All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music - you don't say!

Walter Pater tells us, in the "School of Giorgione" chapter of The Renaissance (1873), that "All art aspires towards the condition of music." Later, in the conclusion, one can find his geniuses burning with their "hard gemlike flame."

One advantage of specializing in a period is that one can, through repeated exposure, begin to make sense of nonsense like this.* I mean insights, one can make sense of these deep insights. I have obviously not reached that point with later 19th century aesthetic theory.

This particular ranking of the arts seems to have begun with Schopenhauer. The very abstractness of music allows it a kind of stronger reality than more concrete arts. Something like that. Richard Wagner swallowed the whole thing (when an eminent philosopher says everyone wants to be, and should be, like you, who among us would gainsay him?), and under his influence so did many others. The idea seems to have been especially strong in France and Germany - it's a major component of French Symbolist poetry, while German novelists created a genre to explore it, the Kunstlerroman.

Since I don't understand this stuff, I'll make a simpler point: people, writers, really believed it. This wasn't just intellectual play. Poets, painters, architects, were told that art aspired towards music, and as a result they themselves aspired to create art that was like music.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about writers who used other artist characters as surrogates for their ideas about writing, but in this intellectual environment, it would be odd if everyone wrote about artists this way. At a minimum, writers would want to see test their art form against others. What does music do that the novel does not? What can the novel do to be more musical?

At a basic level, this is just a set of contrasts. I think this is part of what Marcel Proust is doing with his gallery of artists in In Search of Lost Time. Bergotte the writer, Elstir the painter, Vinteuil the composer (am I forgetting someone?) - these characters allow Proust to knock their art forms up against each other. The little motif of Vinteuil's sonata that runs through the novel, affecting characters in different ways, for example: what is it doing that a written passage can't? Or look at the novelist Bergotte's strange vision of "the tiny patch of yellow wall" in Vermeer's View of Delft. The dying Bergotte says that he should have written his novels like that little patch of wall. What can he mean?

I'll try an earlier example, no less difficult. E. T. A. Hoffmann was not just a writer, but a practising composer. His opera Undine (1814) is still performed in Germany. Here's an author whose composer characters, of which there are a few, are surely not mannequin writers.

The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr (1820-22) presents Hoffmann's divide in an extreme way. The novel abruptly alternates between the autobiography of a cat, written by himself (he's a very talented cat), with a fairy-tale like story of the composer Johannes Kreisler (who is also a person the cat knows). The cat, it turns out, was using the manuscript of the composer's story as blotting paper, so the pages got mixed together.

This is a very strange book. I don't know what it means that the cat-author, in the process of writing, mangles the composer's story. Or that the composer lives in a sort of magical world while the author's concerns - plates of cream, pretty lady cats, and the like - are purely quotidian. I'll bet it means something, and it's not that the creative nature of composing and writing are the same.

* Older examples: Poetry is painting. Shakespeare holds a mirror up to Nature.