Welsh Journals

the song, it is impossible to think of the words without the accompanying music, or of the music without the words it interprets. It is the same with all great songs indeed, in many cases it may be said that the composer has added richness and a fuller meaning to the words he has set, he has, in a manner, explained them. Out of all the hundreds of songs that Hugo Wolf wrote, I do not know of one that does not quicken the words, to which it is wedded, into a more intense life. Music, in itself, means little or nothing even the vast pictorial symphonic poems of Richard Strauss would have no definitely realistic meaning at all, if we did not first of all know the programmes which they interpret, for the effect of music is not intellectual but emotional. In an audience of two thousand people listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, for example, you would not find two music- lovers to agree precisely on its intellectual significance. Music is the most fluid, the most easily adaptable and the most accom- modating of the arts but before it can have meaning (in the intellectual sense) it must be associated either with words (song and opera) or with dancing (ballet,) or with ceremonial (a funeral, a wedding, and so on). It is because of its fluidity and its intense emotionality that it is so extra- ordinarily true in its interpretation of poetry. Pictorial art and sculpture fail in this respect, for a picture states precise facts; that is to say, it simply records in colour and form what the particular poem has already said in words. Even pictures of the impressionist school are as in- tellectual as they are emotional. But music never defines it only suggests. It does not draw; it only colours. Its function is not to state, but only to under- line and indicate. The primary weakness of Welsh vocal music is that it is frequently allied to words of little or no value. We are supposed to be a nation of poets, and so we are, if emotion be the only qualification for the writing of poetry. But, of course, other things are equally necessary. In music, as I have already said, the effect is almost entirely emotional but in the writing of music, in its conception and in its development, a most rigid intellectual control is necessary. One does not com- pose music merely by experiencing acute emotion, and fine verse is rarely written save with great mental effort. I some- times think that much Welsh poetry is written too easily some of it does not bear real evidence of deep thought. In spite of common belief, great art is not born easily. Beethoven used to suffer agonies of mental labour in writing his symphonies, and many creative artists have -been most suspicious of .those of their works that were written without arduous effort and imaginative strain. Very little Welsh poetry, so far as I have observed, is concerned directly with life, as it is lived to-day. The mountains and the streams are everlasting, and as long as they exist they will inspire poets to song. But nature both in its wild and beneficent aspects is only a part of life. Which of our poets has put into his work any of those feelings and aspirations that are quickly changing the various aspects of our religious, social and industrial life ? The most vital creative artists of to-day- Mr. John Galsworthy, Mr. John Mase- field, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Arnold Bennett-live intensely in the present. They do not wish to be for ever delving in the past they desire, above all things, to interpret their own generation to their fellows. Welsh literary men are in danger of falling between two stools. Our scholars are, for the most part, too closely