sphere of metaphysic, it has been with him so much a necessity of intelligent life to face the complex problems of existence, and to pursue the lines of philosophic thought arising naturally from the progress of science, that he writes with enthusiasm. He fully recognises that reason is the power which will carry us furthest in appreciation of the wonders of Nature, and of all that is grandest in human life and most inspiring in human faith and expectation.

ART IX.-Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies. By Sir GEORGE GROVE. London and New York: 1896.

No true lover of music would like to admit that while it is undoubtedly the most emotional, it is also the least intellectual, of the arts. Nor do we believe there is any real ground, taking the widest view of the art, for laying it under such condemnation. Rightly discerned, music appeals as much to the higher intellectual faculties of our nature as any art except poetry, which is something more than an art. Yet one is tempted sometimes to relapse into a temporary scepticism on the subject, not because great music has been written by men of otherwise little culture or intellect (for here we shall be at once consoled by the recollection of Turner's paintings, as compared with his life and conversation and literary efforts), but in view of the general intellectual level of the literary and critical appreciation which their works evoke. Not only is the average writing on subjects connected with painting far in advance of that on music in intellectual perception and literary style, but writers on painting understand that their office is not only to praise, but to discriminate, an idea which seems to be beyond the pale of the musical critic's perceptions." His usual attitude towards a great composer is one of indiscriminate adulation, expressed with that effusiveness and tawdriness of epithet which is one of the worst vices in literary style; and it is not surprising that well-educated and thoughtful people who are not essentially musical should look, as they often do, with some suspicion on the claims to veneration of those who, as Voltaire said when he heard the gun-firing at Annecy on Christmas eve, are adorés comme cela.'

*

No great musical genius has suffered more lately from this kind of unreasoning adulation than Beethoven. To merely question the artistic propriety or perfection of anything which he wrote is to expose oneself to the charge of a kind of profanity. Why is a great composer, more than any other class of producer in art, to be exempt from all critical judgement as to his works? When J. Addington Symonds produced his admirable and thoughtful study on Michelangelo he did not hesitate, although the book originated in his great admiration for and interest in its

*We are speaking, of course, of criticism on composers and compositions, not on concerts and executants.

subject, to endeavour to analyse and discriminate in regard to the productions of the artist, and to show where he was greatest and what were his limitations. Michelangelo was as great a genius as Beethoven-possibly greater, and most certainly a greater man; but no one thought of accusing Symonds of audacity for attempting a critical estimate of his genius. But any one who attempts to adopt the same attitude of critical consideration in regard to Beethoven excites among the ranks of professional musicians and musical critics either anger or a kind of foolish surprise: he even criticises Beethoven,' &c.; as if the object of all art-criticism that is worth the name were not to get at the whole truth about art, and as if discriminating admiration were not a better homage to offer to any artist than mere blind prostration of the judgement before him. Those, we venture to think, who can judge in a dispassionate spirit the works of Beethoven, and who can realise where he was least successful, are also those who can appreciate most fully his highest and greatest works, though they may not be so ready to prate about them: the deepest and sincerest enthusiasm is not always the most loquacious.

There are three prevalent fallacies in regard to Beethoven recognisable in current musical criticism. The first is that to which we have already referred: that he was a perfect artist, who could do no wrong, and who is, as it were, to be swallowed whole. The second is, that his works exhibit a continuous progress or developement, from the beginning to the end of his artistic career, towards a higher ideal and a higher accomplishment in the art. The third is, that he first brought instrumental music to its true mission of expressing not only emotional feeling but intellectual meaning. The first of these may be best answered, not categorically, but by implication, in reference to some of the points we shall have to touch on in the succeeding pages. But one remark bearing on the subject may be made here. It is one of the amusements of the modern musical critic-a rather shallow one to reprint passages from the criticisms on various works of Beethoven's written on their first appearance, and invite the reader to enjoy the joke of comparing these with the modern idea as to the same compositions. Some of these older criticisms are no doubt amusing-nay more, astounding as showing how blind (or deaf) the first hearers of a great musical composition may be to beauties which seem self-evident to us now. But there are others of which it may be said that they were not only honest, but very fair

and rational criticisms from the artistic standpoint of their authors, and there are some which are true up to the present day, though they are not such as are popular now. It does not do to adopt the theory that all the early criticisms which seem to most people out of date now were necessarily foolish. Habit, the familiarity engendered by frequent hearing, is as much a disturbing element to the critical faculty as novelty. As to the second point, the progress' fallacy, that idea has taken such possession of the modern mind in musical criticism that people seem absolutely to be losing all perception of the essential distinction between science and art, and imagine that the latter is necessarily and of its nature progressive, like the former. The theory has been applied to Beethoven, perhaps, in rather an ex post facto manner: it has been desired to show that Wagner is the roof and crown of things musical, the ideal to which everything has been leading up; therefore it must be shown that Beethoven led up to him, and that Wagner was the natural sequence of the Ninth Symphony. Between one critic and another a regular argument in a circle has been started and kept up on this point. Sometimes it is that Beethoven's genius was always developing to the last, and therefore the Ninth Symphony must be his greatest work of the class; at other times it is that the Ninth Symphony is his greatest work, and therefore his genius was always rising to a higher developement. It does not seem to matter which way it is put to critics who are determined at any rate to have 'progress' mapped out. That Beethoven actually was, to the end of his career, striving to get more and higher intellectual aliment out of music we fully admit. There is abundant evidence of his ambition in this respect, even to the fact of his angrily repudiating the style and aim of many of his own earlier works. The question is, Did he accomplish it? Solvitur ambulando, and we question the fact of the ambulance.' Of this more anon. What we have called the third fallacy-that Beethoven first brought instrumental music to its true or highest

* As when, according to Nohl, he heard Fräulein Streicher practising his Thirty-two Variations in C minor, which he had forgotten, and said, on being told they were his own: 'O Beethoven, what a donkey you were then!' Thus, if he could, he would evidently have deprived us of the most interesting and original study for the handling of the piano in all modern music, not to speak of its remarkable concentration of musical design.

6

function, of expressing definite ideas and emotions, present to himself as the basis of the music, even if not obvious to his hearers we call a fallacy not because there is no truth in it, but because it has been pushed a great deal too far as regards any known facts about the motives of Beethoven's compositions, and because it is very questionable, perhaps more than questionable, whether it is in theory the most true or the best manner of regarding the æsthetic function of instrumental music. In fact, this very generation, which 'seeketh after a sign' in music, seems to be under a curious unconscious contradiction of feeling on the subject. The three composers who draw' at the present day, at least in the professedly musical world of amateurs, are Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner; Handel and Mozart being left out in the cold as inferior composers. As we are only dealing here with purely instrumental music, we may leave Wagner out of consideration; and then we may ask how it is that the same set of people who are never tired of insisting on the necessity of a 'poetic basis' in instrumental music, and who reverence Beethoven as the composer who first gave full impulse to this element in the art, at the same time profess an equal reverence for the author of the Wohltemperirte Klavier,' than which no collection of instrumental compositions can be more thoroughly free from any suggestion of poetic basis? We are not forgetting what Spitta has so well and so truly pointed out, in a passage which has been referred to before in these pages, that Bach's fugues for the clavier (and still more is it true of those for the organ) are not to be regarded as fugues written for the sake of fugal structure, so to speak; that they are the expressions of musical moods of feeling, which took the fugue form because that was at the time the highest and accepted form for the expression of the most serious musical ideas, just as Beethoven's most serious moods of feeling were expressed, for a similar reason, in the sonata form. But poetic basis,' in the sense in which it has been used by modern critics, obviously means something more than saying that the music must be the expression of feeling, and not mere sound-structure: it means, if it means anything, that the music must be the expression of an idea which could, if the composer so willed it, be defined in words. There are a few compositions of Beethoven's which confessedly and by his own showing belong to this class, and it is assumed that there are others which would equally admit of this literary definition had the composer chosen