our modern public sums up in it its whole idea of Music's essence.-
But apart from this public and its subservient fashion-mongers and mode-purveyors, the inmost individual essence of Tone was yet to soar up from its plumbless depths, in all the unlost plenitude of its unmeasured faculties, to redemption in the sunlight of the universal, one Art of the Future. And this spring it was to take from off that ground which is the ground of all sheer human art : the plastic motion of the body, portrayed in musical Rhythm.
Though in the Christian lisping of the stereotyped Word, eternally repeated until it lost itself in utter dearth of Thought, the human voice had shrunk at last to a mere physical and fiexile implement of Tone: yet, by its side, those tone-implements which mechanism had devised for Dance's ample escort had been elaborated to ever more enhanced expressive faculty. As bearers of the dance-tune, the rhythmic Melody had been consigned to their exclusive care; and, by reason of the ease with which their blended forces took up the element of Christian Harmony, to them now fell the call for all further evolution of the art of Tone from out itself. The harmonised dance is the basis of the richest art-work of the modern Symphony.-Even this 'harmonised dance' fell as a savoury prey into the hands of counterpoint-concocting mechanism; which loosed it from obedient devotion to its mistress, body-swaying Dance, and made it now to take its turns and capers from its rules. Yet it needed but the warm hifebreath of the natural folk-tune to beat upon the leathern harness of this schooled and contrapunctal dance,-and lo! it stretched at once to the elastic flesh of fairest human artwork. This artwork, in its highest culmination, is the Symphony of Haydn, of Mozart, and Beethoven.
In the Symphony of Haydn the rhythmic dance-melody moves with all the blithesome freshness of youth: its entwinements, disseverings, and re-unitings, though carried out with highest contrapunctal ingenuity, yet hardly show a trace of the results of such ingenious treatment; but rather take the character peculiar to a dance ordained by laws of freest Phantasy,-so redolent are they of the warm and actual breath of joyous human Life. To the more tempered motion of the middle section of the symphony we see assigned by Haydn a broad expansion of the simple song-tune of the Folk; in this it spreads by laws of melos peculiar to the character of Song, through soaring graduations and 'repeats' enlivened by most manifold expression. This form of melody became the very element of the Symphony of song-abundant, and song-glad Mozart. He breathed into his instruments the passionate breath of Human Voice, that voice toward which his genius bent with overmastering love. He led the stanchless stream of teeming Harmony into the very heart of Melody; as though in restless care to give it, only mouthed by Instruments, in recompense -the depth of feeling and of fervour that forms the exhaustless source of human utterance within the inmost chambers of the heart. Whilst, in his Symphonies, Mozart to some extent but made short work of everything that lay apart from this his individual impulse and, with all his remarkable dexterity in counterpoint, departed little from those traditional canons which he himself helped forward to stability: he lifted up the 'singing' power of instrumental music to such a height that it was now enabled, not only to embrace the mirth and inward still content which it had learnt from Haydn, but the whole depth of endless heart's-desire.
It was Beethoven who opened up the boundless faculty of Instrumental Music for expressing elemental storm and stress. His power it was, that took the basic essence of the Christian's Harmony, that bottomless sea of unhedged fulness and unceasing motion, and clove in twain the fetters of its freedom. Harmonic Melody-for so must we designate this melody divorced from speech, in distinction from the Rhythmic Melody of dance-was capable, though merely borne by instruments, of the most limitless expression together with the most unfettered treatment. In long, connected tracts of sound, as in larger, smaller, or even smallest fragments, it turned beneath the Master's poet hand to vowels, syllables, and words and phrases of a speech in which a message hitherto unheard, and never spoken yet, could promulgate itself. Each letter of this speech was an infinitely soul-full element; and the measure of the joinery of these elements was utmost free commensur ation, such as could be exercised by none but a tone- poet who longed for the unmeasured utterance of this unfathomed yearning.
Glad in this unspeakably expressive language, but suffering beneath the weight of longing of his artist soul-a longing which, in its infinity, could only be an 'object' to itself, not satisfy itself outside-the happy-wretched, sea- glad and sea-weary mariner sought for a surer haven wherein to anchor from the blissful storms of passionate tumult. Was his faculty of speech unending-so also was the yearning which inspired that speech with its eternal breath. How then proclaim the end, the satisfaction, of this yearning, in the selfsame tongue that was naught but its expression? If the utterance of immeasurable heart-yearning be vented in this elemental speech of absolute tone, then the endlessness of such utterance, like that of the yearning itself; is its only true Necessity; the yearning cannot find contentment in any finite shutting-off of sound,-for that could only be Caprice. Now by the definite expression which it borrows from the rhythmic dance-melody, Instrumental Music may well portray and bring to close a placid and self-bounded mood; for reason that it takes its measure from an originally outward-lying object, namely the motion of the body. If a tone-piece yield itself ab initio to this expression, which must always be conceived as that of mirth, in greater or in less degree,-then, even mid the richest, most luxuriant unfolding of the faculty of tonal speech, it holds within itself the necessary grounds of every phase of 'satisfaction'; while equally inevitably must this 'satisfaction' be a matter of caprice, and therefore in truth unsatisfying, when that sure and sharp-cut mode of utterance endeavours merely thus to terminate the storms of endless yearning. The transition from the endless agitation of desire to a mood of joyous satisfaction, can necessarily take place no otherwise than by the ascension of desire into an object. But, in keeping with the character of infinite yearning, this 'object' can be none other than such an one as shows itself with finite, physical and ethical exactitude. Absolute Music, however, finds well-marked bounds dividing her from such an object; without indulging in the most arbitrary of assumptions, she can now and never, of her own unaided powers, bring the physical and ethical Man to distinct and plainly recognisable presentment. Even in her most infinite enhancement, she still is but emotion; she enters in the train of the ethical deed, but not as that Deed itself; she can set moods and feelings side by side, but not evolve one mood from out another by any dictate of her own Necessity ;-she lacks the Moral Will.
What inimitable art did Beethoven employ in his 'C-minor Symphony,' in order to steer his ship from the ocean of infinite yearning to the haven of fulfilment! He was able to raise the utterance of his music almost to a moral resolve, but not to speak aloud that final word; and after every onset of the Will, without a moral handhold, we feel tormented by the equal possibility of falling back again to suffering, as of being led to lasting victory. Nay, this falling-back must almost seem to us more 'necessary' than the morally ungrounded triumph, which therefore-not being a necessary consummation, but a mere arbitrary gift of grace-has not the power to lift us up and yield to us that ethical satisfaction which we demand as outcome of the yearning of the heart.
Who felt more uncontented with this victory than Beethoven himself? Was he lief to win a second of the sort? 'Twas well enough for the brainless herd of imitators, who from glorious 'major '-jubilation, after vanquished 'minor '-tribulation, prepared themselves unceasing triumphs,-but not for the Master, who was called to write upon his works the world-history of Music.
With reverent awe, he shunned to cast himself afresh into that sea of boundless and insatiate yearning. He turned his steps towards the blithesome, life-glad Men he spied encamped on breezy meads, along the outskirt of some fragrant wood beneath the sunny heaven; kissing, dancing, frolicking. There in shadow of the trees, amid the rustling of the leaves, beside the tender gossip of the brook, he made a happy pact with Nature; there he felt that he was Man, felt all his yearning thrust back deep into his breast before the sovereignty of sweet and blissful manifestment. So thankful was he toward this manifestment that, faithfully and in frank humility, he superscribed the separate portions of the tone-work, which he built from this idyllic mood, with the names of those life-pictures whose contemplation had aroused it in him :-' Reminiscences of Country Life' he called the whole.
But in very deed they were only 'Reminiscences' - pictures, and not the direct and physical actuality. Towards this actuality he was impelled with all the force of the artist's inexpugnable ('nothwendig') yearning. To give his tone-shapes that same compactness, that directly cognisable and physically sure stability, which he had witnessed with such blessed solace in Nature's own phenomena,-this was the soul of the joyous impulse which created for us that glorious work the 'Symphony in A major.' All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart become here the blissful insolence of joy, which snatches us away with bacchanalian might and bears us through the roomy space of Nature, through all the streams and seas of Life, shouting in glad self-consciousness as we tread throughout the Universe the daring measures of this human sphere-dance. This symphony is the Apotheosis of Dance herself: it is Dance in her highest aspect, as it were the loftiest Deed of bodily motion incorporated in an ideal mould of tone. Melody and Harmony unite around the sturdy bones of Rhythm to firm and fleshy human shapes, which now with giant limbs' agility, and now with soft, elastic pliance, almost before our very eyes, close up the supple, teeming ranks; the while now gently, now with daring, now serious, (13) now wanton, now pensive, and again exulting, the deathless strain sounds forth and forth; until, in the last whirl of delight, a kiss of triumph seals
