pes and Fears for Art_.

XI

A GENERATION OF MUSIC

DR. ERNEST WALKER

The general subject of this course is European Thought; and, to some,
music may perhaps seem in this connexion rather like an intruder.
Indeed, if the musician is, in William Morris's phrase, 'the idle singer
of an empty day', if his business is to administer alternate stimulants
and soporifics to the nerves or, at best, the surface emotions, or to
serve in Cinderella-like fashion any passing, shallow needs of either
the individual or the crowd, then, obviously, he has no place worth
self-respecting mention in the world as it exists for philosophy. But
widespread as some such conception of the function of music is, I hope
you will agree with me in throwing it aside as, at any rate for our
present purpose, no more worth the trouble of even approximately patient
argument than that other less general but more objurgated conception of
musical composition as something like a mechanically calculated spinning
of bloodless formulae. By the conditions of its being, music has to
express itself through non-intellectual channels, but may we not say
that its essence is intellectual, that it is, in Combarieu's phrase, the
art of thinking in sound--thinking in as precise a sense as the word can
bear? It does not express itself verbally: it is self-dependent, with a
language available only for the expression of its own ideas and not even
indirectly translatable by nature into a verbal medium. Yet it is
thought none the less; perhaps all the more. Words, we have often been
told, serve for the concealment of thought; but the language of music is
more subtle, more comprehensive. It has been said that where words end,
music begins; and anyhow, for musicians, there stands on record the
serenely proud claim of one of themselves. 'Only art and knowledge',
said Beethoven, 'raise man to the divine; and music is a higher
revelation than all wisdom and all philosophy.'

But I must not allow this little preliminary apology to stray into the
field of abstract aesthetics. The subject proposed to me, the
correlation of the progress of specifically musical thought during the
last generation with the progress of European thought in general, is so
extensive that I cannot within the necessary limits attempt to deal with
more than some of the most salient features, and even those I shall have
to treat in very broad outlines, with a certain disregard of detail and
nicely b