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Page 38
Happily, it is not my business to reform the world; and writing in
October, when so many of the idealists who felt with Parsifal in his
remorse about the duck-shooting episode are applying the lesson by
wantonly slaughtering every harmless creature they can hit, it would
be superfluous to point out in any detail how very wrong and absurd is
the world's estimate of the Bayreuth performance. In fact, were it my
object to assist in the destruction of Bayreuth, no better plan could
be found than that of approving cordially of everything Bayreuth does.
For it is fast driving away all sincere lovers of Wagner; it lives now
on fashionable ladies, betting men, and bishops: when the fashion
changes and these depart, the Bayreuth festivals will come to an end.
Bayreuth is only an affectation; not one pilgrim in a hundred
understands the "Ring" or "Parsifal"; not one in a thousand is really
impressed by anything deeper than the mere novelty of the business.
Visitors go and are moved by the shooting of the duck (the libretto
calls it a swan, but the management chooses to use a duck); they talk
of Wagner's love of animals and of how they love animals themselves;
they go straight from Bayreuth to Scotland and show their love in true
sportsmanlike fashion by treating animals, birds, and fishes with a
degree of cruelty so appalling as to disgust every right-thinking and
right-feeling man and woman; and they tell you that the stag likes to
be disembowelled, the bird to have its wings shattered, the fish to be
torn to pieces in its agonised struggle for life. Or, having been
moved by the consequences of sin, they straightway go and prepare
cases for the divorce courts; having appreciated the purity and peace
of monastery life and a daily communion service, they return without
hesitation or sense of inconsistency to their favourite modes of
gambling; having revelled in the most lovely music in the world, they
proceed to listen nightly to the ugliest and silliest music in the
world. Their appreciation of Bayreuth is a sham; they would cheerfully
go elsewhere--say to Homburg--if Bayreuth were shut up; and before
long they will go to Homburg or elsewhere, whether Bayreuth is shut up
or not.
A NOTE ON BRAHMS
It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen
musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as
to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly.
His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are
very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of
intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that
"austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the
worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that
there is little behind that austere manner--that his reticence does
not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do
not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever
enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he
purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who
wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had
not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a r�le
for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms,
the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in
many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the
smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his
overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the
opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most
satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a
mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely
beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with
beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he
written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces,
Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a
degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but
he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole
world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing
many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was
not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms
really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid
example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless
thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he
would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small
herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of
the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and
had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music;
he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is
small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little
more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that,
despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they
dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a
great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical
form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was
born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was
even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond
rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the
blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began
breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that
miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been
tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil
influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers,
the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms
into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that
he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there
are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms
became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the
guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and
he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere
when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler
to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be
found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there
is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his
bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he
wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have
attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a
pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt
and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original
emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious
mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of
his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the
evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the
window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the
quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a
good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that
one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.
That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.
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