burn through them into any leaden substratum4 ,they are gold throughout4 ,am ,i wrong in thinking this an achievement without parallel in the modern world8 ,point to me in poetry1 painting1 sculpture1 music1 anywhere1 one other artist who has recreated 7not paid lip-service to7 the meaning of good and left to us the imagination of a love transcending both the sacred and the profane4 ,there is none4 ,we cannot live without values and at present we cannot conceive a state when men would not ask themselves3 8,why do ,i live80 8,is life worth living80 ,this is the theme which touches us to-day when we marry and settle down with our love1 measure the spots on the ,sun1 and fear neither plagues1 pirates1 nor eclipses3 8,here ,i am an old man in a dry month1 ,being read to by a boy1 waiting for rain4 ,i was neither at the hot gates ,nor fought in the warm rain ,nor knee-deep in the salt marsh1 heaving a cutlass1 ,bitten by flies1 fought4 ,my house is a decayed house1 ,and the jew squats on the window-sill1 the owner1 ,spawned in some estaminet of ,antwerp1 ,blistered in ,brussels1 patched and peeled in ,london4 ,the goat coughs at night in the field overhead2 ,rocks1 moss1 stonecrop1 iron1 merds4 ,the woman keeps the kitchen1 makes tea1 ,sneezes at evening1 poking the peevish gutter4 ,i am an old man1 ,a dull head among windy spaces40 ,the bravest1 the most intelligent1 the most sensitive are oppressed with that profound sense of the futility of life which ,mr4 ,eliot expresses so admirably in the above lines4 ,it is1 indeed1 the constant burden of the most characteristic of our modern poets3 8,this is the way the world ends ,this is the way the world ends ,this is the way the world ends ,not with a bang but a whimper40 ,yes1 we are convinced4 ,this is the way the world ends and we have no more faith in anything4 ,democracy1 ,liberty1 ,equality1 ,fraternity1 have all been added to the list of the ,great ,superstitions4 ,mussolini and ,lenin have made moonshine of ,socialism and ,communism4 ,god is a word used only in treatises on tribal magic1 when it is spelt correctly as god4 ,love has been appropriated by the writers of silly magazine stories and even sillier novels4 ,all honest men are reduced to silence before the daily avalanche of fraudulent lies from pulpit1 printing press1 parliament and platform4 ,everywhere men speak with the tongues of serpents and the minds of manufacturers of chewing gum4 ,and deep in all men's hearts there is only one thought3 8,i grow old--,i grow old ,i shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled40 ,but in the midst of futility and inanity1 in the midst of desperation and despair there sounds the music of ,beethoven which says without bombast or credo3 8,this is not the way the world ends40 ,and says it in such a way that we are forced to listen4 ,we listen to ,beethoven when we would listen to nobody else because he is a man without any of the world's illusions4 ,how feeble and superficial seems the disillusionment of ,mr4 ,t4 ,s4 ,eliot's poems compared with the agony of the ,cavatina in the ,b flat ,quartet with its mysterious pause--as if the pulse of the whole ,universe were stopped and might not continue2 of the ,fugue in ,b flat ,op4 #acc2 and of the last ,pianoforte ,sonata which ,beethoven wrote4 ,in this last ,sonata we feel the agony of a man whose imagination is grappling with some insupportable horror4 ,let us conceive the ,captain of a ship standing on its bridge in a calm1 unconscious sea4 ,the boats are useless because land does not exist anywhere4 ,from the deck come the cries1 curses and weeping of the doomed crew1 who are only his own embodied emotions1 for he is really alone4 ,slowly they are going down into the unruffled water4 ,the ,captain does not shake his fist defiantly into the sky and deny that he is going down1 but knowing that he is going down never to return sinks passionately into the sea4 ,such is the mind and temper of ,beethoven4 ,there is agony but no whimper1 and if that is not ending with a bang ,i don't know what is4 ,in the music of ,beethoven there are no anodynes1 no lullings of sense1 no deceits of the intelligence1 but pure virtus4 ,and this virtus is thrilling absolutely1 without reservations4 ,after the tremendous drama of the first movement of the ,c minor ,sonata1 for example--a drama in which there is the whole ecstatic misery of life--we are not assuaged by a dream4 ,the conflict does not cease4 ,that wonderful ,arietta--surely the most wonderful thing in all music--is no bringer of peace and resignation4 ,in it something passes away but its passing away is an act of creation not of extinction4 ,it is this which gives ,beethoven's music its peculiar significance1 for ,creation not ,nirvana is the essence of ,beethoven4 ,it has its root therefore in human personality and may be most accurately described as the supremest imagination of love in human art4 ,but though beyond the conception of the ,neapolitan fisherman mourning for his lost bride it does not lessen but enriches that ancient love-song1 making it impossible for us to feel that it was meaningless4 ,and if anyone should say that the question3 8,why do ,i live80 has not been answered1 ,i reply that ,beethoven has rendered it ridiculous4 ,,footnotes3 #e ,the ancient ,greeks with characteristic intellectual power did not believe in mere irresponsible accident4 #f ,compare for example the feebleness of our contemporary love-songs and ballads4 #g ,for example we can ask nothing more than that a composer should write 8exciting musical patterns40 ,it all depends upon what is meant by 8exciting40 ,,chapter ,,vii ,,beyond ,,all ,,sense ,music will not end with ,beethoven4 ,it is possible that the very problems that confronted him and still confront us will fade out of the imagination just as those political problems which occupied so much of the attention of the historical world from the ,greek ,republics to the ,british ,empire are ceasing to exist before our very eyes4 ,and when we think of the religious dissensions of ,christendom and reflect on the questions which once divided father from son1 sect from sect1 church from church1 it is with difficulty that we can give them a meaning intelligible to our minds1 much less feel any shadow of the life that was once in them4 ,in the memory of living men1 heartburning intellectual problems have become empty phrases4 ,darwin1 ,huxley1 and the ,anglican ,bishops all seem as unreal as the waxworks of ,madame ,tussaud and are seen to be the complementary phenomena of an intellectual nightmare4 ,no one to-day imagines that ,truth wears the strange ,victorian get-up of any of these gentlemen4 ,similarly the sociological phantoms of the age of ,bernard ,shaw and ,h4 ,g4 ,wells1 of ,karl ,marx and ,lenin are cutting the last of their antithetical capers4 ,socialist and ,anti-,socialist1 ,communist and ,anti-,communist1 ,conservative and ,revolutionary have suddenly caught sight of their own faces behind the masks of their opponents4 ,their passionate reality is seen to be no more than a ,fancy ,dress ,ball--for all these figments1 these fictions1 these ,ideas were never any more than the ,masks of false passions1 passions which have never succeeded in begetting a progeny1 since they are the mere nightmare passions of social indigestion4 ,in another five generations there will be no poverty1 there may be no matrimony1 there will certainly1 if there is no poverty1 be no patrimony4 ,children may take their mother's name and then fathers will have not even a fifty-year royalty upon their creations4 ,men and women will look upon their children as artists look upon their works and will wish others to enjoy them4 ,the world will be so changed that none of the problems which to-day set our newspapers printing and our politicians talking will even exist4 ,our present ideas on sex1 morality1 beauty and value will in those days appear as strange1 as fantastic1 as illusory as the ideas of our ancestors who took ,beecham's pills to cure all ills4 ,will the music of such a world differ from the music of to-day8 ,necessarily1 since life without change is inconceivable to us and music that is alive must be changing4 ,but the meaning of this change is not to be apprehended by the mind1 for it is no less than life itself4 ,a part of it1 however1 can be apprehended1 for1 although we feel instinctively that the more the world changes the more that it is the same#h yet we cannot deny that it is the same with a difference4 ,and it is the difference which matters and is matter--that which appears1 is visible and audible--the death-shape of the spirit4 ,it would be boring and futile to consider the methods which may be invented of distributing music or of making music heard4 ,that a million persons listen to ,beethoven by wireless or gramophone where1 previously1 a thousand listened in a concert hall is one of those statistical changes which it is beyond the wit of man to value4 ,fortunately there is a period fixed to the possibilities of 8progress0 of this kind2 and when every baby is born to ,beethoven and to ,freedom then culture and statistics of culture1 education and measurements of education will have simultaneously ceased4 ,there will be in those days no newspaper interviews with ,neo-,edisons because there will be no newspapers2 the people will have forgotten that it is interesting to know whether a celebrity drinks de-caffeined coffee or dehydrogened water because there will be no 8people0 and no celebrities4 ,the ,age of ,vulgarity will have passed4 ,what sort of music will be listened to in those days8 ,the music of ,orpheus1 the music that comes out of darkness4 ,according to ,plato when ,orpheus descended into hell and succeeded by the strains of his mysterious music in softening the hearts of ,pluto and ,persephone--who themselves were phantoms1 prisoners of the imagination1 supernal beings chained to the bottom of ,hades because they were imagined there and existed only in ,imagination--he brought back with him but an ,apparition4 ,it was an ,apparition that he gazed at so fondly1 and which nevertheless vanished before his eyes4 ,his music was that ,apparition2 those heavenly strains1 mysterious1 profound1 issuing from his mouth took form1 the form of ,eurydice--the imagination of light in darkness1 of love in the midst of death4 ,the forms that music will take in the future are as yet unimagined2 but these forms will always be the form of ,eurydice plucked by ,orpheus vainly out of ,hell4 ,and they will not be abstract forms but the apparition of a real love which1 bitten by the serpent of life1 descended into the kingdom of ,pluto4 ,,footnotes3 #h ,the evolutionary theory will no longer be thought of as a continuous or a discontinuous ascent2 biological species will be regarded as ripples on a pool2 the ,astronomical ,universe will be conceived as stationary4 ,,the ,,end