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Page 21
Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might possibly have
been cured, but not of his melancholy: it is the very essence of his
music, as it was of his being. "The Wanderer" is his typical song: he
was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately, helplessly,
hopelessly through a strange, chilly, unreal world, singing the
saddest and sometimes the sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of
men. That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts for
nothing; for he did not and could not know that he was the voice of
the eighteenth century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility
of the purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a
consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in
throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth
century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless
in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the
tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides,
had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was
he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He lived with an
ever-present consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest
needs. He was even destitute of that sense of the immeasurable good to
come which of old time found expression in the fiction of a personal
immortality, and in the nineteenth century in the complacent
acceptance of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and
fitting close. Life and death alike were tragic, because hopeless, to
Schubert. His career, if career it can be called, is infinitely
touching. His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems that
one in some ways so strong should also in so many ways be so weak; and
his death was as touching as his life. Of all the composers he met
death with least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically;
but death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror; and
the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate. Beethoven,
during a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the stream of
water and blood flowing from him, and found courage to say, "Better
from the belly than the pen;" and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm
broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched fist.
Schubert learnt that he was to die, and turned his face to the wall
and did not speak again. It is hard to say whether his music was
sadder when he sang of death than when he sang of life. Even in his
rare moments of good spirits one catches stray echoes of his
prevailing note, and realises how completely his despair dominated
him. He could not sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of
nature without betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all
created things. It is characteristic that his major melodies should
often be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and
other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be
light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous
energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free play.
Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by the
endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though
sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one
mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous
facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of
extraordinary power and bigness. At least half of his songs are
poor--for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the
remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for
sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach
so close to Handel's and Mozart's that affection for the composer
presses one hard to put them on the same level. But, compared with
those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is unmistakably felt
to be second-rate, while his average--always comparing it with the
highest--cannot truly be said to be more than fourth-rate. That he
stands far above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above
Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of
the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and
Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the lovely
irresistibly moving melody and the bigness. But it must be recognised
that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained grandeur and dignity;
he was always colloquial, paying in this the penalty for the extreme
facility with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and when I
have finished one thing I commence something fresh"). Compose is
scarcely the word to use: he never composed in the ordinary sense of
the word; he extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote a song, it
meant little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a
theme, he tried again. He never built as, for instance, Bach and
Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening this
portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that in the
end the whole composition became a complete organism. There is none of
the logic in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top men,
none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary, a very considerable
degree of looseness, if not of actual incoherence, and many marks of
the tool and a good deal of the scaffolding. But, in spite of it all,
the greatness of many of his movements seems to me indisputable. In a
notice of "The Valkyrie," Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the
"earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find
in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of
nature--the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the
convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt--he does not
accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with
the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with
the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever
attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament,
and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in
"The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried." The rapidly repeated note, now rising
to a roar and now falling to a subdued murmur, in "The Erl-king" was
an entirely new thing in music; and in "The Wanderer" piano fantasia,
the working-out of the Unfinished symphony, and even in some of the
chamber music, he invented things as fresh and as astounding. And when
he is simply expressing himself, as at the beginning of the
Unfinished, and in the first and last movements of the big C symphony,
he often does it on the same large scale. The second subject of the C
symphony finale, with its four thumps, seems to me to become in its
development, and especially in the coda, all but as stupendous an
expression of terror as the music in the last scene of "Don Giovanni,"
where Leporello describes the statue knocking at the door. In short,
when I remember Schubert's grandest passages, and the unspeakable
tenderness of so many of his melodies, it is hard to resist the
temptation to cancel all the criticism I have written and to follow
Sir George Grove in placing Schubert close to Beethoven.
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