Beauty & Art - A Collection of Essays. Vernon Lee

of Signorelli, stretching forth impetuous arms towards Paradise, only lose sight of the stately viol-playing angels who guide them, let them suddenly see above them the awful sword of the corsleted Angel of Judgment, and they will sink, and grovel, and writhe and their now up-turned faces will be draggled in the dust; let the trumpet of warfare and triumph shrill in the ear of Michael Angelo's "Jeremiah," and the dreary dream will be shaken off; he will leap up, and the compressed hand-gagged mouth will open with the yell of battle; let only the emotion change, and the whole gesture, the attitude, plastic or musical, must change also; the already existing, finite, definite work will no longer suffice; we must have a new picture, or statue, or piece of music. And in these inexplicit arts of mere suggestion, we cannot say, as in the explicit art of poetry, this grovelling wretch is a proud and hopeful spirit; this violent soldier is a vague dreamer; this Othello, who springs on Desdemona like a wild beast, loves her as tenderly as a mother does her child. Unliterary art, plastic or musical, is inexorable: the man who grovels is no proud man; the man who fells down to the right and left, is no dreamer; the man whose whole soul is wrath and destruction, is no lover; the mood is the mood; art can give only it; and the general character, the connection between moods, the homogeneous something which pervades every phase of passion, however various, escapes the powers of all save the art which can speak and explain. How then obtain our Cherubino, our shiftiest and most fickle of pages? How? Why, by selecting just one of his very many moods, the one which is nearest allied to fickleness and volubility; the mood which must most commonly be the underlying, the connecting one, the mood into which all his swagger and sentiment sooner or later resolve; the tone of voice into which his sobs will quickest be lost, the attitude which will soonest replace the defiant strut; the frame of mind which, though one and indivisible itself, is the nearest to instability: levity.

      Let Cherubino sing words of tenderness and passion, of audacity and shyness, to only one sort of music, to light and careless music; let the jackanapes be for ever before us, giggling and pirouetting in melody and rhythm; it will not be Cherubino, the whole Cherubino; it will be only a miserable fragmentary indication of him, but it will be the right indication; the psychological powers of music do not go far, but thus far they can go. Analysis of the nature of musical expression has shown us how much it may accomplish; the choice of the artist alone can tell us how much it should accomplish; the scientific investigation is at an end, the artistic judgment must begin. Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, here are your means of musical expression, and here is the thing to be expressed; on careful examination it appears distinctly that the only way in which, with your melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, you can give us, not a copy, but a faint indicative sketch, something approaching the original as much as four lines traced in the alley sand of your Schloss Mirabell Gardens at Salzburg resemble the general aspect of the Mirabell Palace; that the only way in which you can give us such a distantly approximative….

      Signor Maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vice-Chapelmaster of His Most Reverend Highness the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, has meanwhile sat down at his table near his thin-legged spinet, with the bird-cage above and the half-emptied beer-glass at his side; and his pen is going scratch, scratch, scratch as loud as possible.

      "The only way in which you can possibly give us such a distantly approximative copy of the page Cherubino as shown" … (Scratch, scratch, scratch goes the pen on the rough music paper), "as shown in the words of Beaumarchais and of your librettist D'Aponte, is to compose music of the degree of levity required to express the temper jackanapes."

      The Chapelmaster Mozart's pen gives an additional triumphant creak as its point bends in the final flourish of the word finis; Chapelmaster Mozart looks up—

      "What was that you were saying about jackanapes? Oh, yes, to be sure, you were saying that literary folks who try to prescribe to musicians are jackanapes, weren't you? Now, do me the favour, when you go out, just take this to the theatre copyist; they are waiting in a hurry for Cherubino's song…. Yes, that was all very interesting about the jackanapes and all the things music can express…. Who would have thought that musical expression is all that? Lord, Lord, what a fine thing it is to have a reasoning head and know all about the fundamental moods of people's characters! My dear sir, why don't you print a treatise on the musical interpretation of the jackanapes and send it to the University of Vienna for a prize? that would be a treatise for you! Only do be a good creature and take this song at once to the copyist…. I assure you I consider you the finest musical philosopher in Christendom."

      The blotted, still half-wet sheet of note paper is handed across by Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is the manuscript of "Voi che sapete."

      "But dearest Chapelmaster Mozart, the air which you have just written appears to be not in the least degree light—it is even extremely sentimental. How can you, with such phrases, express the Cherubino of Beaumarchais?"

      "And who, my dear Mr. Music Philosopher, who the deuce told you that I wanted to express the Cherubino of Beaumarchais?"

      Chapelmaster Mozart, rising from his table, walks up and down the room with his hands crossed beneath his snuff-coloured coat-tails, humming to himself—

      Voi che sapete che cosa è amor,

      Donne, vedete s'io l'ho nel cor,

      and stops before the cage hanging in the window, and twitching the chickweed through the wires, says—

      "Twee! twee! isn't that a fine air we have just composed, little canary-bird, eh?"

      "Twee! twee!" answers the canary.

      Mozart has willed it so: there is no possible appeal against his decision; his artistic sense would not listen to our logic; our arguments could not attain him, for he simply shook from off his feet the dust of logic-land, and calmly laughed defiance from the region of artistic form, where he had it all his own way, and into which we poor wretches can never clamber. So here is the page's song irrevocably sentimental; and Mozart has been in his grave ninety years; and we know not why, but we do shrink from calling in Offenbach or Lecocq to rewrite that air in true jackanapsian style. What can be done? There still remains another hope.

      For the composer, as we have seen, could give us—as could the painter or the sculptor—only one mood at a time; for he could give us only one homogeneous artistic form. But this artistic form exists so far only in the abstract, in the composer's brain or on the paper. To render it audible we require the performer; on the performer depends the real, absolute presence of the work; or, rather, to the performer is given the task of creating a second work, of applying on to the abstract composition the living inflexions and accentuations of the voice. And here, again, the powers of musical expression, of awaking association by means of sounds or manner of giving out sounds such as we recognize, automatically or consciously, to accompany the emotion that is to be conveyed; here again these powers are given to the artist to do therewith what he choose. This second artist, this performer, is not so free indeed as the first artist, the composer; he can longer choose among the large means of expression the forms of melody and rhythm, the concatenation of musical phrases; but there are still left to him the minor modes of expression, the particular manner of setting forth these musical forms, of treating this rhythm; the notes are there, and their general relations to one another, but on him depends the choice of the relative stress on the notes, of the tightening or slackening of their relations; of the degree of importance to be given to the various phrases. The great outline cartoon is there, but the cunning lights and shades, transitions, abrupt or insensible, from tint to tint, still remain to be filled up. A second choice of mood is left to the singer. And see! here arises a strange complication: the composer having in his work chosen one mood, and the singer another, we obtain in the fusion or juxtaposition of the two works, of the two moods, that very thing we desired, that very shimmer and oscillation of character which the poet could give, that dualism of nature required for Cherubino. What is Cherubino? A sentimental jackanapes. Mozart in his notes has given us the sentiment, and now we can get the levity from the performer—unthought-of combination, in which the very irrational, illogical choice made by the composer will help us. Here are Mozart's phrases, earnest, tender, noble—Mozart's love song fit for a Bellario or a Romeo; now let this be sung quickly, lightly, with perverse musical head-tossing and tripping and ogling, let this passion be gabbled out flippantly, impudently—and then, in this perfect mixture