Scan 23
Musical Courier 1902-05-28: Vol 44 Iss 1157, 1902
28 lines. Read by computer on 22 September 2026. Printed page 24. See the scan on archive.org.
1human soul, he is a child when he reasons, a mystic after the manner of the Essensians when he writes of religion. He is the Stendhal of Russia, yet he compiled the queerest book on aesthetics the nineteenth century ever saw. It is called "What Is Art?" and what art was not when Lyof Tolstoy got through with the subject would be difficult to decipher.
3In the matter of aesthetics Spencer is as dense as Tolstoy—though there is the excuse of his philosophical bias, his English blood and training. If you have ever studied the Spencer physiognomy his imaginative deficiencies—perhaps they are virtues—may be noted. The head is magnificently domed, but it is not the head of an artist. And that evangelical upper lip! No, it cannot be denied that Spencer writes of music as his face leads one to expect. He has the prophetic gaze, the noble frontal arch; yet John Ruskin, despite his defective ideation, his art bigotry and one-sided criticism of life, that same John Ruskin was the artist that Herbert Spencer is not. Now I know some will say that his critical nihilism has killed the love of music in him. But it has not. Spencer adores music, adores it as did his friend—and companion at symphony concerts—George Eliot. Only his notion of music is a commonplace one, and, as I hope to show, one that is old-fashioned John Bull to the core.
5He reveals his aesthetic deficiencies by declaring in the essay on a "Style" that he could never conscientiously admire Milton's or Ruskin's prose. This at once betrays the lack of a musical ear. The most stately cadences in our mother tongue are to be found in the involved, fugal English of John Milton. As for Ruskin, I can only recommend Mr. Spencer's case to the tender offices of Frederick Harrison. What that Positivist thinks we may remember after reading his brilliant and infectious article on a theme dear to him. Mr. Spencer, for whom clarity spells style, even picks to pieces the limpid prose of Matthew Arnold, forgetting in this schoolmaster diversion that the great stylists have never been respectable grammarians.
7And I like far better the good Flaubert's idea of style. Compare it with Mr. Spencer's colorless, scientific definitions: "I can conceive," wrote the Giant of Rouen in undress prose to Madame Calet. "a style which would be beautiful; which someone will produce one of these days, in ten years or ten centuries; which will be as rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of science; which will have undulations, modulations like those of a violoncello, flashes of fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto, on which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces as one sails in a boat with a good wind aft. Prose is born of yesterday, that must be said; verse is the appropriate form for the literature of antiquity. All the combinations of prosody have been made; those of prose are still to make."
9Mr. Spencer has, odd to relate, no sympathy with those who believe the function of art to be educational—"the heresy of education," as Baudelaire called it. Mr. Spencer and George Eliot agreed one afternoon at the Royal Italian Opera that the critical faculties spoilt their enjoyment of the music—which is a likely enough thing, if Italian music be the subject. The Italian operatic music of fifty years ago could not be criticised. If you stopped to consider its foolishness your pleasure vanished. But if you tell me that we can't enjoy good music if our brain is as busy as our feelings—employing the familiar cant phrase—then I deny it. It is the highest enjoyment when head and heart—pardon the old-fashioned dualism; it is, of course, the brain alone—are in consonance. The hearing of "Tristan and Isolde" is a capital example. There the cerebral hemispheres are alive with emotion, and when the score is studied the keenness of the critical joy beggars fancy. One's love of logic, order, of power and emotion, are thrilled simultaneously.
11"The avowed theory of Wagner was that the purpose of music is to teach." Wagner als Erzieher! Now may the gods give us joy! Even Nietzsche, Wagner hater as he was, would have smiled at this statement. Wagner preached enough in his clumsy German prose, but his music is the reverse of educational—or ethical. As a liberator of emotion it teaches, and so does all great art; but not in the Spencerian sense. Spencer falls upon Ernest Newman's phrase about music adding "something to our knowledge of life," and misses entirely Mr. Newman's very broad generalization.
13In the essay "The Origin of Music" Mr. Spencer obstinately holds to his wrongheaded theory, a theory disposed of years ago by Wallaschek and many others. Melody came before rhythm, says our philosopher, revealing in a sentence his incapability to comprehend the bald structural qualities of tone. If melody came first, then our flesh precedes in the order of making our skeleton. All music began with rhythm, probably in company with sexual emotion. Mr. Spencer tilts ineffectually at Mr. Newman's "Study of Wagner." I envy sincerely Mr. Newman, for futile as are his antagonist's arguments, is it not something to have such a distinguished opponent?
15Under the caption "Some Musical Heresies" Mr. Spencer has rude things to say of the violin as a "perfect" instrument. He dislikes the bite of the bow, the overtones, &c. Query: To whom has he been listening? Possibly Joachim! And then the orchestra has not the deep organ tone of the church organ! Ah, the Briton again! What he really admires is a droning tune. The organ superior to the orchestra? There you have criticism of the mid-Victorian epoch. Mr. Spencer does not seem to be aware of the modern orchestra, with its superb diapasonic undertow, its individualization of instrumental groups, its avoidance of string predominance. And if he did listen to a Richard Strauss poem or a Tschaikowsky symphony, it is extremely doubtful whether the philosopher would enjoy or comprehend their melodic and harmonic complexity. The masterly synthesizer of evolution does not seem to realize that music must, if it is to keep vital, fall into the evolutionary procession. However, I know of many professional music critics, doctors of music, who have missed this cardinal doctrine—a doctrine that Nietzsche applied with astounding results to the genealogy of morals. Fancy the drone of a church organ set over against the miracles of color, tonal ductility and versatility in figuration of modern orchestral music! I hear the churchly machine panting in the race, all its "barnyard stops"—as Runciman dubbed them—flaring wide open, and yet—the orchestra wins with easy grace. Why not? The normal organ tone is one of solemn grandeur, and we may easily picture to ourselves its soothing effect on Mr. Spencer's soul as it floods the porches of his ears. But its place is in the church.
17I fear that he is, on the score of music, like many half-baked theoreticians and amateurs. What he does not like or understand he sets down to "mere execution," "a virtuoso display." This becomes, in his appreciation of Meyerbeer, really infantile. The great, simple hearted man believes Meyerbeer to be superior to most composers, because he employs fewer scale passages and arpeggios in his operas than Mozart! Incredible! And he discovered this from studying piano arrangements of "Robert," "Huguenots" and "Prophète," forgetting that a piano paraphrase, be it never so faithful, is only a compromise. In it the orchestral score is never faithfully reproduced. And scales and arpeggios prove nothing one way or the other. Beethoven uses them abundantly; yet who dares—except, perhaps, Herbert Spencer—to accuse him of obscuring the significance of his themes or of indulging in hollow display?
19The suggestions to increase the resonance of the violin may be practical, though I doubt it; they are most certainly inartistic. The violin is sonorous enough as it stands; when we desire more string sonority we employ the viola, 'cello and contrabasso. It is the weakness of Mr. Spencer to like droning tones—he really admires, I am quite positive, "Old Hundred" on a country organ.
21His notions of sonata form are refreshing. In "Some Musical Heresies" he outlines what is almost the symphonic poem employed by a dozen men for the past half century. I suspect that he was happiest when listening to Italian opera in company with George Eliot. He is not alone in his task. Schopenhauer, like Frederick of Potsdam, admired the flute, and after hearing Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" overture confessed his inability to enjoy or even understand the amorphous mess. And Nietzsche, did he not swear by "Carmen"? The "more marked advance from the indefinitely homogeneous to the definitely heterogeneous" has not taken place in Mr. Spencer's musical development.
23But we are at one with him, as Brother Baughan asserts, on the theme of "Feeling vs. Intellect."
25Says Mr. Spencer:
27"In the early days of my friendship with Professor Huxley—I think about 1854—an afternoon call on him quickly brought the suggestion—"Come upstairs; I want to show you something which will delight you—a fact that goes slick through a great generalization!" His ironical expression was prompted by his consciousness that being so much given to generalizing I should be disconcerted. He was dissecting the brain of a porpoise, and the anomalous fact that he pointed out was that the porpoise has a brain of relatively immense size—a size seemingly out of all proportion to the creature's needs. What can an animal leading so simple a life want with an organ almost large enough to carry on the life of a human being? Partly because the guidance of our actions by thought is so conspicuous, and partly because speech, which occupies so large a space in our lives, is a vehicle that makes thought predominant to ourselves and others, we are led to suppose that the thought-element of mind is its chief element—an element often excluding from recognition every other. Consequently, when it is said that the brain is the organ of the mind, it is assumed that the brain is chiefly if not wholly the organ of the intellect. Sensations and emotions are parts of consciousness, and so far from being its minor components they are its major components. The intellectual element is limited to recognition of the co-existences and sequences among sensations of sounds, touches, odors, warmth and the rest. So that the body even of our thought-consciousness consists of feelings, and only the form constitutes what we distinguish as intelligence. The emotions are the masters, the intellect is the servant. The large brain of the porpoise is not the agent of much intellectual activity, but it is agent of much emotional activity, accompanying the pursuit and capture of prey." So far from underrating the emotional preponderance of the mind, Herbert Spencer claims that it makes for what we call civilization. Carrying the argument a step further he says that "an over-valuation of teaching is necessarily a concomitant of this erroneous interpretation of mind"—that is, of mind as intellect or intelligence. The last is trained and educated as if it were the predominant characteristic of the mind. "Were it fully understood that the emotions are the masters and the intellect the servant, it
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