The Old and the New Music - Page 2

is to confess oneself an ignoramus
conversant only with dance tunes and ballads.

The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he
hampers himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike
what might have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example)
had been compelled by convention to write his historical stories
in rhymed stanzas. That is to say, it limits his fertility to an
occasional phrase, and three quarters of the time exercises only
his barren ingenuity in fitting rhymes and measures to it. In
literature the great masters of the art have long emancipated
themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy
of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin,
should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick
to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving
factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing
the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural
endowment of variety, force and simplicity.

This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in
musical art, since music can be written in prose themes or in
versified tunes; only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater
difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of
versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature,
the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious
results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made
like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things
the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in art.

Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic
element in both literature and music is maintained by the example
of great masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression
can be combined with decorative symmetry of versification when
the artist happens to possess both the decorative and dramatic
gifts, and to have cultivated both hand in hand. Shakespeare and
Shelley, for instance, far from being hampered by the
conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it
much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in
prose, all his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the
first scene of As You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine
as "What a piece of work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal
of blank verse in which the thought is commonplace, and the
expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent
might either have been a serious drama or might never have been
written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to