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CHAPTER III.

MUSIC AND MUSICAL CRITICISM.

AVOIDING, then, the office of yearly chronicler of the decline of painting, Heine turned his attention to music. Music, in fact, in the decline of the art of poetry, began from that time to assume that overwhelming dominion over the public taste, which it has maintained up to the present hour-a dominion to which indeed, except during the periods of decline of its sister arts, it never does attain. Heine himself, in chronicling the musical triumphs of his day, did not fail to recognise this truth, and therefore it was somewhat à contre cœur that he undertook the office of musical critic at all.

One does not like to seem ungrateful to an art to which all persons who have the ordinary supply of senses, and enjoy ordinary opportunities, are indebted for much exquisite pleasure; however, it argues no lack of appreciation of the work of a Vattel or an Ude to assert that the art of a Vattel or an Ude is not precisely on the same level with that of a Dante or a Michael Angelo ;-and music has this at least, in common with cookery, that it begins to affect us by physical modifications, and is in great part a sensual art, and just as the lower forms of cookery are are capable of being appreciated even by animals, so too the lower forms of music are capable of giving pleasure to birds, beasts, and even to reptiles. A gourmet, who is nothing else but a gourmet, looks with something like indifference on all matters but matters of the cuisine; so, too, the exclusive devotees of music, being in the main persons of in

ferior intelligence and inferior culture, arrogate for music an importance among the arts out of all proportion to its merits or significance. If, too, there is one thing more patent than another with respect to music, it is that its effects upon any given mind vary with the idiosyncrasies of the individual subject. Even a piece of dance-music will be differently interpreted by a dancing bear than it will be by creatures of higher organisation; and persons of high imagination and enthusiasm are presumably capable of being moved to nobler emotions by the strains of Mozart or Beethoven, than are possible in the case of the frivolous and the grovelling. The clown, after drinking champagne, can but feel a clownish exhilaration, while a Schiller has been moved under such excitement to sing the sublimest hymns to the Ideal. And music, like wine, can impart no thought, although it may be an incentive to thought. Music, however, since the days in which Heine began to write, has been ever acquiring a wider and more exclusive empire. The honours which have been paid at times to silly sopranos and fatuous tenors would have been extravagant if they had been paid to the heroes and redeemers of mankind, not to speak of the prodigal fortunes which a giddy public has poured out at their feet.

The unpoetic English public, so little capable of any enthusiasm at all in æsthetic matters, singularly barren too as the country has been in the way of musical creation, or even in the production of musical artists, has yet outdone all countries in the world, with the exception perhaps of America (where æsthetic taste is at a still lower level), in the strange antics with which they have greeted the success of clever performers. The nation which was styled by Sir Philip Sydney 'the step-mother of poets,' which starved Spenser, did no honour to Shakespeare in his lifetime at least ---let Milton die in solitude and poverty, made an exciseman of Burns, drove Chatterton to suicide, and Byron into exile, which upon the whole of its disinherited sons of genius

expends the generous sum of twelve hundred pounds a year, while it gives to its head church official fifteen thousand, ten thousand to a lawyer, and as much, or nearly as much, to mere solemn figuranti, went wild-bishops and all-about Jenny Lind; and the accounts of the brainless frenzy excited by the Swedish Nightingale, which reached Heine across the Channel, represent pretty accurately the extravagance of the Jenny Lind furore, and will certainly be registered by the historian as one of the most striking characteristics of the time.

The following notice, written in 1847, which records. these strange vagaries of the English public, was singularly enough the last thing in the way of musical criticism which came from his pen :

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'Since Gustavus Adolphus,' he writes, of glorious memory, no Swedish reputation has made so much noise in the world as Jenny Lind. The reports which come over to us about this from England border on the incredible. A friend told me of an English cathedral town (Norwich) where all the bells were rung when the Swedish Nightingale made her entry into it; the bishop of the see celebrated the event in a remarkable sermon, delivered in his Anglican episcopal robes, which is not unlike the costume of a chef de pompes funèbres. He mounted the pulpit of the cathedral, and greeted the newly arrived singer as a saviour in woman's clothes, as a lady redeemer who had come down from heaven to save by her song our souls from sin, while the older singers were so many demons, who warble us into the avenging fire of Satanas. The Italian prime donne, Grisi and Persiani, must now be getting as yellow as canary-birds with envy and vexation, while our fancy, the Swedish Nightingale, flutters from one triumph to another. I say our Jenny Lind, since at the bottom the Swedish Nightingale does not represent little Sweden exclusively--she represents the whole community of the German races, the division of the Cimbri as well as that of the Teutons; she is a German just as much as her nature

grown, plant-sleepy sisters on the Elbe and the Neckar; she belongs to Germany as, according to the assurance of Franz Horn, Shakespeare also belongs to us, and as in the same way Spinoza, considered in his inner nature, can only be a German. So with pride we say our Jenny Lind! Shout in triumph, Uckermark, even thou hast thy share of this new glory! Leap thou, Massman, with thy most joyful Vaterlandish leapings, since our Jenny speaks no Romish outlandish jargon, but Gothic, Scandinavian, the most German of German; and thou canst call her thy countrywoman, only thou must wash thyself before thon givest her thy German hand. Yes, Jenny Lind is a German woman; the name Lind suggests the Linden, those green cousins of the German oaks; she has no black hair, like those outlandish prima donnas; in her blue eyes there is a swimming of northern gemüth and moonshine, and her throat is melodious with the purest maidenhood! Thus is it-"Maidenhood is in her voice;" so have all the old spinsters of London declared; so have declared, with rollings of the eyes, all the prudish ladies and pious gentlemen, the still existing mauvaise queue of Richardson, and all Great Britain has fêted in Jenny Lind a singing maidenhood, a besung virginity

The chaste feeling of the prima donna immaculata reveals itself most livelily in her horror of Paris, the modern Sodom, which she expresses at every opportunity, to the extreme edification of the lady patronesses of morality on that side the Channel. Jenny has most decidedly vowed never to expose her singing virginity to the French public. "This rugged virtue makes me gasp!" would (Schiller's) old Paulet say. Is perchance the legend not without foundation which declares that the nightingale of to-day has been in Paris in former time, and even had her share of the sinful teachings of the Parisian Conservatoire, like other singing birds who since then have become very loose finches indeed? Or does Jenny fear that frivolous Parisian criticism which judges

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of a singer, not by her morals, but by her voice, and holds the worst immorality to be a want of art? However that may be, our Jenny will not come this way and sing the Frenchmen out of the mire of sin in which they flounder. They remain given over to eternal condemnation.'

This glorification of an art the most sensual and the least intellectual of all, at the expense of the others, of which the Lind furore was a culminating example, is viewed with all the more disfavour by the poet and man of culture, since it seems to be a prophetic sign of the extinction of art altogether. The remarks of Heine on this head present us, it is true, with a melancholy view of the future of humanity, but they are not discordant with the conclusions of other thinkers. These remarks are found at the beginning of his article on the Musical Season of 1841:

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The salon [of pictures] this year was but a manifestation of incapacity in all sorts of colours. One must almost be of opinion that the rejuvenescence of the plastic arts of painting and sculpture has come to an end: it was no new spring, but only a sorry old woman's summer. Painting and sculpture, and even architecture, took a new flight immediately after the revolution of July, but their wings were only stitched on externally, and after a forced flight there was a pitiful fall. Only the younger sister-art, music, lifted itself up with original individual power. Has she already reached her summit of glory? Will she keep her place long thereon? Or will she soon again fall down? These are questions which only a later generation can answer. In any case it appears as though in the annals of art our present time will especially be characterised as the age of music. With the gradual spiritualisation of the human race the arts also have progressed in symmetrical step. In the earliest period architecture must necessarily come forward alone, glorifying brute unconscious magnitude in the composition of masses, as was the case with the Egyptians. Later we behold in the Greeks the

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