Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 12

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HOW THE SOUL SHOULD BE MOVED BY THE NEW MUSIC.-The artistic purpose followed by the new music, in what is now forcibly but none too lucidly termed "endless melody," can be understood by going into the sea, gradually losing one's firm tread on the bottom, and finally surrendering unconditionally to the fluid element. One has to _swim_. In the previous, older music one was forced, with delicate or stately or impa.s.sioned movement, to _dance_. The measure necessary for dancing, the observance of a distinct balance of time and force in the soul of the hearer, imposed a continual self-control. Through the counteraction of the cooler draught of air which came from this caution and the warmer breath of musical enthusiasm, that music exercised its spell.-Richard Wagner aimed at a different excitation of the soul, allied, as above said, to swimming and floating. This is perhaps the most essential of his innovations. His famous method, originating from this aim and adapted to it-the "endless melody"-strives to break and sometimes even to despise all mathematical equilibrium of time and force. He is only too rich in the invention of such effects, which sound to the old school like rhythmic paradoxes and blasphemies. He dreads petrifaction, crystallisation, the development of music into the architectural. He accordingly sets up a three-time rhythm in opposition to the double-time, not infrequently introduces five-time and seven-time, immediately repeats a phrase, but with a prolation, so that its time is again doubled and trebled. From an easy-going imitation of such art may arise a great danger to music, for by the side of the superabundance of rhythmic emotion demoralisation and decadence lurk in ambush. The danger will become very great if such music comes to a.s.sociate itself more and more closely with a quite naturalistic art of acting and pantomime, trained and dominated by no higher plastic models; an art that knows no measure in itself and can impart no measure to the kindred element, the all-too-womanish nature of music.

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POET AND REALITY.-The Muse of the poet who is not in love with reality will not be reality, and will bear him children with hollow eyes and all too tender bones.

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MEANS AND END.-In art the end does not justify the means, but holy means can justify the end.

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THE WORST READERS.-The worst readers are those who act like plundering soldiers. They take out some things that they might use, cover the rest with filth and confusion, and blaspheme about the whole.

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SIGNS OF A GOOD WRITER.-Good writers have two things in common: they prefer being understood to being admired, and they do not write for the critical and over-shrewd reader.

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THE MIXED SPECIES.-The mixed species in art bear witness to their authors'

distrust of their own strength. They seek auxiliary powers, advocates, hiding-places-such is the case with the poet who calls in philosophy, the musician who calls in the drama, and the thinker who calls in rhetoric to his aid.

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SHUTTING ONE'S MOUTH.-When his book opens its mouth, the author must shut his.

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BADGES OF RANK.-All poets and men of letters who are in love with the superlative want to do more than they can.

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COLD BOOKS.-The deep thinker reckons on readers who feel with him the happiness that lies in deep thinking. Hence a book that looks cold and sober, if seen in the right light, may seem bathed in the suns.h.i.+ne of spiritual cheerfulness and become a genuine soul-comforter.

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A KNACK OF THE SLOW-WITTED.-The slow-witted thinker generally allies himself with loquacity and ceremoniousness. By the former he thinks he is gaining mobility and fluency, by the latter he gives his peculiarity the appearance of being a result of free will and artistic purpose, with a view to dignity, which needs slow movement.

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_LE STYLE BAROQUE._(11)-He who as thinker and writer is not born or trained to dialectic and the consecutive arrangement of ideas, will unconsciously turn to the rhetoric and dramatic forms. For, after all, his object is to make himself understood and to carry the day by force, and he is indifferent whether, as shepherd, he honestly guides to himself the hearts of his fellow-men, or, as robber, he captures them by surprise.

This is true of the plastic arts as of music: where the feeling of insufficient dialectic or a deficiency in expression or narration, together with an urgent, over-powerful impulse to form, gives birth to that species of style known as "baroque." Only the ill-educated and the arrogant will at once find a depreciatory force in this word. The baroque style always arises at the time of decay of a great art, when the demands of art in cla.s.sical expression have become too great. It is a natural phenomenon which will be observed with melancholy-for it is a forerunner of the night-but at the same time with admiration for its peculiar compensatory arts of expression and narration. To this style belongs already a choice of material and subjects of the highest dramatic tension, at which the heart trembles even when there is no art, because heaven and h.e.l.l are all too near the emotions: then, the oratory of strong pa.s.sion and gestures, of ugly sublimity, of great ma.s.ses, in fact of absolute quant.i.ty _per se_ (as is shown in Michael Angelo, the father or grandfather of the Italian baroque stylists): the lights of dusk, illumination and conflagration playing upon those strongly moulded forms: ever-new ventures in means and aims, strongly underscored by artists for artists, while the layman must fancy he sees an unconscious overflowing of all the horns of plenty of an original nature-art: all these characteristics that const.i.tute the greatness of that style are neither possible nor permitted in the earlier ante-cla.s.sical and cla.s.sical periods of a branch of art. Such luxuries hang long on the tree like forbidden fruit. Just now, when music is pa.s.sing into this last phase, we may learn to know the phenomenon of the baroque style in peculiar splendour, and, by comparison, find much that is instructive for earlier ages. For from Greek times onward there has often been a baroque style, in poetry, oratory, prose writing, sculpture, and, as is well known, in architecture. This style, though wanting in the highest n.o.bility,-the n.o.bility of an innocent, unconscious, triumphant perfection,-has nevertheless given pleasure to many of the best and most serious minds of their time. Hence, as aforesaid, it is presumptuous to depreciate it without reserve, however happy we may feel because our taste for it has not made us insensible to the purer and greater style.

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THE VALUE OF HONEST BOOKS.-Honest books make the reader honest, at least by exciting his hatred and aversion, which otherwise cunning cleverness knows so well how to conceal. Against a book, however, we let ourselves go, however restrained we may be in our relations with men.

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