Ring, all of them reachings-forward to the new Vitalist
art, with the dreary pseudo-sacred oratorios and cantatas
which were produced for no better reason than that
Handel had formerly made splendid thunder in that way,
and with the stale confectionery, mostly too would-be
pious to be even cheerfully toothsome, of Spohr and
Mendelssohn, Stainer and Parry, which spread indigestion
at our musical festivals until I publicly told Parry
the bludgeoning truth about his Job and woke him to
conviction of sin. Compare Flaxman and Thorwaldsen
and Gibson with Phidias and Praxiteles, Stevens with
Michael Angelo, Bouguereau’s Virgin with Cimabue’s,
or the best operatic Christs of Scheffer and Mueller
with the worst Christs that the worst painters could
paint before the end of the fifteenth century, and
you must feel that until we have a great religious
movement we cannot hope for a great artistic one.
The disillusioned Raphael could paint a mother and
child, but not a queen of Heaven as much less skilful
men had done in the days of his great-grandfather;
yet he could reach forward to the twentieth century
and paint a Transfiguration of the Son of Man as they
could not. Also, please note, he could decorate
a house of pleasure for a cardinal very beautifully
with voluptuous pictures of Cupid and Psyche; for
this simple sort of Vitalism is always with us, and,
like portrait painting, keeps the artist supplied with
subject-matter in the intervals between the ages of
faith; so that your sceptical Rembrandts and Velasquezs
are at least not compelled to paint shop fronts for
want of anything else to paint in which they can really
believe.
And there are always certain rare but intensely interesting
anticipations. Michael Angelo could not very well
believe in Julius II or Leo X, or in much that they
believed in; but he could paint the Superman three
hundred years before Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra
and Strauss set it to music. Michael Angelo won
the primacy among all modern painters and sculptors
solely by his power of shewing us superhuman persons.
On the strength of his decoration and color alone
he would hardly have survived his own death twenty
years; and even his design would have had only an
academic interest; but as a painter of prophets and
sibyls he is greatest among the very greatest in his
craft, because we aspire to a world of prophets and
sibyls. Beethoven never heard of radioactivity
nor of electrons dancing in vortices of inconceivable
energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement
of his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than
as a musical picture of these whirling electrons?
His contemporaries said he was mad, partly perhaps
because the movement was so hard to play; but we, who
can make a pianola play it to us over and over until
it is as familiar as Pop Goes the Weasel, know that
it is sane and methodical. As such, it must represent
something; and as all Beethoven’s serious compositions
represent some process within himself, some nerve storm
or soul storm, and the storm here is clearly one of
physical movement, I should much like to know what
other storm than the atomic storm could have driven
him to this oddest of all those many expressions of
cyclonic energy which have given him the same distinction
among musicians that Michael Angelo has among draughtsmen.
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