ome kind, its component parts must look backward and forward. The
latter-day composers who speak of Form as a kind of bogey that they have
at last exorcized remind us of those latter-day thinkers who boast that
they have abolished metaphysics. We cannot leap off our shadows; if we
try, we shall only find that we are left with a residuum of bad
metaphysics or bad musical form--as thoroughly bad as the metaphysics
and the musical form that have resulted from the confusion of the one
with empty word-spinning and of the other with hide-bound pedantry.
Again, much of the modern rhythmical complexity strongly resembles, in
essence, the machine-made experiments of mediaeval times; and the
peculiarly fashionable trick of shifting identical chords up and down
the scale--the clothes'-peg conception of harmony, so to speak--is a
mere throw-back still farther, to Hucbald and the diaphony of a thousand
years ago. And the insistence, now so common, on the decorative side of
music, the conscious preference of the sensuous to the intellectual or
emotional elements, brings us back to our own infancy, with its
unreflecting delight in things that sparkle prettily or are soft to the
touch or sweet to the taste. It is a reaction from sentimentality, no
doubt, but is a reaction to an equal extreme, a perversion of the truth
that great art never wholly gives itself away. As Vincent d'Indy has
justly pointed out, the 'sensualist formula'--'all for and by
harmony'--is as much an aberration of good sense as the parallel formula
of the ultra-melodic schools of Rossini and Donizetti: in either case it
means the sacrifice of spaciousness to immediate effect, the supremacy
of sensation over the equilibrium of the heart and the intelligence. Not
of course that any music lacks the sensuous element; but it is a matter
of proportion. And very distinguished as are many of the modern
exponents of this side of things, history tells us, I think, that they
are working in a blind alley. They have their supporters, no doubt. M.
Jean-Aubry, in his very suggestive and valuable book on modern French
musicians, has used a phrase that seems to me worth remembering; he
speaks of the 'obsession of intellectual chastity' which, to his mind,
disfigures the work of Cesar Franck and other great composers whom he
therefore rejects from his latter-day Pantheon. I am glad to think that
Franck would have gloried in this shame. He, and a very goodly company
with him, knew that