o the men because of the sex interest, and to the women because
of the professional or technical interest--and so music is forced into
the background. What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-heard
accompaniment to an imagined anecdote, just as color, line and mass
become mere accomplishments to an anecdote in a picture by an English
academician, or by a sentimental German of the Boecklin school.
The purified and dephlogisticated music of the future, to be sure, will
never appeal to the mob, which will keep on demanding its chance to
gloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob,
even disregarding its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a natural
hero worshiper. It loves, not the beautiful, but the strange, the
unprecedented, the astounding; it suffers from an incurable
_heliogabalisme_. A soprano who can gargle her way up to G sharp in
altissimo interests it almost as much as a contralto who has slept
publicly with a grand duke. If it cannot get the tenor who receives
$3,000 a night, it will take the tenor who fought the manager with
bung-starters last Tuesday. But this is merely saying that the tastes
and desires of the mob have nothing to do with music as an art. For its
ears, as for its eyes, it demands anecdotes--on the one hand the Suicide
symphony, "The Forge in the Forest," and the general run of Italian
opera, and on the other hand such things as "The Angelus," "Playing
Grandpa" and the so-called "Mona Lisa." It cannot imagine art as devoid
of moral content, as beauty pure and simple. It always demands
something to edify it, or, failing that, to shock it.
These concepts, of the edifying and the shocking, are closer together in
the psyche than most persons imagine. The one, in fact, depends upon the
other: without some definite notion of the improving it is almost
impossible to conjure up an active notion of the improper. All salacious
art is addressed, not to the damned, but to the consciously saved; it is
Sunday-school superintendents, not bartenders, who chiefly patronize
peep-shows, and know the dirty books, and have a high artistic
admiration for sopranos of superior gluteal development. The man who has
risen above the petty ethical superstitions of Christendom gets little
pleasure out of impropriety, for very few ordinary phenomena seem to him
to be improper. Thus a Frenchman, viewing the undraped statues which
bedizen his native galleries of art, either enjoys them
|