(C) Keystone

M

IN HONOR OF
BEETHOVEN

AKERS of musical programmes have been paying especial attention to the compositions of Beethoven this month, for it was on December 16 a hundred and fifty years ago that Beethoven was born. Enough time has elapsed to establish Beethoven's greatest compositions as among those works of art which survive all changes of idiom. Nobody to-day paints in the style of Rembrandt or writes in the style of Shakespeare, but no painting

and no drama is more alive than theirs.

So nobody to-day composes music in the style of Beethoven, but what living composer is more truly alive than he?

Sometimes we are inclined to think that the greatest ages in art are long past. In literature, what name more recent than that of Shakespeare can be written alongside the names of Eschylus and Euripides? In sculpture what name more recent than Michelangelo can be written alongside of Phidias and Praxiteles? But in music there are no names greater than that of Beethoven, who wrote within the lifetime of men now alive. Near as Beethoven is to our own times, however, his immortality is as certain as that of any great figure in any art.

Though such a genius as that of Beethoven cannot be accounted for, there are certain elements in his character and career that help to explain his greatness, or at least distinguish him from men whose work is not lasting. There are three elements that are especially worthy of note in these days.

In the first place, Beethoven was a master craftsman. It is the fashion nowadays in music to deride craftsmanship as if it were a false substitute for genius; but in Beethoven's case craftsmanship was essential to what his genius produced. He was a master of his mediums. He used his instruments as they were designed to be used. He was familiar with the conventional forms in which music had taken shape. He understood thoroughly the theories of his art. If frequently he set tasks which seemed beyond the range of the instruments, if he broke some of the old molds and fashioned new ones, if at times he set aside the theoretical rules that had been formulated, it was not out of ignorance, but out of an understanding of the nature of the instrument he was using, the purpose of the form that he was fashioning, the principle of the theory he discarded. Only a man thoroughly a master of his technique could have written, as Beethoven did, his greatest compositions when he was stone deaf.

In the second place, Beethoven's compositions were the product of incessant and enormous labor. His notebooks attest his assiduity. In art, spontaneity is never the product of unpremeditated impulse; it must come only by toil. Beethoven's work that remains the freshest to-day is that which was evolved only by shaping, pruning, altering, here a little, there a little, until the maker of it felt he had reached as

nearly as possible his goal of perfection.

In the third place, Beethoven's labor was a labor of self-effacement. His art was not, in the current phrase, self-expression. He was not seeking to lay his heart open to the world. He was not selling his emo

tions at so much per. His art was an expression, or the striving after an ex pression, of life. It expressed himself only in so far as he succeeded in identifying himself with a greater life than that which can be compassed by the individual. The listener to the master pieces of Beethoven is in communica tion with the stars. Consciously or un consciously, deliberately or by instinct, Beethoven found about him fragmentsand out of them built a whole. Those temperamental souls that think they are doing great things when they tell what is inside of them are not artists. Beethoven was temperamental enough, in all conscience; but it is not because of his temperament that the world listens; it is rather because, whether through his temperament or in spite of it, he compassed within himself some thing of the life of all men.

Many of the observances of this Beethoven anniversary may have been perfunctory, but they will all have served their purpose if they remind people that the greatest music is not that which may give the greatest thrills, but that which makes life more understandable and invests human existence with a sense of nobility.

THE TURN IN THE TIDE

OPULAR sentiment, popular interest towards all phases of life, rises and falls like the tide. We advance by a process of approaching the mean through going to extremes.

In its attitude towards labor and industry the public has manifested this familiar method of dealing with mat ters of vital importance. A few decades. ago industrialism held the upper hand. The great captains of industry were the popular heroes. They were regarded as the creators of our National prosperity, nor were the methods by which they attained success examined with any great closeness. As a protection against the exploitation of capital, labor was forced to the formation of Nation-wide unions, the ramifications of which touched almost every industry, except that of agriculture, in the country.

With the growing sense of the moral responsibility of the country to protect its citizens against exploitation and to further a higher standard of living, the sympathy of the country very generally turned from capital to labor. Strikers almost invariably enjoyed the support and sympathy of the public, and in many instances won their strikes be cause of this fact. Like capital in a previous generation, labor took advan

E

ge of the situation to press home its mands with increasing vigor and dar

g.

The culmination of this process was erhaps reached when the railway aions forced the Democratic Adminisbation to pass the Adamson Bill under reat of a Nation-wide strike. It has emed that the passage of this law lost ore for the general labor movement an it gained. The tide of public senment in favor of the labor movement is ebbed from that time to this.

The widespread efforts to return merican industry to the days of the en shop (we are not here discussing e rights or the wrongs of this prosal), the failure of the steel strike, le readiness, with which the public is responded to appeals for volunteers replace striking laborers in essential dustries, are all floating straws which dicate which way the tide has turned. Cow far the tide will go will depend rgely upon the wisdom which labor aders manifest in their approach to je problem of adjusting our industrial lations in accordance with principles

equity. If labor leaders are to rein the sympathy which they once id, they must show a readiness to coperate with industry towards the urtherance of production, they must e prepared to forego some of the rivileges which they have gained rough unionization in order that a etter form of industrial democracy ay be developed.

The capitalist who attempts to take a unfair advantage of the present tuation and the labor leader who fails comprehend the real interests of his ovement will both of them be doing disservice to themselves and to their ommon country..

T

THE DRAMA ON

STRINGS

HERE is an ancient and honorable art which goes back into the dim regions of history and which as flowered in a dozen different civiliations. Evidences of the antiquity of his art have been gathered from the ombs of the Egyptians and the ruins of Ctruria. It was known to the ancient treeks; it flourished, and still flourshes, in India and China; and modern Europe still turns to it for entertainnent and recreation.

We refer to the art of the marionette, he art. of conveying the essentials of Irama by the use of puppets controlled nd manipulated in a manner which night suggest to a person of pessi

Save in limited localities, where the demands of some of our immigrant neighbors have kept alive the Old World art, the puppet show has not flourished in America. It might be interesting to speculate whether the absence of the puppet show from American life is due to over-sophistication or to a real lack of dramatic imagination. in the American character.

Certainly the puppet show is art stripped to its essentials. It is an art which seeks to attain its end with few, or none, of those mechanical elaborations which American ingenuity has brought to the aid (or the suffocation) of the legitimate drama.

The puppet show, in its purity, is an attempt to convey dramatic incident through a medium which is of itself essentially undramatic. The emotions excited by hatred, fear, love, crime, passion, achievement, and failure are brought into reality by the means of figures with faces as unchanging as the masks of the actors of ancient Greece. To make such an attempt successful the spectator, as well as the god of the puppet world who pulls the strings, must be endowed with a truly creative imagination. The spectator must bring to the puppet show that Elizabethan quality of mind which found it stimulating rather than ridiculous to be confronted with a sign, "This is a Forest" or "This is a Castle," instead of the type of stage setting which has brought popular fame and fortune to David Belasco. With these facts in mind, it might be very well for us seriously to consider whether it is our superior wis

has made the puppet show a rarity in American life.

Perhaps there is some connection between the supposition which we have suggested and the fact that the bestknown master of American puppets is at the same time the man who has imparted to his lay figures the greatest realism of form and action. Certainly Tony Sarg has introduced into his puppet dramas a technical development which is a departure from the essential idea of the art of the marionette. Yet if ever Mr. Sarg comes within the field of possible observation, any one who fails to see his puppet show will be depriving himself or herself of a real and stimulating pleasure. Properly to appreciate Mr. Sarg's art one should witness it in company with all the available children of the neighborhood. A child's observations at a puppet show have a very clarifying effect upon the mind too tightly bound by conventions and habits of thought. Through a child's eyes one can attain to that directness of vision which the older puppet dramas demanded and received from their spectators.

The reality of Mr. Sarg's presentations may be understood from a curious optical illusion which occurred at the conclusion of a recent performance of his version of "Rip Van Winkle." After the curtain closed for the last act it opened again, and Mr. Sarg himself stepped upon his diminutive stage to accept the well-earned applause of his audience. As he stooped to peer beneath the proscenium arch, his puppets strangely retained the appearance of distant life-size figures, while he

himself loomed above them like some huge giant from another world. It was the living man who was thrown out of proportion by the comparison and not the lifeless figures on the stage. The detail of Mr. Sarg's lay figures

I

DO not suppose that Arthur Whiting will thank me for calling him a missionary. But that is what he really is. And, in spite of the rebellion of revolutionaries like Stravinsky, musicians as well as scientists must, whether they like it or not, stand the consequences of facts.

I do not know any American who believes more profoundly than Arthur Whiting that music is one of the four great fine arts and should be cultivated, understood, and appreciated by every well-balanced and well-educated man, not merely because of its sensuous beauty, but because it is food for the spirit and the imagination.

I have forgotten what the text-books say, but I name the four great fine arts as follows: Painting, Sculpture (including architecture), Poetry, and Music. Every cultivated man enjoys, or pretends to enjoy, the first three. Unfortunately, large numbers of American men who would resent it if they were called barbarian or philistine apparently take some pride in saying that they "cannot tell one tune from another." It is conceivable that a man may enjoy and even appreciate painting and sculpture whose musical sense is wholly atrophied, as Darwin's was. But no man without some musical instinct and appreciation can really enjoy poetry, unless it be Amy Lowell's. For music is the very basis and soul of all poetry, save that of the hopeless futurists. Even Walt Whitman, the father and apostle of the herd of modern American writers of vers libre, wrote some of the most rhythmical and musical poetry in the English language. Only those who have some capacity for music can take in the whole beauty of "Captain, O My Captain !"

But to get back to Arthur Whiting. Actuated by a creed which I have thus roughly set forth, Arthur Whiting for more than ten years has been going to our American colleges and universities with the purpose of interesting undergraduates in music as one of the fine arts. A committee which has now been formed to give much-needed support to this real missionary work says of Whiting's university concerts:

Mr. Whiting has given a course of five monthly concerts preceded by a talk on the character and form of the music. This fixes the attention of the students on important points and assists them to understand and to appre

education in the art of music. From the year of the establishment of these "Expositions of Classical and Modern Chamber Music" they have been free to the students, and the attendance at each concert. has averaged four han dred men. As the attendance is entirely voluntary, the interest and response of undergraduates has been an agreeable surprise to the resident Faculty and is truly indicative of the real value of these recitals.

The response of the undergraduates has been spontaneous and enthusiastic.

While Whiting is a musician in the highest sense of the word, he is not a "highbrow," and his comments on composers and musical compositions as he interprets his programmes to the under graduates are delightful and sometimes laughter-exciting in their apposite wit and criticism. I append a specimen programme of this year's series.

Of two of the soloists on the programme it may be said in passing that Miss Wyman is an American singer trained in France, who sings French folk songs with a charm like that of Yvette Guilbert, and Mr. George Barrère is perhaps the greatest living flute player and a member of the New York Symphony Orchestra. So it will be seen that Whiting selects artists of the first rank as his expositors. Those who have heard the Whiting recitals, in which the best kind of talk is combined with the best kind of music, know how delightful they are. Indeed, it is not too much to say that they are sui generis, a Latin phrase which I use because it seems peculiarly applicable to any uni versity undertaking.

As to the missionary himself, he is an American, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts; is a pianist and composer, having written orchestral and chamber music, songs, and pianoforte pieces; and his compositions have been played by the great symphonic orchestras and chamber music organizations.

But, unlike too many professional musicians, he has other interests than music-literature, for example, and even politics. I have had more than one political discussion with him, and they have not been adagio talks either. He has a marked gift for literary ex pression and a lively but unstinging (if there isn't such a word as unsting ing there ought to be) critical sense. If the Fates had set him in the channel of literature instead of music, he could, I

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alth

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believe, have given Augustine Birrell a run for his money as an essayist. I say Augustine Birrell, because last night I appened to read in bed (a delightful lthough I am told an unhygienic habit) Birrell's essays on Cowper, Matthew Arnold, and Cardinal Newman. I do not know any English essayist of our ime who combines more delightfully a gentle sense of humor, a delicate apreciation of literary values, and an inconventional humanism than this hancery barrister, who has been a niversity professor of law and head of he Department of Education in a British Cabinet, and who yet says that book hunting" is his chief recreation, nd who has done perhaps more than ny other Englishman to reveal the prings of literary life to the ordinary and unsophisticated British reader.

But to get back again to Arthur Whiting. He has, as I have said, a Birrell-like, semi-humorous appreciation f what is genuine and spontaneous in uman nature. For example, a few ears ago he contributed to these pages En article on the American composer En which I find the following passage:

The American of to-day is unique. He has his own face, his own way of doing and of feeling things. If his emotions have as yet no complete musical representation, it is not because they cannot be represented in tones, for we have one song at least-our beloved "Dixie "-which throbs exactly with the National pulse, and which is of such sterling worth that it has survived fifty years of hard usage, and is to-day as thrilling and impelling as when it led the tired marchers of the Potomac.

The official and ceremonial hymn of a country is usually perfunctory and philistine. It is pious custom more than spontaneous feeling which brings us to our feet when we sing that commonplace tune which we borrowed from England which she borrowed from Germany, the words of which we vaguely remember to begin

"God save our 'tis of thee."

I speak thus disrespectfully of our National anthem because it is not our National anthem; it is not a musical representation of our National feeling or experience. As to the verses, leave them to any American conscience.

If many of the accredited hymns of nations are characterless, there are at least three popular songs which are, in a real sense, national. The "Rákoczy March" of Hungary, the "Marseillaise "of France, and "Dixie" of America are intoxicants which stimulate the nerves of their respective races, so that the first two have often been forbidden by the police in times of special excitement. But there is nothing warlike or vengeful in our own song; it has good-natured energy, a certain confident strength; its saucy gait has humor; it is not theatWrical, self-conscious, or sentimentalit is American character.

From a bas-relief by Miss Frances Grimes presented to Mr. and Mrs. Whiting by a group of friends in Cornish, New Hampshire, where the Whitings then had their summer home. The inscription in the upper left-hand corner is a French quotation which may be translated: Harmony, Harmony ! The language which Genius invented for Love to speak"

I submit that this passage is indicative of good humor, good taste in music, and a good literary style.

If anything can soften the hearts of the average American undergraduates, so that they will not feel ashamed in displaying an interest in æsthetics, which they too often mistakenly think is a sign of effeminacy, it is music. For, as is well known, an English poet, William Congreve, who was certainly not a parlor snake, once made the statement-included in so many books of quotations that it has become tritethat "music hath charms, etc., etc." I do not finish the quotation lest some of my undergraduate readers resent an implied personal criticism.

As a matter of fact, the men at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have heard Mr. Whiting and his recitals will confirm all I say about their charm and usefulness. They ought to be extended to other colleges and universities, and for this purpose a committee of amateur music lovers has been organized in New York City which hopes not only to maintain the work as it is now carried on by Mr. Whiting, but to extend it. "The expense," says the committee, "cannot be met by the universities officially, and

the concerts have been maintained since 1907 by a group of interested friends in the universities themselves and in New York. With the greatly increased cost of arranging for soloists, traveling, printing, etc., the combined funds from these sources no longer suffice, and unless a guarantee of a much wider and more generous support is quickly forthcoming, an important educational factor in the general musical life of our country is in grave danger of being lost."

Perhaps it is true that the expense cannot be met by the university officially, but it ought to be so met. Our universities bring professors of Greek poetry from the other side of the Atlantic. They ought to appropriate at least a small sum of money for the development of an appreciation of the best in music among their students. Nevertheless the committee should be supported in its work by lovers of music in all parts of the country. Contributions may be sent to the treasurer, Mrs. George Montgomery Tuttle, 103 East Seventy-fifth Street, New York City, who will also doubtless send information about this unique movement in American education to any who may be interested.

LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT.