question must be answered with regard to all the elements of the art from the oldest to the newest, and it is one of the few sound artistic questions which concerns an artist's whole output as well as individual works; e.g. any one of Bach's arpeggio- preludes will show a monotony of rhythm unbroken till near the end, and will present melody only in the negative form of an avoidance of awkward intervals on the surface of the chords; but such arpeggio-preludes cannot be created by a composer who could do nothing else; the very conception of their plan belongs to all musical time and existence.
Without comparing Scriabine to Bach or even to Chopin, we may on these lines eliminate matters of taste from our estimate of works like the Poeme d'Extase and Promethee. The enthusiast is carried away, like the players and the conductor, by the climax of the Poeme d'Extase, and is apt to declare that it attains a sonorous power never reached before in music. To which the cynic replies that Scriabine has inherited the Rimsky- Korsakoff tradition of a grammar of orchestration as accurate as that of Palestrina's vocal writing; that -with this as a back- ground he has merely to instruct the first trumpet to indulge in a street-player's vibrato and so to lead up to a climax which is obtained by simply allowing the full organ to drown the orchestra in the fashion of an Albert Hall performance of The Messiah. There never was and never will be a new sensation in the fine arts which cannot be laughed down on these lines; but real composition can never be thus laughed down, and it is real composition alone which makes a street cornet vibrato and an Albert Hall organ peal capable of producing new sensations. Again, these effects are obviously essentially popular; a ground, no doubt, why the description just given should be bitterly resented by many of their admirers. Yet it is just their popular quality which, rationalized by power of composition, vouches for the reality of the art. Without the power of com- position a popular new sensation cannot last, even if it can make its mark at all. With power of composition everything in art must some day find wide recognition, if it escapes physical destruction; for no composer attains such power without being driven by strong human impulses. Epigrams are not enough. Human experience vividly presented never loses point.
But the chances of producing permanently living work are heavily weighted against the composer if he concerns himself only with things which he alone can understand. The Russian ballet gave abundant vital impulses to music so long as it dealt intelligibly with drama, fairy-tale, fable and life; and the young Stravinski of L'Oiseau de Feu found in it inspiration for music that remains brilliant and intelligible apart from the ballet. In Petrouchka he still makes rhythmic and instrumental sounds that faithfully follow and enhance the moods of a fascinating pantomime; but the concert-goer who, knowing nothing of the ballet, affects to be moved by the music in an orchestral concert, is little wiser than the man who would rather say he preferred the wrong end of his asparagus than admit that he did not know which was the right end. The ballet is to the composer an easier and therefore more dangerous art form than the opera; in both cases the listener will always give the music credit for all the qualities of the scenario if the composer only manages not to interfere with them. Self-deception, loss of vitality, decadence and dry-rot set in when the designers of the ballet themselves retire into the arbitrary kingdom of abstractions which they call symbolic, and which common sense calls nonsense. There is a real kingdom of nonsense, and it will have none of your owlish aesthetic solemnity about morbid twists of mind. Lewis Carroll, trained logician, leaves it to later commentators to identify his Snark with the Absolute, or with the company promoter; his and Edward Lear's wonderland of nonsense is a school of manners in the light of which any explicit social satire and many fantastic flights of modern musical imagination appear almost equally convicted of grossness and heavy incongruity. For music, as for all arts, the fruitful path, and that which leads even to the sub- lime as well as the imperishable, is a path of unselfconscious childlike enjoyment of the matter in hand, with no petulant preoc- cupation with the stupidity of the outsider. Erik Satie is amusing
enough with his Vraies preludes flasques pour man chien, his AperQues desagreables, and all the rest of it; his works are an- nounced with the challenge that, as to les A platis, les Insignifiants and other more Rabelaisian nonentities who will not enjoy them: " qu'ils avalent leurs barbesl qu'ils se marchent sur le venire!"
Domenico Scarlatti, in the days of Handel, was a master of one of the most personal and eccentric genres of music known to history, a genre which, for all its confinement to one small form and one instrument, had a profound influence on all later instru- mental music; and his preface is a sincere and unaffected warning to the reader to expect nothing learned, but a playful indulgence of his art. If this represents only the manners of his day, those were evidently very good manners and conducive to artistic progress and freedom.
Prominent among the eternal questions which agitate the contemporary critics of all arts at all periods is the proportion of means to ends. The modern orchestra grows easily with the demands of the modern composer, for in spite of local and tem- porary difficulties, it is to the interest of players that orchestras should increase as well as multiply; and the most extravagant modern composer has never yet faced the problem of designing music for which the band and chorus of a Crystal Palace Handel festival would really be to the purpose. In other words, the Handel festival exists; but the music for an organization of even half that size has never yet been composed. Here, then, is material for a real aesthetic development; and herein lies the significance of the recent vogue in Holland of the enormous works of Gustav Mahler. That great Viennese orchestral con- ductor died almost a generation ago, and his symphonies owe much of their recognition to the personal zeal of their apostle, the eminent conductor Mengelberg. It is improbable that the music-lovers of other countries will ever readily receive these huge volumes of nai've sentimentality and boyish grotesqueness (to say nothing of more definitely oriental traits). But the works nevertheless demonstrate at least three vital things: first, that it is still possible for a composer to pile up structures of illimitable extent in the most unsophisticated harmonic and melodic style; secondly, that, whereas taste cannot even begin to express itself without some technique, an immense amount of technique may be learnt from work which cannot be said to show any taste at all; and thirdly, that whatever may be objected to Mahler's taste and form in this direction, he undoubtedly ful- filled his set purpose of working out the pioneer aesthetic and technical principles of music designed for a thousand performers and upwards. And this is no decadent proposition. Decadence, or barbarity, is entirely on the side of the Handel festival: the performance of music on a scale for which it was never designed. The real problems of music for a thousand performers are, as Mahler perceived, problems for a severely disciplined and accurate imagination; and nothing can be further removed from the world of arbitrary artistic egoism. They are not to be mastered by the methods of that kind of extravagance which now and then displays a revulsion in some absurd economy, like Meyerbeer's old trick of thin and inadequate harmony for one voice supported insecurely by one horn and a spasmodic gurgle on a solo violoncello. Meyerbeer in his day did work that was good enough to anticipate Wagner's discoveries and bad enough to ruin Wagner's cause. Mahler has none of Meyerbeer's worldly wisdom, and in his special field there is as yet no greater and more masterly idealist.
The main stream of music still flows within the Wagner- Strauss limits and seldom requires 150 instrumental players. Arnold Schonberg's Gurre Lieder (a large vocal and choral cycle, the great success of which is held by his disciples to be a serious hindrance to the spread of his later gospel of musical revolution) requires a huge orchestra; but the very fact that the score often employs 50 staves proves that Schonberg is by no means imagining the aesthetics of an unprecedented scale of performance; the polyphony that requires 50 staves for its notation rather implies detail than bulk. (This, by the way, may help us to understand why the Handel festival has always had an undeniable measure of success; Handel's style is almost
