ote: _Vocal music and delineation._]

[Sidenote: _Beethoven's canon._]

The extent to which tone-painting is justified is a question which
might profitably concern us; but such a discussion as it deserves
would far exceed the limits set for this book, and must be foregone.
It cannot be too forcibly urged, however, as an aid to the listener,
that efforts at musical cartooning have never been made by true
composers, and that in the degree that music attempts simply to copy
external things it falls in the scale of artistic truthfulness and
value. Vocal music tolerates more of the descriptive element than
instrumental because it is a mixed art; in it the purpose of music is
to illustrate the poetry and, by intensifying the appeal to the fancy,
to warm the emotions. Every piece of vocal music, moreover, carries
its explanatory programme in its words. Still more tolerable and even
righteous is it in the opera where it is but one of several factors
which labor together to make up the sum of dramatic representation.
But it must ever remain valueless unless it be idealized. Mendelssohn,
desiring to put _Bully Bottom_ into the overture to "A Midsummer
Night's Dream," did not hesitate to use tones which suggest the bray
of a donkey, yet the effect, like Handel's frogs and flies in
"Israel," is one of absolute musical value. The canon which ought
continually to be before the mind of the listener is that which
Beethoven laid down with most painstaking care when he wrote the
"Pastoral" symphony. Desiring to inform the listeners what were the
images which inspired the various movements (in order, of course, that
they might the better enter into the work by recalling them), he gave
each part a superscription thus:

[Sidenote: _The "Pastoral" symphony._]

I. "The agreeable and cheerful sensations awakened by
arrival in the country."

II. "Scene by the brook."

III. "A merrymaking of the country folk."

IV. "Thunder-storm."

V. "Shepherds' song--feelings of charity combined with
gratitude to the Deity after the storm."

In the title itself he included an admonitory explanation which should
have everlasting validity: "Pastoral Symphony; more expression of
feeling than painting." How seriously he thought on the subject we
know from his sketch-books, in which occur a number of notes, some of
which were evidently hints for superscriptions, some records of his
convictions on the subject of descri