familiarities. In his hands alone the forces of design and of expression were completely controlled. Self-dependent instrumental art on the grandest and broadest lines found its first perfect revelation in his hands, not in a formal sense alone, but in the highest phase of true and noble characteristic expression.

CHAPTER XIII

MODERN TENDENCIES

BEETHOVEN stands just at the turning-point of the ways of modern art, and combines the sum of past human effort in the direction of musical design with the first ripe utterance of the modern impulse-made possible by the great accumulation of artistic resources-in the direction of human expression. After him the course of things naturally changed. In the art of the century before him formality was prominent and expression very restrained; in the times after him the conditions were reversed, and the instinct of man was impelled to resent the conventions of form which seemed to fetter his imagination, and began his wanderings and experiments anew in the irrepressible conviction that every road must lead somewhere. A new artistic crisis had been passed, similar to the crisis of Palestrina and Bach, but implying a still greater organisation and a richer accumulation of actual resources than was available for either of the earlier masters. All three crises represent a relatively perfect formulation of human feeling. Palestrina without emotion embodies the most perfect presentation of contemplative religious devotion. Bach, more touched by the secular spirit, and fully capable of strong emotion, formulates a more comprehensive and energetic type of religious sentiment, and foreshadows, by his new combination of rhythm and polyphony, the musical expression of every kind of human feeling. Beethoven expresses the complete emancipation of human emotion and mind, and attempts to give expression to every kind of mood and of inner sensibility which is capable and worthy of being brought into the circuit of an artistic scheme of design.

But only at particular moments in the history of art are such crises possible. For it needs not only the grandeur of a man's nature to think of things worthy of being grandly said, but it requires a condition of mankind which shall be as appreciative of artistic considerations as of expression. There may be nobility, truth, and greatness in art at all times; but the perfect adjustment of things which is necessary to make a grand scheme of art, and to render possible examples of it which are nearly perfect from every point of view, is only to be found at rare moments in the history of human effort. The love of art for art's sake is generally a mere love of orderliness in things which require a great deal of ingenuity to get them into order; at best it is a love of beauty for itself. At one stage in art's history an excessive delight in design and abstract beauty of form is inevitable, but humanity as it grows older instinctively feels that the adoration of mere beauty is sometimes childish and sometimes thoroughly unwholesome; and then men are liable to doubt whether human energies are not sapped by art instead of being fostered by it. After a period in which men have gone through experiences such as these, a condition of art naturally follows in which the worshippers of abstract beauty and the worshippers of expression both find satisfaction; but inasmuch as the momentum generated is in a direction away from things purely artistic, a period is liable to follow in which things tend to leave the grand lines which imply a steadfast reverence for the highest phase of abstract beauty, and men seek a new field wherein to develop effects of strong characterisation. Art comes down from its lofty region and becomes the handmaid of everyday life. It seems to be so in most of the arts; for they each have their time of special glory, and are then turned to the more practical purposes of illustration. The greater portion of the arts of painting and drawing in modern times is devoted to illustration of the most definite kind; and even the pictures which aim at special artistic value, and are exhibited in important galleries, are of infinite variety of range in subject, and endeavour to realise within the conditions of artistic presentation almost

any subject which has impressed an artist as worthy of permanent record. The instinct for beauty and the feeling for design may still have plenty of scope in accordance with the disposition of the artist, but they are by no means SO prominent and necessary a part of art as they were; and many pictures have had immense fame which have been nothing but the baldest presentations of totally uninteresting everyday occurrences, without a trace of anything that shows a sense of either beauty or design.

Nothing is more con

It is much the same in literature. spicuously characteristic of the present age than the immense increase of short illustrative stories which make vividly alive for all men the varieties of human circumstances and dispositions, from the remotest districts of India and the steppes of Russia, to the islands of Galway Bay and the backwoods. of Australia. The few men that still have the instincts of great art cling to the great traditions and deal as much as they can with great subjects, but the preponderant tendency in all arts is towards variety and closeness of characterisation./

As has before been pointed out, the premonitions of this tendency are already discernible in Beethoven; and many other external facts in his time and soon after show in what direction the mind of man was moving. A characteristic feature which illustrates this is the much more frequent adoption by composers of names for their works; which evidently implies taking a definite idea and endeavouring to make the music express it. No one emphasises this fact more than Spohr. By natural musical organisation and habit of mind he was the last composer of whom one might expect unclassical procedure. Mozart was his model, and Beethoven was barely intelligible to him except in his least characteristic moods. But Spohr set himself in a very marked way to emphasise illustration. To many of his symphonies he gave definite names, and made it his endeavour to carry out his programme consistently. The well-known "Weihe der Töne" is a case in point. He meant originally to set a poem of that title by Pfeiffer as a cantata, but finding it un suitable he wrote the symphony as an illustration of the

poem,

し

and directed that the poem was to be read whenever the symphony was performed. Moreover, he endeavoured to widen the scope and design of this symphony to carry out his scheme, with eminently unsatisfactory results, as far as all the latter part of the work is concerned. His "Historical Symphony" has a similarly definite object, though not so close an application; as it was merely a very strange attempt to imitate the styles of Bach and Handel, Mozart and Beethoven in successive movements. More decisively to the point is his symphony, called "The Worldly and Heavenly Influences in the Life of Man," in which the heavenly influences are represented by a solo orchestra, and the worldly by an ordinary full orchestra. The general idea is very carefully carried out, and the heavenly influences re made particularly prominent in the early part, and appa tly succumb to the power of the worldly orchestra towards Je end. Another symphony of Spohr's is called "The S sons," which is a very favourite subject, and also a very su table one, for true musical treatment. Weber was naturally on the same side, both on account of his romantic disposition and the deficiencies of his artistic education. His one successful instrumental work,

a large scale, the Concertstuck for pianoforte and orchestra, deliberately represents a story of a knight and a lady in crusading times. The inference suggested is even stronger in the case of Mendelssohn, who was ultra-classical by nature, but gave names and indicated a purpose or a reason for the particular character of all his best symphonies-The Reformation, the Italian, and the Scotch. Even the symphony to the "Lobgesang" has a very definite and intelligible relation to the cantata which follows; while as far as musical characterisation is concerned, the overture and scherzo in the "Midsummer's Night's Dream" music are among the vivid things of modern times.

To all appearance the line which Berlioz took is even more decisive. But important as it is, the fact of his being a Frenchman reduces its significance a little. The French have never shown any talent for self-dependent instrumental music From the first their musical utterance required to be put in