Part 3 (2/2)
The only portion of the paper from which I have extracted the above observations that can be treated in perfect seriousness, is that which begins--”If the Italians have a genius for music, &c.,” and ends--”I would allow it no better quarter than Plato has done,” &c. Now the recent political condition of Italy sufficiently proves that music could not save a country from national degradation; but neither could painting nor an admirable poetic literature. It is also better, no doubt, that a man should learn his duty to G.o.d and to his neighbour, than that he should cultivate a taste for harmony, but why not do both; and above all, why compare like with unlike? The ”performances of a much higher nature” than music undeniably exist, but they do not answer the same end. The more general science on which that of astronomy rests may be a n.o.bler study than music, but there is nothing consoling or _per se_ elevating in mathematics. Poetry, again, would by most persons be cla.s.sed higher than music, though the effect of half poetry, and of imaginative literature generally, is to place the reader in a state of reverie such as music induces more immediately and more perfectly. The enjoyment of art--by which we do not mean its production, or its critical examination, but the pure enjoyment of the artistic result--has nothing strictly intellectual in it; no man could grow wise by looking at Raphael or listening to Mozart. Nor does he derive any important intellectual ideas from many of our most beautiful poems, but simply emotion, of an elevated kind, such as is given by fine music. Music is evidently not didactic, and painting can only teach, in the ordinary sense of the word, what every one already knows; though, of course, a painter may depict certain aspects of nature and of the human face, previously un.o.bserved and unimagined, just as the composer, in giving a musical expression to certain sentiments and pa.s.sions, can rouse in us emotions previously dormant, or never experienced before with so much intensity. But the fine arts cannot communicate abstract truths--from which it chiefly follows that no right-minded artist ever uses them with such an aim; though there is no saying what some wild enthusiasts will not endeavour to express, and other enthusiasts equally wild pretend to see, in symphonies and in big symbolical pictures. If Addison meant to insinuate that _Phaedra and Hippolytus_ was a much higher performance than any possible opera, he was decidedly in error. But he had not heard _Don Juan_, _William Tell_, and _Der Freischutz_; to which no one in the present day, unless musically deaf, could prefer an English translation of _Phedre_. It would be unfair to lay too much stress on the fact that the music of Handel still lives, and with no declining life, whereas the tragedies of Racine, resuscitated by Mademoiselle Rachel, have not been heard of since the death of that admirable actress; Addison was only acquainted with the earliest of Handel's operas, and these _are_ forgotten, as indeed are most of his others, with the exception, here and there, of a few detached airs.
[Sidenote: OPERA AND DRAMA.]
In the sentence commencing ”Music is certainly a very agreeable entertainment, but,” &c., Addison says what every one, who would care to see one of Shakespeare's plays properly acted (not much cared for, however, in Addison's time), must feel now. Let us have perfect representations of Opera by all means; but it is a sad and a disgraceful thing, that in his own native country the works of the greatest dramatist who ever lived should be utterly neglected as far as their stage representation is concerned. It is absurd to pretend that the Opera is the sole cause of this. Operas, magnificently put upon the stage, are played in England, at least at one theatre, with remarkable _completeness_ of excellence, and, at more than one, with admirable singers in the princ.i.p.al and even in the minor parts. Shakespeare's dramas, when they are played at all, are thrown on to the stage anyhow.
This would not matter so much, but our players, even in _Hamlet_, where they are especially cautioned against it, have neither the sense nor the good taste to avoid exaggeration and rant, to which, they maintain, the public are now so accustomed, that a tragedian acting naturally would make no impression. Their conventionality, moreover, makes them keep to certain stage ”traditions,” which are frequently absurd, while their vanity is so egregious that one who imagines himself a first-rate actor (in a day when there are no first-rate actors) will not take what he is pleased to consider a second-rate part. Our stage has no tragedian who could embody the jealousy of ”Otello,” as Ronconi embodies that of ”Chevreuse” in _Maria di Rohan_, nor could half a dozen actors of equal reputation be persuaded in any piece to appear in half a dozen parts of various degrees of prominence, though this is what constantly takes place at the Opera.
In Addison's time, Nicolini was a far greater actor than any who was in the habit of appearing on the English stage; indeed, this alone can account for the success of the ridiculous opera of _Hydaspes_, in which Nicolini played the princ.i.p.al part, and of which I shall give some account in the proper place. Doubtless also, it had much to do with the success of Italian Opera generally, which, when Addison commenced writing about it in the _Spectator_, was supported by no great composer, and was constructed on such frameworks as one would imagine could only have been imagined by a lunatic or by a pantomime writer struck serious.
If Addison had not been fond of music, and moreover a very just critic, he would have dismissed the Italian Opera, such as it existed during the first days of the _Spectator_, as a hopeless ma.s.s of absurdity.
[Sidenote: STAGE DECORATION.]
Every one must in particular admit the justness of Addison's views respecting the incongruity of operatic scenery; indeed, his observations on that subject might with advantage be republished now and then in the present day. ”What a field of raillery,” he says, ”would they [the wits of King Charles's time] have been let into had they been entertained with painted dragons spitting wildfire, enchanted chariots drawn by Flanders mares, and real cascades in artificial landscapes! A little skill in criticism would inform us, that shadows and realities ought not to be mixed together in the same piece; and that the scenes which are designed as the representations of nature should be filled with resemblances, and not with the things themselves. If one would represent a wide champaign country, filled with herds and flocks, it would be ridiculous to draw the country only upon the scenes, and to crowd several parts of the stage with sheep and oxen. This is joining together inconsistencies, and making the decoration partly real and partly imaginary. I would recommend what I have here said to the directors as well as the admirers, of our modern opera.”
In the matter of stage decoration we have ”learned nothing and forgotten nothing” since the beginning of the 18th century. Servandoni, at the theatre of the Tuileries, which contained some seven thousand persons, introduced as elaborate and successful mechanical devices as any that have been known since his time; but then as now the real and artificial were mixed together, by which the general picture is necessarily rendered absurd, or rather no general picture is produced. Independently of the fact that the reality of the natural objects makes the artificiality of the manufactured ones unnecessarily evident as when the branches of real trees are agitated by a gust of wind, while those of pasteboard trees remain fixed--it is difficult in making use of natural objects on the stage to observe with any accuracy the laws of proportion and perspective, so that to the eye the realities of which the manager is so proud, are, after all, strikingly unreal. The peculiar conditions too, under which theatrical scenery is viewed, should always be taken into account. Thus, ”real water,” which used at one time to be announced as such a great attraction at some of our minor playhouses, does not look like water on the stage, but has a dull, black, inky, appearance, quite sufficient to render it improbable that any despondent heroine, whatever her misfortune, would consent to drown herself in it.
The most contemptuous thing ever written against the Opera, or rather against music in general, is Swift's celebrated epigram on the Handel and Buononcini disputes:--
”Some say that Signor Buononcini Compared to Handel is a ninny; While others say that to him, Handel Is hardly fit to hold a candle.
Strange that such difference should be, 'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
Capital, telling lines, no doubt, though is it not equally strange that there should be such a difference between one piece of painted canvas and another, or between a statue by Michael Angelo and the figure of a Scotchman outside a tobacconist's shop? These differences exist, and it proves nothing against art that savages and certain exceptional natures among civilized men are unable to perceive them. We wonder how the Dean of St. Patrick's would have got on with the Abbe Arnauld, who was so impressed with the sublimity of one of the pieces in Gluck's _Iphigenie_, that he exclaimed, ”With that air one might found a new religion!”
[Sidenote: BERANGER ON THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.]
One of the wittiest poems written against our modern love of music (cultivated, it must be admitted, to a painful extent by many incapable amateurs) is the lament by Beranger, in which the poet, after complaining that the convivial song is despised as not sufficiently artistic, and that in the presence of the opera the drama itself is fast disappearing, exclaims:
Si nous t'enterrons Bel art dramatique, Pour toi nous dirons La messe en musique.
Without falling into the same error as those who have accused Addison of a selfish and interested animosity towards the Opera, I may remark that song-writers have often very little sympathy for any kind of music except that which can be easily subjected to words, as in narrative ballads, and to a certain extent ballads of all kinds. When a man says ”I don't care much for music, but I like a good song,” we may generally infer that he does not care for music at all. So play-wrights have a liking for music when it can be introduced as an ornament into their pieces, but not when it is made the most important element in the drama--indeed, the drama itself.
Favart, the author of numerous opera-books, has left a good satirical description in verse of French opera. It ends as follows:--
Quiconque voudra Faire un opera, Emprunte a Pluton, Son peuple demon; Qu'il tire des cieux Un couple de dieux, Qu'il y joigne un heros Tendre jusqu' aux os.
Lardez votre sujet, D'un eternel ballet.
Amenez au milieu d'une fete La tempete, Une bete, Que quelqu'un tra Des qu'il la verra.
Quiconque voudra faire un opera Fuira de la raison Le triste poison.
Il fera chanter Concerter et sauter Et puis le reste ira, Tout comme il pourra.
[Sidenote: PANARD ON THE OPERA.]
This, from a man whose operas did not fail, but on the contrary, were highly successful, is rather too bad. But the author of the ill-fated ”Rosamond” himself visited the French Opera, and has left an account of it, which corresponds closely enough to Favart's poetical description.
”I have seen a couple of rivers,” he says, (No. 29 of the _Spectator_) ”appear in red stockings, and Alpheus, instead of having his head covered with sedge and bulrushes, making love in a fair, full-bottomed, periwig, and a plume of feathers, but with a voice so full of shakes and quavers that I should have thought the murmurs of a country brook the much more agreeable music. I remember the last opera I saw in that merry nation was the ”Rape of Proserpine,” where Pluto, to make the more tempting figure, puts himself in a French equipage, and brings Ascalaphus along with him as his _valet de chambre_.” This is what we call folly and impertinence, but what the French look upon as gay and polite.”
Addison's account agrees with Favart's song and also with one by Panard, which contains this stanza:--
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