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THE BENSON LIBRARY OF HYMNOLOGY 
 
 Endowed by the Reverend 
 
 Louis Fitzgerald Benson, d.d. 
 
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 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 wfO'O PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 
 
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 JUL 30 1941 
 
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 BIBLE MUSI 
 
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 Inng ©tafams, in IJtag legs, on ^mwd 
 w fxom Smgtm 
 
 FRANCIS JACOX, B.A., 
 
 Autlwr of "Cues from all Quarters," etc., etc. 
 
 * From holy writ the motif or the theme. 
 And variations thence meandering stream ; 
 Andante now, Adagio now prevails, 
 Now Allegretto chirps, now Largo wails ; 
 Major to minor turns ; chromatic scales 
 Change colour, as chameleon his hue, 
 If not clean turning achromatic too." 
 
 Nicias Foxcar. 
 
 ROBERTS, BROTHERS 
 
 MDCCCLXXII. 
 
PREFATORY. 
 
 To matter-of-fact sticklers for sticking to one's 
 text, this book is not unlikely to be an offence 
 throughout. The texts are taken less as stand- 
 points than as starting-points ; less as something 
 to make a stand upon, than as something to get 
 away from. To compare them to stones, — they 
 are here used not as foundation-stones, whereon to 
 uprear an orderly structure, but as stepping-stones, 
 for crossing a stream that, like Wordsworth's, 
 wanders at its own sweet will ; and the bank once 
 gained, the rambling becomes almost systematic- 
 ally vagrant, up stream, down stream, or against 
 the stream, whithersoever chance suggests or fancy 
 leads. 
 
 One word, also to the address of matter-of-fact 
 
vi PREFATORY. 
 
 critics, on the use of the term "Author," on the 
 title-page or elsewhere, of this or any other book 
 from the same pen. If none can write himself 
 author who cannot point to some achievement in 
 original, creative composition, I am none. If I 
 could think of another term that should not look 
 affected or pedantic, I would use it. Failing any- 
 such, I use the word in its accepted conventional 
 sense, — conventionally comprehensive, comprehen- 
 sively conventional 
 
 F.J. 
 
 Prestwood, October^ 1871, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFATORY. PAGE 
 
 I. IN THE BEGINNING, AND AT THE END • I 
 
 JOB XXXVIII. 6; REV. XIV. 2. 
 
 II. JUBAL's INVENTION 1 7 
 
 GENESIS IV. 21. 
 
 III. ORGANS — BEYOND THE MEANING, AND THE 
 
 PATIENCE, OF JOB 4 1 
 
 IV. AS VINEGAR UPON NITRE . • . 50 
 
 PROVERBS XXV. 20. 
 
 v. saul's malady and david's minstrelsy . 72 
 
 1 SAMUEL XVI. 23 ; XIX. 9, IO. 
 
 VI. A MUSICAL MONARCH 86 
 
 2 SAMUEL VL 5. 
 
 VII. TEMPLE MUSIC 113 
 
 I CHRON. XVI. 41, 42; 2 CHRON. V. 12, 13. 
 
 VIII. TRUMPET TONES 1 29 
 
 EXOD. XIX. 16, SQ. ; JUDGES VIL 1 8, SQ. ; I COR. 
 
 xv. 25. 
 
 IX. HAVING EARS, BUT HEARING NOT . . 1 42 
 
 JEREMIAH V. 21. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 X. THE BRUTE-WORLD AND MUSIC . 1 64 
 
 JOB XXXIX. 24, 25 ; PSALM LVIII. 5. 
 
 XI. MINSTREL AND SEER 191 
 
 2 KINGS III. 15. 
 
 XII. UNCERTAINTY OF SOUND . , .224 
 
 I COR. XIV. 7, 8. 
 
 XIII. MUSIC AND MORALS , 236 
 
 AMOS VI. 5. 
 
 XIV. IS ANY MERRY? 253 
 
 PSALM LXXXI. I ; JAMES V. 13. 
 
 XV. SONGS OF PILGRIMAGE . . , .267 
 
 PSALM CXIX. 54. 
 
 XVI. SONGS OF EXILE . . , , . - 277 
 
 PSALM CXXXVTI. 3, 4. 
 
 XVII. SONGS IN THE NIGHT « 298 
 
 JOB XXXV. 10. 
 INDEX . , . . , . . 22 q 
 
BIBLE MUSIC. 
 
 i. 
 3in tlje Bcgmnino;, ana at tlje (£ntu 
 
 Job xxxviii. 7 ; Rev. xiv. 2. 
 
 WHERE was man — the question came by- 
 way of answer from out of the whirlwind — 
 when the foundations of the earth were fashioned, 
 and the corner-stone of it laid ? Man as yet was 
 not. But then was the time "when the morning 
 stars sang together," and creation thrilled at the 
 melody* of sound. 
 
 * Creation thrilled at the melody of speech — these words, 
 or words to this effect, close a paragraph in a sermon by the 
 late Henry Melvill, descriptive of the first articulate utterance 
 of newly-created man. Congregations thrilled at the melody 
 of Canon Melvill's voice, in the rich fulness of its mellow prime ; 
 and no listener of those days can well have forgotten the sen- 
 sational effect of breath-drawing on the part of the people. 
 
 I 
 
CHURCH-GOERS? SIGH OF RELIEF. 
 
 " From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 
 This universal frame began : 
 When nature underneath a heap 
 Of jarring atoms lay, 
 
 when the climax, or grand climacteric, of a paragraph was at 
 length reached by the preacher, and the culminating effect, the 
 terminus ad que?n, was arrived at, so that the hushed ex- 
 pectants could breathe freely again, and prepare for a fresh 
 start. One is reminded, in the retrospect, of certain words 
 in one of Corneille's prefaces, where he speaks of un certain 
 fremissement dans Vassemblee, qui marquait une curiosite 
 //tense, et un redoublcment d y attention, etc. The church- 
 goer's sigh of relief is by the satirical associated with the full 
 stop of the sermon ; as where Mr. Thackeray describes the 
 effect of a display of pianoforte fireworks, at the conclusion 
 of which the drawing-room listeners give "a heave and a 
 gasp of admiration — a deep-breathing gushing sound, such as 
 you hear at church when the sermon comes to a full stop." 
 And some vague echo of which may have been sounding in 
 Lord Cockburn's ears when he described the fire at the Tron 
 Church in 1824, and the burning of the clock — the minute 
 hand dropping suddenly and silently down to the perpen- 
 dicular at a quarter before twelve at night : " When the old 
 time-keepers function was done, there was an audible sigh 
 over the spectators. . . . Scott, whose father's pew had been 
 in the Tron Church, lingered a moment, and said, with a pro- 
 found heave, ' Eh, sirs ! mony a weary, wean- sermon hae I 
 heard beneath that steeple ! ' " No listener to London's Golden 
 Lecturer sighed after that sort. The listening was more like 
 that of the Commons to Pitt at his best, as Dr. Croly has de- 
 scribed it — "deeply silent but where some chord was so power- 
 fully touched that it gave a universal thrill. Again those 
 involuntary bursts of admiration were as suddenly hushed by 
 the eagerness of the House to listen, and the awful importance 
 
SENSATIONAL BREATH-TAKING. 
 
 And could not heave her head, 
 The tuneful voice was heard from high, 
 
 'Arise, ye more than dead.' 
 Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 
 
 of the subject." Dr. Oliver Holmes makes a simile that is 
 pat and pertinent, when he pictures Helen Darley sighing, 
 and changing her place, " as persons do whose breath some 
 cunning orator has been sucking out of them with his spongy 
 eloquence, so that, when he stops, they must get some air, 
 and stir about, or they feel as if they should be half smothered 
 and palsied." There float in the memory as applicable, if only 
 misapplied, some lines of Byron's which tell how every 
 listener's bosom held his breath, and how, throughout, 
 
 1 ' from man to man, 
 A swift electric shiver ran ; . . . 
 And with a hushing sound comprest, 
 A sigh shrunk back on every breast." 
 
 Of Melvill's Golden Lectures it might be said, as Macaulay 
 says of Tillotson, that his eloquence attracted to the heart of 
 the City crowds of the learned and polite, from the Inns of 
 Court and from the mansions of the west end ; a considerable 
 part of his congregation generally consisting of young clergy- 
 men, " who came to learn the art of preaching at the feet of him 
 who" — thus the great Whig historian appraises the great 
 Whig prelate — " was universally considered as the first of 
 preachers." Another Thursday morning series will occur to 
 some readers, not forgetting the sensational breath-taking 
 after prolonged breath-holding, to which this footnote refers. 
 Dr. Wardlaw describes as "peculiarly striking" the aspect 
 of the Tron Church, in Glasgow, " on a Thursday forenoon ' 
 (he italicizes the day of the week, and the time of day,) when 
 Dr. Chalmers occupied the pulpit. To see a church of that 
 size, " crammed above and below," during the busiest hours 
 of the day, with fifteen or sixteen hundred hearers, and these 
 
SUSPIRATION AND EXPECTORATION. 
 
 In order to their stations leap, 
 And Music's power obey. 
 From harmony, from heavenly harmony, 
 This universal frame began : 
 
 of all vocations, " was indeed a novel and strange sight." A 
 hush of dead silence attended the giving out of the text ; and 
 as the preacher grew more earnest, so did the listeners. 
 "Every breath is held, every cough is suppressed, every 
 fidgety movement is settled ; every one, riveted himself by 
 the spell of the impassioned and entrancing eloquence, knows 
 how sensitively his neighbour will resent the very slightest 
 disturbance. Then, by-and-by, there is a pause. The 
 speaker stops — to gather breath, to wipe his forehead, to 
 adjust his gown, and purposely too, and wisely, to give the 
 audience, as well as himself, a moment or two of relaxation. 
 The moment is embraced ; there is free breathing, sup- 
 pressed coughs get vent, postures are changed, there is a 
 universal stir, as of persons who could not have endured this 
 strain much longer ; the preacher bends forward, his hand is 
 raised — all is again hushed." A learned tourist in Norway 
 not long since bore witness that the most impressive service 
 he ever heard was in one of the Bergen churches — though he 
 owns that an Englishman might have been a little startled by 
 the amount of expectoration indulged in by the congregation ; 
 for between the intervals of the sermon the sound was like 
 that of the large raindrops at the beginning of a thunder- 
 shower. The expectoration is an undesirable complement or 
 supplement to the deep-drawn breath-taking ; otherwise the 
 aspect of the Bergen auditory answers closely enough to one 
 spell-bound by a Robert Hall or a Chalmers. Dr. Gregory 
 tells us of the former, that from the beginning of his dis- 
 course "an almost breathless silence prevailed," deeply 
 solemnizing from its singular intenseness. Not a sound was 
 heard but that of the preacher's voice. As he became 
 
UNDER THE SPELL. 
 
 From harmony to harmony- 
 Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 
 The diapason closing full in Man." 
 
 more animated, a few listeners here and there would be seen 
 to rise from their seats, and stand gazing fixedly upon him — 
 " every eye directed to the preacher, yet now and then for a 
 moment glancing from one to the other, thus transmitting 
 and reciprocating thought and feeling." Professor Fraser's 
 description of Chalmers at the Tron Church is quite a 
 parallel passage. Of the doctor's face, from which " intense 
 emotion beamed," he says what John Foster said of Robert 
 Hall's, that it was " lighted up almost into a glare." The 
 congregation, he says, were leaning forward in the pews, like 
 a forest bending under the power of the hurricane — looking 
 intently at the preacher, and listening in breathless wonder- 
 ment. " One young man, apparently a sailor, who sat in a 
 pew before me, started to his feet, and stood till it was over. 
 So soon as it was concluded, there was (as invariably was the 
 case at the close of the doctor's bursts) a deep sigh, or rather 
 gasp for breath, accompanied by a movement throughout the 
 whole audience." Such a movement as the Chronicler of 
 Carlingford has in mind, in the sentence, — " his audience 
 paused with him, taking breath with the orator in a slight 
 universal rustle, which is the most genuine applause." — Not 
 the least graphic of the many describers of Savonarola as a 
 preacher, speaks of his voice rising in impassioned force up 
 to a certain point, when he became suddenly silent, let his 
 hands fall, and clasped them quietly before him : the silence 
 of the preacher, however, " instead of being the signal for 
 small movements amongst his audience," seemed to be as 
 strong a spell to them as his voice. " Through the vast area 
 of the cathedral men and women sat with faces upturned, 
 like breathing statues, till the voice was heard again in clear 
 low tones." Compare Madame de Sevigne's description of 
 
MUSIC IMMORTAL. 
 
 Coeval with the heavens, its destiny is not, like 
 them, to wax old, for that which decayeth and 
 waxeth old is ready to vanish away. And of 
 music it may be said that it abideth and is eternal 
 in the heavens ; for St. John the Divine recognized 
 its divine destiny, when he heard a voice from 
 heaven as the voice of many waters, and as the 
 voice of a great thunder ; and heard the voice of 
 harpers, harping with their harps, and singing a 
 new song before the throne. Music is thus iden- 
 tified, or at least inseparably associated, in holy 
 writ, with the first records of creation, and with the 
 last apocalypse of redemption and glory. It was 
 in the beginning, and it ever shall be. In one 
 sense of the word time, music without time, is a 
 thing of nought ; but in another, music shall live 
 on when time shall be no more. 
 
 The music of the spheres may be a poetical 
 licence only. But what though in solemn silence 
 all move round (old style of cosmogony, and in 
 Addison's verse) this dark terrestrial ball ; what 
 though no real voice or sound amid their radiant 
 orbs be found ? NHmporte: 
 
 Father Bourdaloue's funeral sermon (in 1687) for M. le 
 Prince, when " l'auditoire paraissait pendu et suspendu a tout 
 ce qu'il disait, d'une telle sorte qu'on ne respirait pas." (Au 
 Comte Bussy, 25 avril, 1687.) 
 
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES. 
 
 " In reason's car they all rejoice, 
 And utter forth a glorious voice ; 
 For ever singing, as they shine, 
 * The hand that made us is divine' " 
 
 To the ear, and in the judgment, of Sir Thomas 
 Browne, there is music wherever there is harmony, 
 order, or proportion ; and thus far we may, he 
 affirms, maintain the music of the spheres : " for 
 those well-ordered motions, and regular paces, 
 though they give no sound to the ear, yet to the 
 understanding they strike a note most full of har- 
 mony." Wherefore the poet, of imagination all 
 compact, will love to mark by moonlight with 
 Lorenzo at Belmont how the floor of heaven is 
 thick inlaid with patins of bright gold, and to per- 
 suade himself that not the smallest orb his upward 
 gaze takes in, 
 
 " But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim ; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it." 
 
 Pythagoras was enabled, on the showing of Iam- 
 blichus, appijTco riv\ tcai §vazinvoi}Tw Ouot^tl yjpwfitvoq, 
 by an effort (as Daniel Dove renders it) of ineffable 
 and hardly conceivable divinity, to retire into the 
 depths of his own being, and there listen to that 
 heavenly harmony of the spheres which to him alone 
 
IX AUDIBLE HARM 
 
 of all the human race was made audible. It is in 
 pursuance of his argument, rhetorically enforced, 
 that all deep things are Song, — it seeming somehow 
 the very central essence of us, Song ; as if all the 
 rest were but wrappages and hulls ; — the primal 
 element of us, and of all things ; — that Mr. Carlyle 
 goes on to say, " The Greeks fabled of Sphere- 
 Harmonies : it was the feeling they had of the 
 inner structure of Nature ; that the soul of all her 
 voices and utterances was perfect music." It was 
 reserved for a latter-day poet to give expression 
 to the non possnmns of these latter days : 
 
 " I've heard of music in the spheres, 
 AYhich all men hear of, all admire, 
 But not a human mortal hears." 
 
 Enough of the inaudible, and the incredible, if so 
 it must be. Pass we on to what ear hath heard, or 
 may hear, in a less questionable and a more prac- 
 tical sense. 
 
 Among the things which the Scriptures both of 
 the Old and of the New Testament may be said to 
 take for granted is this, that man is, by what is 
 human in him, and that he ought to be, by what is 
 divine about him, a lover of music. Choral sym- 
 phonies consecrated the worship of the Jewish 
 Temple. The apocalypse of heaven, as foreseen 
 by the seer of Patmos, may have been very limited 
 in details, but at any rate a main constituent in the 
 
DISCORD AND DISGUST. 
 
 beatific vision is the throng of harpers harping with 
 their harps. And indeed 
 
 " What know we of the blest above, 
 But that they sing, and that they love?" 
 
 A too one-sided acceptance of, and insistance 
 upon, this partial view of heaven, has done much 
 to set some people, especially young people, 
 against any such ideal of the life to come. They 
 are repelled by the narrow conventionalism which 
 strictly confines the raptures of eternity to sitting 
 upon clouds and playing on stringed instru- 
 ments. Perhaps they have been accustomed to 
 an extremely rude and crude type of church 
 or chapel psalmody, — offensive to every notion 
 they cherish of culture and sesthetical refinement ; 
 and when they remember with what stentorian 
 zest, bellowed forth as if by blatant beasts and 
 bulls of Bashan, the words of the hymn have 
 deafened, dazed, and distressed them, 
 
 " I have been there, and still would go ; 
 'Tis like a little heaven below/' — 
 
 their involuntary, or perhaps too voluntary, infer- 
 ence has been, that if the greater heaven above be 
 really in this respect like the little heaven below, 
 they, for their part, having not yet been there, 
 would almost rather not go. 
 
 Pope has his Horatian sneer at Hopkins and 
 
io STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS. 
 
 Sternhold who "glad the heart with psalms," as 
 sung by charity children, when "the silenced 
 preacher yields to potent strain," and "heaven 
 is won by violence of song." Addison's country 
 clergyman has another kind of grievance con- 
 nected with Sternhold and Hopkins, in the bravura 
 flourishes of a fashionable visitor at his church,* 
 who startles the parish from its propriety. It is 
 sad, exclaims the author of Musics Monument,^ 
 
 * " But what gives us the most offence is her theatrical 
 manner of singing the psalms. She introduces about fifty- 
 Italian airs into the hundredth psalm ; and whilst we begin 
 All people, in the old solemn tune of our forefathers, she, in 
 a quite different key, runs divisions on the vowels, and adorns 
 them with the graces of Nicolini ; if she meets with eke or 
 aye, which are frequent in the metre of Hopkins and Stern- 
 hold, we are certain to hear her quavering them half a minute 
 after us to some sprightly airs of the opera." The good 
 parson can assure Mr. Spectator he is far from being an 
 enemy to church music, but he fears this abuse of it may 
 make his parish ridiculous, for his parishioners already look 
 on the singing psalms as an entertainment, and not part of 
 their devotion. 
 
 f Which Dr. Burney calls a matchless book, not to be 
 forgotten among the curiosities of the seventeenth century. 
 Southey devotes some pages to it in The Doctor. Here 
 is a pertinent and rather piquant specimen of the manner of 
 the man Mace : 
 
 ' ' That counsel given by the Apostle Pauj 
 Does certainly extend to Christians all. 
 Colossians the third, the sixteenth verse ; 
 (Turn to the place :) that text will thus rehearse, 
 
SCREECHING CHORISTERS. 
 
 Thomas Mace, " to hear what whining, toting, 
 yelling, or screeching there is in many country 
 
 Let the word of Christ dwell in you plenteously, 
 (What follows ? Music in its excellency. ) 
 Admonishing yourselves in sweet accord, 
 In singing psalms with grace unto the Lord ; 
 Sed sine arte, that cannot be done, 
 Et sine arte, better let alone." 
 
 Thomas Mace would have sympathized with the early con- 
 tempt of the Italians for tramontane singing, as expressed by 
 John the deacon, and reproduced in Muratori and Gibbon : 
 Alpina scilicet corpora vocum suarum tonitruis altisone per- 
 strepentia, susceptae modulationis dulcedinem proprie non 
 resultant, etc. And Mace would have relished the allusion 
 in one of Washington Irving's letters : " It is Saturday even- 
 ing. I hear a solemn though rather nasal strain of melody 
 
 from the kitchen. It is the good , setting his mind in 
 
 tune for the morrow." And then the writer records his satis- 
 faction at having brimstoned his cider according to Uncle 
 Natt's receipt ; it would stand a poor chance, otherwise, 
 against such melody. 
 
 The church music of Scotland in the reign of David the 
 First has been graphically reviewed by his friend Ethelred, 
 " of high authority," says Tytler, who argues that it was a 
 pretty close imitation of the English. Ethelred is sarcastic 
 on " so many organs and cymbals," such " terrible blowing 
 of the bellows," such vocal " quavering like the neighing of 
 horses." He hits out right and left at the choristers, who 
 gesticulate and grimace " like comedians " — much as Hartley 
 Coleridge, in a racy diatribe on parish clerks of the old school 
 (happily now all but extinct), owns to having been reminded 
 more of Punch than of any animated comedian. Hartley 
 complains of the psalmody becoming, in such hands, as dis- 
 
12 SQUALLING-BOXES IN CHURCH. 
 
 :ongregations, as if the people were affrighted or 
 listracted." That is better, however, than the 
 jravura type. The American Professor at the 
 Sreakfast-table expresses delight in the unso- 
 phisticated blending of all voices and all hearts in 
 jne common song of praise : some will sing a 
 little loud perhaps, and now and then an impatient 
 chorister will get a syllable or two in advance, or 
 an enchanted (not enchanting) singer so lose all 
 
 tracting and irrelevant an episode as the jigs and country- 
 dances scraped between the acts of a tragedy. 
 
 Mr. Newbigging remarks of the musicians of Rossendale 
 Forest, in his topographical history of that district, that, far 
 from being of yesterday's growth, they are a venerable race, 
 and can count their congeners back through the centuries j 
 and although he allows they may be taken at a disadvantage 
 with the " formal and new-fangled squalling-boxes which are 
 regulated by clockwork, and troll forth their music by the 
 yard, as a carding-engine measures out its sliver," yet, place 
 before them, he adds, the glorious choruses of Handel and 
 Haydn, and the creations of these masters of harmony find 
 ready interpreters and strongly-appreciative minds. Old- 
 fashioned folk are fain to utter the wish that it were every- 
 where so : the harmoniums and school-choirs of our country 
 villages may have improved the church music of our time, 
 but they have destroyed, through no inconsiderable part of 
 England, the old corporations of village singers, through 
 whom the songs and ballads of the country-side had been 
 handed down for centuries. An archaeological critic in the 
 Saturday Review supposes that all this is quite as it should 
 be, but is sorry for it nevertheless. 
 
RUSTIC CHOIRS. 13 
 
 thought of time and place in the luxury of a 
 closing cadence that he holds on to the last semi- 
 breve upon his private responsibility; but "how 
 much more of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the 
 music of these imperfectly trained voices than in 
 the academic niceties of the paid performers' who 
 take our musical worship out of our hands." True 
 in spirit, and to the letter, for all the year round — 
 the Christian Year — is what Keble says or sings ir 
 his lyric for Palm Sunday : — 
 
 " Childlike though the voices be, 
 And untunable the parts, 
 Thou wilt own the minstrelsy, 
 If it flows from childlike hearts." 
 
 The musical mal-practice of rustic choirs has 
 too often, however, only too thoroughly deserved 
 the satire that first and last has been lavished on 
 it. Some of our best writers of fiction have made 
 a subject of this grievance in fact. Mr. Hughes, in 
 his Tom Brown at Oxford, dilates on the doings of 
 the choir at the Englebourn parish church ; how 
 the bass viol proceeded thither to do the usual 
 rehearsals, and gossip with the sexton ; and how 
 at the singing of the verse which ends with the 
 line, "With dragons stout and strong," (in the 
 ninety-first psalm,) which the gallery sang with 
 exceptional and rather exceptionable vigour, — 
 the trebles took up the line, and then the whole 
 
14 UNTUNABLE, INTRACTABLE. 
 
 strength of the gallery chorused again, " With 
 dYdL-go?is stout and strong,'* and the bass viol 
 seemed to prolong the notes and to gloat over them 
 as he droned them out, looking triumphantly at 
 the distant curate, whose mild protests it was plea- 
 sant thus to defy. Mr. Charles Reade somewhere 
 introduces to us a lad with a small rustic genius 
 for music, which he illustrates by playing the cla- 
 rionet in church, to the great regret of the clergy. 
 So minute and observant a recorder of English 
 midlandshire georgics and bucolics as George 
 Eliot, naturally abounds in notices of a like sort. 
 In Felix Holt there is a persistent plaint, by one in 
 authority, about the obstinate demeanour of the 
 singers, who decline to change the tunes in accord- 
 ance with a change in the selection of the hymns, 
 and stretch short metre into long out of pure wil- 
 fulness and defiance, irreverently adapting the 
 most sacred monosyllables to a multitude of wan- 
 dering quavers.* " There's no other music equal 
 
 * "I cannot but think it a snare when a professing Chris- 
 tian has a bass voice like brother Kemp's," says Mr. Nutt- 
 wood, deacon and grocer. " It makes him desire to be heard 
 of men ; but the weaker song of the humble may have more 
 power in the ear of God." An outspoken friend retorts upon 
 the speaker the query, does he think it any better vanity to 
 flatter himself that God likes to hear him, though men don't? 
 Felix Holt is, indeed, rather flippantly severe upon the sleek 
 tradesman, whom he ironically bids " follow the light of the 
 
BUCOLIC B ASSOC X. 15 
 
 to the Christmas music — 'Hark the erol angils 
 sing,'" poor Dolly assures Silas Marner ; "And 
 you may judge what it is at church, Master 
 Marner, with the bassoon and the voices, as you 
 can't help thinking you've got to a better place 
 already." In the same book we come across a 
 large jocose-looking man, an excellent wheel- 
 wright in his week-day capacity, but on Sunday 
 leader of the choir, who puts down a recalcitrant 
 with a jest, winking the while at the " bassoon " 
 and the " key-bugle," in the confidence that he is 
 expressing the sense of the musical profession in 
 Raveloe. And in one of the Scenes of Clerical 
 Life we have a rather elaborate account of the 
 process and procedure of the singing at Shep- 
 perton Church ; how, as the moment of psalmody 
 approached, a slate appeared in front of the gal- 
 lery, advertising in bold characters the psalm about 
 to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the 
 clerk should leave the bucolic mind in doubt on 
 that head ; how this was followed by the migra- 
 tion of the clerk to the gallery, where, in company 
 
 old-fashioned Presbyterians that I've heard sing at Glasgow. 
 The preacher gives out the tenth psalm, and then everybody 
 sings a different tune, as it happens to turn up in their 
 throats. It's a domineering thing to set a tune, and expect 
 everybody else to follow it. It's a denial of private judg- 
 ment." — Felix Holt, chap. xiii. 
 
16 ANTHEMS AND AMATEURS. 
 
 with a bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter under- 
 stood to have an amazing power of singing 
 " counter," and two lesser musical stars, he formed 
 the complement of a choir regarded in Shep- 
 perton as one of distinguished attraction, occasion- 
 ally known to draw hearers from the next parish. 
 " But the greatest triumphs of the Shepperton 
 choir were reserved for the Sundays when the 
 slate announced an Anthem, with a dignified 
 abstinence from particularisation, both words and 
 music lying Tar beyond the reach of the most am- 
 bitious amateurs in the congregation," — an anthem 
 in which the key-bugles are described as always 
 running away at a great pace, while the bassoon 
 every now and then boomed a flying shot after 
 them. 
 
17 
 
 II. 
 
 3|ubal f gntoentiotw 
 
 Genesis iv. 21. 
 
 MUSIC must have got some way beyond 
 the most primitive stage of all,* when 
 Jubal, the son of Lamech and Adah, the brother 
 of Jabal (whose children are all such as dwell in 
 
 * Mr. Herbert Spencer accepts the argument of Dr. Burney, 
 as indeed implied by the customs of still extant barba- 
 rous races, that the first musical instruments were, without 
 doubt, percussive — sticks, calabashes, and tomtoms ; and 
 were used simply to mark the time of the dance ; and in this 
 constant repetition of the same sound, we see music in its 
 most homogeneous form. In his treatise on the origin and 
 function of music, the same philosophic writer takes note of 
 the fact that the dance chants of savage tribes are very 
 monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are much 
 more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of 
 civilized races (from which, and cognate facts, he infers the 
 original divergence of vocal music from emotional speech in 
 a gradual, unobtrusive manner). Delightful to savage ears 
 would be what is so horrid to Shakspeare's Richard : — 
 
 2 
 
1 8 WHAT IS AN OVATION? 
 
 tents, and have cattle), and alsp of Tubal Cain, 
 that instructor of every artificer in brass and iron 
 
 " The harsh resounding trumpet's dreadful bray, 
 With boisterous untuned drums." 
 
 Mr. Helps has this passage in his story cf the Lake City of 
 the age of flint : " At the end of the day there was a sort of 
 ovation in honour of Realmah, and he was accompanied 
 home by a great crowd, and with loud noise of instruments 
 of music which would not much have delighted our ears, but 
 which were very pleasing to the Sheviri." One finds it hard to 
 quote without a mild protest, in the case of so pleasing and 
 accomplished a writer, a passage containing the words " a 
 sort of ovation," remembering how that word ovation is used 
 up and abused by penny-a-liners. The penny papers are, 
 some of them, above misusing the poor word now. One of 
 them, in a special correspondent's letter on the occasion of 
 the reception of Prince Bismarck at Berlin after the great 
 war of 1870-71, told us that the clerks of the Foreign Office 
 gave the Count " a kind of ' ovation ' " in the interior of their 
 bureau, but immediately went on to remark that the word 
 " ovation " has been sadly misused of late years by careless 
 writers ; whereas he claimed to have not misapplied it in 
 connection with the welcome of Bismarck at the Foreign 
 Office. " He is not the first German who has been ' ovated.' 
 What said Kaiser Ludwig as he sat at supper after the great 
 victory at Muhldorf-on-the- Inn, more than five hundred years 
 ago . . . with the valiant Ritter Schweppermann, etc. The 
 country had been eaten to the bone, and the conqueror and 
 his captains had no better fare than bread and eggs for 
 supper; whereat cried the Kaiser, 'Jedem Mann ein Ey; 
 dem frommen Schweppermann zwei.' And surely the 
 ' fromme ' Schweppermann deserved his two eggs — and the 
 1 fromme ' Bismarck his to boot." The application may be a 
 little strained, but at any rate the writer is aware that an egg 
 
PROGRESS OF MUSIC. 19 
 
 — when this Jubal, better known perhaps by name 
 to devout lovers of Handel than to cursory readers 
 
 is a main ingredient in that once rare and dainty dish, an 
 ovation. 
 
 To revert, however, to ancient music. The Egyptians, we 
 find, had a lyre with three strings ; the early lyre of the 
 Greeks had four, constituting their tetrachord, and in course 
 of some centuries lyres of seven and eight strings were em- 
 ployed, until, by the expiration of a thousand years, they had 
 advanced to their "great system" of the double octave, 
 through all which changes there of course arose a greater 
 heterogeneity of melody, though little in the time, as yet. 
 Harmony was then unknown : the advance from melody to 
 harmony was by a sudden leap, music in parts not being 
 evolved until Christian church music had reached some 
 development, when, the fugue having been suggested by the 
 employment of two choirs singing alternately the same air, 
 with whom it became the practice (very possibly originating 
 in a mistake) for the second choir to, begin before the first 
 had ceased, " from the fugue to concerted music of two, three, 
 four, and more parts, the transition was easy." Between the 
 old monotonous dance-chant and an oratorio of our own day, 
 with its endless orchestral complexities and vocal combina- 
 tions, an essayist on the law and cause of Progress may well 
 pronounce the contrast in heterogeneity to be so extreme that 
 it seems scarcely credible that the one should have been the 
 ancestor of the other. 
 
 The clerical interlocutor in Gryll Grange, admitting that 
 little is known of the music of the Greeks, but inferring the 
 unknown from the known, has no doubt it was as excellent in 
 its kind as their sculpture. Another demurs to that view, 
 arguing that they seem to have had only the minor key, and 
 to have known no more of counter-point than they did o 
 perspective. A third demurs to their having only the mine- 
 
MUSIC OF THE GREEKS. 
 
 of the Book of Genesis, attained the distinction of 
 fatherhood of all such as handle the harp and 
 
 key. The natural ascent of the voice, he remarks, is in the 
 major key, and the Greeks, with their exquisite sensibility to 
 sound, could not have missed the obvious expression of cheer- 
 fulness. " With their three scales, diatonic, chromatic, and 
 enharmonic, they must have exhausted every possible ex- 
 pression of feeling." With all that, objects Mr. Minim, they 
 never got beyond melody ; they had no harmony, in our 
 sense ; they sang only in unisons and octaves. His oppo- 
 nent, however, denies it to be clear that they did not sing in 
 fifths. 
 
 Mr. Grote claims a powerful ethical effect for the old 
 Grecian music. It wrought much more movingly, he con- 
 tends, on the impulses and resolutions of the hearers, though 
 it tickled the ear less gratefully, than the scientific composi- 
 tions of after-days. He shows each particular style of music 
 to have had its own appropriate mental effect — the Phrygian 
 mode imparting a wild and maddening stimulus ; the Dorian 
 mode creating a settled and deliberate resolution, exempt 
 alike from the desponding and from the impetuous senti- 
 ments. "In the belief of all the ancient writers, every 
 musical mode had its own peculiar emotional influences, 
 powerfully modified the temper of hearers, and was intimately 
 connected with the national worship." — G?'ote i History of 
 . vol. iii., pp. 288 seq. ; cf. p. 297 ; vol. ii., 583 seq. ; 
 vol. viii., 477 seq. 
 
 Lady Eastlake calls it difficult to imagine how a Greek 
 child could ever evince its natural predilection for music — 
 those two chief elements of the art which test the highest 
 and the lowest grade of musical inclination, time and har- 
 mony, being alike unknown to them. They are believed to 
 have never advanced even so far as the knowledge of those 
 harmonious thirds which little Mozart, when but three years 
 
CHRISTIAN WEST AXD PAG AX FAST. 21 
 
 organ. Father Smith, the organist, was forestalled 
 even by name. 
 
 old, would strike on the clavicle, " and incline his little head, 
 smiling to the harmony of the vibrations." They seem to 
 have either used music outwardly, on this dissertator's show- 
 ing, as a mere sing-song enhancement of that luxurious 
 pleasure which all Orientals take in story-telling, or verse- 
 reciting, or to have sought for it inwardly as an abstract thing 
 on which to try their powers of thought, and not their springs 
 of emotion ; for they are credited with having ascertained the 
 existence of a deep science in music before they suspected a 
 deeper instinct ; they studied her grammar before they knew 
 her speech. " Instead of combining her tones in fulness of 
 harmony, they split them into divisions incognizable to our 
 modern ears/'' M. Kiesewetter scouts the preconceived and 
 deeply-rooted opinion that our present music has been per- 
 fected upon that of the Greeks, and that it is only a further 
 continuation of the same. He refers to authors who, even in 
 his own day, talk of " the revival of ancient music in the 
 middle ages ;" and, in refuting their view, while admitting 
 that there was a period when the music of the Christian West 
 sought counsel with that of the Heathen East, and when the 
 decisions of Greek writers were looked upon as the source 
 of all true musical inspiration, he maintains that, in point 
 of fact, the later music only prospered in proportion as she 
 disengaged herself from the earlier, and then first attained 
 a certain degree of perfection when she had succeeded in 
 throwing off the last fetters, real or conventional, of old 
 Hellenic doctrine. Even had ancient Greece, he argues, 
 continued to exist for two thousand years more, no music, in 
 any way analogous to ours, could possibly have proceeded 
 from her. " The systems in which the art was bound, the 
 purposes for which she was used, the very laws of the State 
 regarding her, offered unconquerable impediments to her 
 
DORIAN AND GREGORIAN. 
 
 u What passion cannot Music raise and quell ? 
 When Jubal struck the chorded shell, 
 His listening brethren stood around, 
 And, wondering, on their faces fell 
 
 development. The old Greek music perished in its infancy, 
 an interesting child, but one predestined never to arrive at 
 maturity." And for the human race he pronounces her fall 
 to have been no loss. 
 
 It is certain, affirms the Quarterly essayist, that in the 
 Isles of Greece, " where burning Sappho loved and sung," 
 that which we now call music was so unknown, that were old 
 Timotheus to rise from the dead, no change or development 
 in modern civilization would astonish him so much as that in 
 the art of music. " He would be delighted with our post- 
 office, interested in our railroads, ashamed of our oratory, 
 horrified at our public buildings, but dumbfounded at our 
 musical festivals." 
 
 Haply, however, even old Timotheus redivivus would stand 
 up for the melody of his native land. Thomson is strenuous 
 to hail in Hellenic melody a melody indeed : — 
 
 " The sweet enforcer of the poet's strain, 
 Thine was the meaning music of the heart. 
 Not the vain trill, that, void of passion, runs 
 In giddy mazes, tickling idle ears ; 
 But that deep-searching voice, and artful hand, 
 To which respondent shakes the varied soul." 
 
 The allusion here is, as commentators remind us, to the tones 
 known as the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, etc., upon which St. 
 Ambrose founded what are called the "authentic" eccle- 
 siastical tones, the Gregorian, as finally settled in their pre- 
 sent form, and set to the Psalms of David, by St. Gregory 
 the Great. M. Jannsen, in his Vrais Principes du Chant 
 Gregorie?i, says of St. Ambrose, " C'est en modifiant le sys- 
 teme des tetrachordes grecs qu'il conserva leur quatre modes 
 
EXECUTIVE DISPLAY. 
 
 To worship that celestial sound : 
 Less than a God they thought there could not dwell 
 Within the hollow of that shell, 
 That spoke so sweetly and so well." 
 
 le plus ge'ne'ralement re*pandus, en assimilant son premier ton 
 au mode Dorien, son deuxieme au mode Phrygien, son troi- 
 sieme au mode Lydien, et son quatrieme au mode Mixolidien." 
 Thomson's tribute to ancient melody and expression, in con- 
 trast to modern display of execution, is seconded again and 
 again by Mr. Peacock, to whose taste a simple accompani- 
 ment, in strict subordination to the melody, is so much more 
 agreeable than that " Niagara of sound under which it is 
 now the fashion to bury it." His Miss Tenorina and Miss 
 Graziosa enchant the company at Headlong Hall with some 
 very scientific compositions, which, as usual, excite admiration 
 and astonishment in every one, without a single particle of 
 genuine pleasure. 
 
 " Avaunt, the scientific squall — 
 * I hate it — nature hates it all — 
 But lo ! 'tis science and the ton, I find," 
 
 exclaims and complains and explains Dr. Wolcot. There is 
 a fair widow in one of Mrs. Gore's fictions who is described 
 advisedly as a " tremendous " musician, for such prodigies of 
 execution as hers inspire the listener with awe, unmixed with 
 any pleasanter sensation. " A squadron of Prussian dragoons 
 galloping up and down the piano would not have produced 
 greater execution." The scale of her voice enabling her to 
 sing the Queen of Night music in the Zauberflote, this lady 
 not only undertakes it in its entirety, but whenever any 
 supremely difficult and frightful bravura is inflicted upon the 
 musical world, she is sure to get it by heart, and astonish 
 even orchestras and professors. " Such exhibitions in private 
 life ought, in my opinion, to be put down by act of parliament. 
 Not one person in two hundred but finds them insupport- 
 
24 "FINE SLEIGHTS OF HAND" 
 
 Milton has a memorable passage descriptive of 
 what Adam, under Michael's guidance, foresees 
 and hears, of the paulo-post-future doings of his 
 more immediate posterity : he hears the sound of 
 instruments that make melodious chime, — of harp 
 and organ ; and Tubal, 
 
 able ; and when Lady G., led away by her wild enthusiasm, 
 was indulging in her vocal or instrumental skirmishing, the 
 country gentlemen used to look absolutely panic-struck." 
 Mr. Hullah has some not uncalled-for strictures on the often 
 grievously misdirected labour of amateur musicians, who 
 attempt to do at their leisure what can only be done success- 
 fully when made the business of a life. And he holds that 
 one of the first evidences of reformation in amateur music 
 would be the study of compositions having an interest and 
 beauty of their own, independent of any which they owe to 
 the executive skill of those who perform them. For though 
 very difficult music is sometimes very fine music, it by no 
 means follows, he cautions the unwary, that fine music is 
 always difficult ; on the contrary, a vast number of musical 
 compositions of the very highest order of invention and 
 science, though susceptible of increased effect from the exer- 
 cise upon them of increased skill, yet dema?id for their exe- 
 cution positively but little. 
 
 Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh is quite a representative 
 young woman in at least one stage of her culture : — 
 
 " I learnt much music — such as would have been 
 As quite impossible in Johnson's day 
 As still it might be wished— fine sleights of hand 
 And unimagined fingering, shuffling off 
 The hearer's soul through hurricanes of notes 
 To a noisy Tophet" 
 
A MASTER OF FUGUE-PLAYIXG. 25 
 
 " who moved 
 Their stops and chords, was seen ; his volant touch 
 Instinct through all proportions, low and high, 
 Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue." 
 
 The Hebrew tiggab, which in our version is Eng- 
 lished organ, was scarcely the instrument for 
 elaborate fugue-playing ; more accurately perhaps 
 it might be called the ancient shepherd's pipe, cor- 
 responding most nearly, Jahn instructs us, to the 
 avpijK, or the pipe of Pan among the Greeks ; — 
 consisting at first of only one or two, it afterwards 
 comprised about seven pipes, made of reeds, and 
 differing from each other in length ; and the in- 
 strument called mashrokitha, used in Babylon, 
 Dan. iii. 5, appears to have been of a similar con- 
 struction. Rome was not built in a day, any 
 more than the cathedral organ. But to the uggab 
 of Jubal is presumably to be traced the first stage 
 of that noble instrument upon which the resonant 
 fugue, in full flight and pursuit, has been played 
 with volant touch. Master Hugues, of Saxe-Gotha, 
 in the act of playing one, is he not the subject of 
 a characteristic study by Mr. Robert Browning ? 
 What does he mean by his mountainous fugues, — 
 he, the poor organist, Hugues, the composer of 
 note — dead though, and done with, this many a 
 year. Mark the exposition, for there's meaning 
 in it : — 
 
26 ANALYSIS OF A FUGUE. 
 
 " First, you deliver your phrase 
 — Nothing propound, that I see, 
 Fit in itself for much blame or much praise — 
 Answered no less, where no answer need be : 
 ' Off start the Two on their ways ! 
 
 " Straight must a Third interpose, 
 
 Volunteer needlessly help — 
 In strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in his nose, 
 
 So the cry's open, the kennel's a-yelp, 
 Argument's hot to the close ! 
 
 " One dissertates, he is candid — 
 
 Two must discept, — has distinguish'd. 
 Three helps the couple, if ever yet man did : 
 
 Four protests ; Five makes a dart at the thing wish'd- 
 Back to One, goes the case bandied. 
 
 " One says his say with a difference — 
 
 More of expounding, explaining : 
 All now is wrangle, abuse, and vociferance — 
 
 Now there's a truce, all's subdued, self-restraining — 
 Five, though, stands out all the stiffer hence. 
 
 " One is incisive, corrosive — 
 
 Two retorts, nettled, curt, crepitant — 
 Three makes rejoinder, expansive, explosive — 
 
 Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant — 
 Five . . . . O Danaides, O Sieve ! 
 
 " Now they ply axes and crowbars — 
 Now they prick pins at a tissue 
 Fine as a skein of the casuist Escobar's 
 
 Work'd on the bone of a lie. To what issue ? 
 Where is our gain at the Two-bars ? 
 
 * Est FUGA, volvitur rota ! 
 
 On we drift. Where looms the dim port ? 
 One, Two, Three, Four, Five, contribute their quota — 
 
 Something is gain'd, if one caught but the import — 
 Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha ! " 
 
TWO BRISTOL ORGANISTS, 27 
 
 So the fugue broadens and thickens, greatens and 
 deepens and lengthens : u if one caught but the 
 import," is too often said of Mr. Browning's own 
 voluntaries. But even those who most consciously 
 fail to catch it, in his case, will hardly fail to ad- 
 mire his gift of word-painting as applied to a 
 sister-art, or to find piquancy in the whimsical 
 devices of his Hudibrastic rhymes. 
 
 Given a good organ, there lacks another good 
 gift, and that is an efficient organist. A Hugues 
 of Saxe-Gotha is not always, or often, to be had 
 for the asking, any more than a Browning to sound 
 his praise. Chatterton has pointed the distinction 
 sharply enough between a Broderip and an Allen 
 at the same finger-board. In the instance of the 
 former, essaying a fugue, " the flying band in swift 
 transition hops through all the tortured, vile bur- 
 lesque of stops ; sacred to sleep .... dull doleful 
 diapasons die away. . . . The vicar slumbers, and 
 the snore goes round, whilst Broderip at his passive 
 organ groans through all his slow variety of tones. 
 
 " How unlike Allen ! Allen is divine .... 
 He keeps the passion with the sound in play, 
 And the soul trembles with the trembling key." * 
 
 * When it was Broderip's turn to be at the organ, the 
 disappointed and utterly dissatisfied listener, regretful of the 
 absent, might feel and say with a French poet, though not in 
 his sense, — 
 
28 FROM DANTE TO MILTON. 
 
 There was a Te Dcinn laiidamus Dante though: 
 he heard, in another world, in accents blendce 
 with sweet melody : the strains came o'er his eai 
 even as the sound of choral voices, that in solemn 
 chant with organ mingle, and, now high and clear, 
 come swelling, now float indistinct away. Mr. 
 Cary, in his note on the passage, quotes Cassio- 
 dorus on the 150th Psalm, and Tiraboschi, to 
 show that organs were used in Italy as early 
 as the sixth century, adding, " If I remember 
 right, there is a passage in the Emperor Julian's 
 writings which shows that the organ was not un- 
 known in his time." By Abelard's time the 
 instrument was sufficiently improved, and appre- 
 ciated, to warrant the allusion by Pope's Eloisa to 
 their moving and exalting strain : " And swelling 
 organs lift the rising soul." Milton was but ex- 
 pressing in noblest diction what had been felt by 
 cathedral worshippers for centuries past, when he 
 penned that pensive aspiration of his, to hear the 
 pealing organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below, 
 in service high, and anthem clear, as might with 
 
 " La main n'^tait plus la, qui, vivant et jetant 
 
 Le bruit par tous les pores, 
 Tout a l'heure pressait le clavier palpitant 
 
 Plein de notes sonores, 
 Et les faisait jaillir sous son doigt souverain 
 
 Qui se crispe et s'allonge, 
 Et ruisseler le long des grands tubes d'airain," etc 
 
HEBREW CHURCH MUSIC. 29 
 
 sweetness, through his ear, dissolve him into 
 ecstasies, and bring all heaven before his eyes. 
 
 To the cathedral organ in its present plenitude 
 of power may be applied the lines intended by the 
 Ettrick Shepherd for another instrument : — 
 
 " What would old Patriarch Jubal say to this — 
 The father of the sweetest moving art 
 E'er compassed by man ? — O be his name 
 Revered for aye ! Methinks I see the sire, 
 With filaments of bark, or plaited thongs, x 
 Stretch'd on a hurdle, in supreme delight, 
 Bumming and strumming at his infant science, 
 Whilst the seraphic gleaming of his eye 
 Gave omen of that world of harmony, 
 Then in its embryo stage, form'd to combine 
 The holy avocations of mankind, 
 ** And his delights, with those of angels." 
 
 Cotton Mather argues that the instrumental music 
 used in the old church of Israel was an institution 
 of God, the instruments being explicitly called His 
 instruments ; but that as not one word of institu- 
 tion is to be found in the New Testament for 
 instrumental music in the worship of God, and 
 that because He "rejects all He does not com- 
 mand in His worship, He now therefore in effect 
 says to us, / will not hear the melody of thy organs." 
 And the old New England divine caps his argu- 
 ment by the query, — If we admit instrumental 
 music in the worship of God, how can we resist 
 the imposition of all the instruments used among 
 
30 FROM CHURCH TO TAVERN. 
 
 the ancient Jews ? " Yea, dancing as well as play- 
 ing, and several other Judaic actions ? " The 
 Puritans in Old England, while their political 
 supremacy lasted, acted upon what South ey calls 
 "this preposterous opinion," by selling the Church 
 organs, without being scrupulous concerning the 
 uses to which they might be applied — some being 
 set up in taverns, where, in the words of a writer 
 of that age, who is speaking of the prevalence of 
 drunkenness, as a national vice, the topers chanted 
 " their dithyrambics and bestial bacchanalia to the 
 tune of those instruments which were wont to assist 
 them in the celebration of God's praises, and regu- 
 late the voices of the worst singers in the world — 
 which are the English in their churches at pre- 
 sent"* 
 
 * It cannot be supposed, as Southey observes in the Doctor, 
 where (and whence) this passage is quoted, that the organs 
 thus disposed of were instruments of any great cost or value. 
 Thirty shillings was the price of one sold in 1565, which be- 
 longed to Lambeth Church ; and Mr. Denne, the antiquary, 
 says of the organs generally in country parish churches, 
 " that they might more properly have been termed a box of 
 whistles." A pair of organs was the term then in use, mean- 
 ing a set ; so, a pair of cards, for a pack. Sir Thomas Over- 
 buys character of a Puritan includes this item : " A paire of 
 organs blow him out o' the parish, and are the only glister- 
 pipes to coole him." Butler is flinging in the same direction 
 when his Hudibras is made to exclaim, in rhymes sui 
 generis, 
 
THE ORGAN APOSTROPHIZED. 31 
 
 At the opening (or, as modern high-polite 
 stylists have it, the "inauguration") of the organ 
 at Don caster parish church, in 1739, — the cost 
 having been five hundred guineas, — a sermon was 
 preached for the occasion by the then curate, Mr. 
 Fawkes, in which, after having rhetorized in praise 
 of sacred music, and touched upon the cornet, 
 flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all 
 kinds of instruments, he turned to the organ, and 
 apostrophised it thus : " But O what — O what — 
 what shall I call thee by ? thou divine box of 
 sounds !" Possibly Dryden's note of interrogation 
 was ringing in his ears : — 
 
 " Are things of superstitious function 
 Fit to be used in gospel sunshine ? 
 It is an antichristian opera, 
 Much used in midnight times of popery." 
 
 It was a new sensation for Londoners to listen to the 
 Abbey organs in the year of the Restoration. Pepys writes in 
 November, 1660 : " I went to the Abbey, where the first time 
 that I ever heard the organs in a cathedral." The taverns 
 had latterly been more in their way, and in his. A month 
 later, on the penultimate day of that memorable year, he 
 writes again in his diary : " I to the Abbey, and walked 
 there, seeing the great confusion of people that come there 
 to hear the organs." 
 
 As Overbury gives in detail the Character of a Puritan, so 
 does he of a Precisian ; and, organically speaking, it is a 
 distinction without a difference ; for of the latter we read : 
 " He thinkes every organist is in the state of damnation, 
 and had rather heare one of Robert Wisdomes psalms, than 
 the best hymne a cherubin can sing." 
 
32 STORMY DIAPASON. 
 
 " But oh ! what art can teach, 
 
 What human voice can reach 
 The sacred organ's praise ? 
 
 Notes inspiring holy love, 
 Notes that wing their heavenly ways 
 
 To mend the choirs above." 
 
 The historian of the Dutch Republic, describing 
 Antwerp Cathedral as a sacred island in the 
 tumultuous main (for so appears the church, 
 "with the noisy streets of the metropolis eddying 
 around its walls"), makes of it a forest, each shaft 
 of which rose to a preternatural height, while the 
 rank vegetation and the fantastic zoology of a 
 fabulous world seemed to decorate and to animate 
 the serried trunks and pendent branches ; and then 
 he adds, that the "shattering symphonies or dying 
 murmurs of the organ suggested the rushing of the 
 wind through the forest — now the full diapason of 
 the storm, and now the gentle cadence of the even- 
 ing breeze." The gusty organ, Leigh Hunt calls 
 it:— 
 
 " For ever and anon there roll'd 
 The gusty organ manifold, 
 Like a golden gate of heaven 
 On its hinges angel-driven 
 To let through a storm and weight 
 Of its throne's consenting's state [sic] ; 
 Till the dreadful grace withdrew 
 Into breath serene as dew, 
 Comforting the ascending hymn 
 With notes of softest seraphim. ,, 
 
ELIA IN THE ABBEY. 33 
 
 Elia, amid his avowals of " no ear" for music, is 
 
 fain to recall the times, five-and-thirty years before, 
 
 when solemn anthems struck upon his heedless 
 
 ear, as he rambled in the side-aisles of the dim 
 
 abbey — waking a new sense, and putting a soul of 
 
 old religion* into his young apprehension, — the 
 
 anthem being perhaps that in which the Psalmist, 
 
 weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to 
 
 himself dove's wings — or that which, with a like 
 
 measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what 
 
 means the young man shall best cleanse his way. 
 
 So listening, " I am for the time," says Elia, " rapt 
 
 above earth, and possess joys not promised at my 
 
 birth." In Dr. Holland's words :— 
 
 " Absorbed, entranced, as one who sits alone t 
 Within a dim cathedral, and resigns 
 
 * In Lamb a something deeper and sincerer than in 
 Byron's flippant promise : " When I turn thirty, I will turn 
 devout : I feel a great vocation that way in Catholic 
 churches, and when I hear the organ." (To John Murray, 
 1817.) 
 
 t The lonesomeness of the listener is a particular that 
 tempts to further illustration, — be the organ strain an act of 
 public worship, while he who listens is an outsider, or be it 
 a mere incident of private practice on the performer's part. 
 Mr. Dallas pictures Milton's father (who was composer as 
 well as scrivener) seated at the organ, after he has tied up 
 his parchments, and filling the house with strains to which 
 it is not less accustomed than to the sound of law Latin and 
 the smell of skins and pounce. " As the foot-passenger goes 
 
34 STIRRING HARMONIES. 
 
 His spirit to the organ-theme, that mounts 
 Or sinks in tremulous pauses, or sweeps out 
 On mighty pinions, and with trumpet voice 
 Through labyrinthine harmonies, at last 
 
 by the house, which bears the sign of the Spread Eagle, 
 taken from the Milton Arms, he perhaps stops to listen, as 
 he listened to the uproarious crew of the Mermaid, and if he 
 is at all musical he recognizes the air as sung last Sunday 
 in the parish church — the tune called York, of which Master 
 Milton was the composer, which half the nurses of England 
 used afterwards to chant by way of lullaby, and which the 
 country churches rung in their chimes full many times a 
 day." — One of Lord Lytton's most elaborately depicted 
 " characters," a guilty and sad-hearted man, is startled in 
 the deepening twilight by a strain from church-organ stealing 
 upon the silence with its swelling and solemn note; and 
 there was, we read, something in the strain of this sudden 
 music that was so kindred with the holy repose of the scene, 
 and that chimed so exactly to the chord now vibrating in the 
 listeners mind, that it struck upon him at once with an 
 irresistible power; and he paused abruptly, "as if an angel 
 spoke." That sound, so peculiarly adapted to express sacred 
 and unearthly emotion, none who have ever mourned or 
 deeply sinned can hear, " at an unlooked-for moment, with- 
 out a certain sentiment that either subdues, or elevates, or 
 awes." For it brings back boyhood, and the church associa- 
 tions of an innocent past — of a past innocence. Balzac tells 
 us of the French officer who thus listens, in his Histoire des 
 Treizc, that " les sensations que lui causerent les differents 
 morceaux execute's par la religieuse, sont du petit nombre de 
 choses dont l'expression est interdite a la parole, et la rend 
 impuissante, mais qui, semblables a la mort, a Dieu, a 
 Te'ternite', ne peuvent s'appre'cier que dans le leger point de 
 contact qu'elles ont avec les hommes." 
 
LONESOME LISTENERS. 35 
 
 Emerging, and through silver clouds of sound 
 Receding and receding, till it melts 
 Into the empyrean, and is lost." 
 
 Quite early in the opening of James Grahame's once 
 popular poem, which still has readers north of the Tweed, 
 there is a picture of a sick man on his couch, whose ear is 
 gladdened by overheard notes of the church organ, swelling 
 into a diapason full, "and now the tubes a softened stop 
 controls." 
 
 " Again the organ-peal, loud, rolling, meets 
 The hallelujahs of the choir. Sublime 
 A thousand notes symphoniously ascend, 
 As if the whole were one, suspended high 
 In air, soar heavenward ; afar they float, 
 Wafting glad tidings to the sick man's couch : 
 Raised on his arm, he lists the cadence close, 
 Yet thinks he hears it still : his heart is cheer' d ; 
 He smiles on death ; but ah ! a wish will rise — 
 ' Would I were now beneath that echping roof ! ' " 
 
 We all remember the gentle organist in the Story of La 
 Roche — how the English philosopher and sceptic was touched 
 as he listened — how the music paused, ceased, and the 
 sobbing of the player was heard in its stead. Some, again, 
 may recall a chapter in Gait's Omen, where the listener is 
 strangely thrilled in every fibre by an organ strain of en- 
 chanting power, overheard by him in his stray wanderings. 
 Or, more recently, the surprised weekday voluntaries of Tom 
 Pinch. Or, yet later, Clara Talboys overheard playing a 
 theme of Mendelssohn's, the dreary sadness of which goes 
 straight to Robert Audley's heart. How often Mendelssohn 
 himself might have been thus overheard, playing on the 
 organ in Swiss and other village churches, far on into the 
 twilight, his letters from Italy and Switzerland amply show. 
 
 Wordsworth has his Cambridge sketch of himself with 
 
36 LISTENING OUTSIDERS. 
 
 Balzac pronounces the organ to be, "certes, le 
 plus grand, le plus audacieux, le plus magnifique 
 
 careless ostentation shouldering up his surplice, as through 
 the inferior throng he clove 
 
 " Of the plain burghers, who in audience stood 
 On the last skirts of their permitted ground, 
 Under the pealing organ." 
 
 Higher in tone and scope, in musical feeling and musical 
 expression, is Mr. Tennyson's simile — 
 
 " As one that museth where broad sunshine laves 
 The lawn by some cathedral, through the door 
 
 Hearing the holy organ rolling waves 
 Of sound on roof and floor 
 
 Within, and anthem sung, is charm' d and tied 
 To where he stands." 
 
 Geoffrey Crayon is an outsider at an evening service in 
 the Abbey, heard faintly and afar off; a hush ensues ; still- 
 ness, desertion, and obscurity gradually prevailing around, 
 give a deeper and more solemn interest to the place ; when 
 suddenly the notes of the deep -labouring organ burst upon 
 the ear of the lingering solitary, falling with doubled and re- 
 doubled intensity, and rolling, as it were, huge billows of 
 sound. How well, muses the transatlantic wayfarer, do their 
 volume and grandeur accord with that mighty building, — 
 swelling with pomp through its vast vaults, and breathing 
 their awful harmony through those caves of death, making 
 the silent sepulchre vocal ! " And now they rise in trium- 
 phant acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant 
 notes, and piling sound on sound. And now they pause, and 
 the soft voices of the choir break out into sweet gushes of 
 melody ; they soar aloft, and warble along the roof, and 
 seem to play about those lofty vaults like the pure airs of 
 heaven. Again the pealing organ heaves its thrilling 
 
ABBEY AND VILLAGE CHURCH. 37 
 
 de tous les instruments cre<£s par le genie human." 
 He recognizes in it an entire orchestra, from which 
 
 thunders, compressing air into music, and rolling it forth 
 upon the soul. What long-drawn cadences ! What solemn 
 sweeping concords ! It grows more and more dense and 
 powerful — it fills the vast pile, and seems to jar the very 
 walls — the ear is stunned — the senses are overwhelmed. 
 And now it is winding up in full jubilee — it is rising from the 
 earth to heaven — the very soul seems rapt away and floated 
 upwards on the swelling tide of harmony." Naturally the 
 sketcher sits for some time lost in that kind of reverie which 
 a strain of such music is apt to inspire, while the shadows 
 of evening thicken around him, and the monuments cast a 
 deeper and deeper gloom. 
 Alexander Smith has a figure of one who 
 
 " Stood tranced and mute as savage at the door 
 Of rich cathedral where the organ rolls, 
 And all the answering choirs awake at once." 
 
 William Hazlitt remembers strolling once along the margin 
 of a stream in a low sheltered valley on Salisbury Plain, 
 near to a little parish church, hidden from his sight by tall 
 elms and quivering elders, when, all of a sudden, he was 
 startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear, 
 accompanied by rustic voices, and the willing choir of village 
 maids and children. It rose, indeed, as the rapt listener 
 describes it, "like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes/' 
 To his thinking, to his feeling, the dew from a thousand pas- 
 tures was gathered in its softness ; the silence of a thousand 
 years spoke in it. "It came upon the heart like the calm 
 beauty of death : fancy caught the sound, and faith mounted 
 on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still 
 poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, 
 and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult 
 
38 BALZAC ON THE ORGAN. 
 
 a deft hand can ask whatever it will, and which 
 can express anything, everything. He calls it a 
 sort of pedestal, upon which the soul se pose pour 
 s'elancer into space, when, in her flight, she essays 
 to trace out a thousand pictures, to paint life, to 
 expatiate in the infinite which separates heaven 
 from earth. The oftener a poet gives ear to the 
 organ's gigantesques harmonies, the more clearly, 
 says this writer, he perceives that between the 
 human worshippers on their knees and the hidden 
 God there is a distance best travelled by the hun- 
 dred voices of the choir, les cJiants qui altement avec 
 le tonnerre des orgnes. And eloquently he dilates 
 on a great and impassioned player's "fugues 
 flexibles du delire," and then "molles ondulations" 
 of music that, tint by tint, takes tine conleur de 
 tristesse profonde. Anon, " les echos verserent les 
 chagrins a torrents. Enfin tout a coup les hautes 
 notes firent detonner un concert de voix angel- 
 iques. . . . Vint XAmen. La, plus de joie ni des 
 larmes dans les airs ; ni melancholie, ni regrets. 
 UAmen fut un retour a Dieu ; ce dernier accord 
 fut grave, solemnel, terrible ; ... les derniers 
 grondements des basses firent fremir les auditeurs, 
 jusque dans leurs cheveux. . . . Ouand les airs 
 eurent, par degres, cesse leurs vibrations oscilla- 
 
 of the world." So muses the fervid rhapsodist in his essay 
 on the moot question, why distant objects please. 
 
SOARING STRAINS. 39 
 
 toires, vous eussiez dit que l'eglise, jusque-la lumi- 
 neuse, rentrait dans une obscurite profonde." 
 
 A poetess's Vision of Poets has its music for the 
 ear as well, strains in high and higher mood, and 
 the strain we hear is in the higher : — 
 
 " A strain more noble than the first mused in 
 
 the organ, and outburst. 
 With giant march, from floor to roof rose the full notes, — 
 
 now parted off in pauses massively aloof, 
 Like measured thunders, — now rejoined in concords of 
 
 mysterious kind, which fused together sense and mind, — 
 Now flashing sharp on sharp along exultant, in a mounting 
 
 throng, now dying off to a low song 
 Fed upon minors ! — warlike sounds re-eddying into silver 
 
 rounds, enlarging liberty with bounds, 
 And every rhythm that seemed to close, survived in confluent 
 
 under-flows, symphonious with the next that rose. 
 Thus the whole strain being multiplied and greatened — with 
 
 its glorified wings shot abroad from side to side, — 
 Waved backward (as a mist might wave a Brocken mist, and 
 
 with as brave wild roaring) arch and architrave, 
 Aisle, transept, column, marble wall, — then swelling outward, 
 
 prodigal of aspiration beyond thrall," 
 
 soared, higher and yet higher, excelsior, itself a glory 
 in excelsis. 
 
 Wordsworth's homage to the organ is full and 
 free and frequent ; not always, perhaps, too 
 poetically expressed. He calls it, for instance, a 
 "tubed engine" in his Thanksgiving Ode: — 
 
 " ' O enter now His temple gate ! ' 
 Inviting words — perchance already flung 
 
40 CHAPEL ORGAN AT KINGS. 
 
 (As the crowd press devoutly down the aisle 
 Of some old minster's venerable pile) 
 From voices into zealous passion stung, 
 While the tubed engine feels the inspiring blasts, 
 And has begun — its clouds of sound to cast 
 Forth towards empyreal Heaven, 
 As if the fretted roof were riven." 
 
 But safe from all verbal cavil are those three noble 
 sonnets on the interior of King's College, Cam- 
 bridge, which commemorate the designer of that 
 branching roof, self-poised and scooped into ten 
 thousand cells, "where light and shade repose, 
 where music dwells lingering, and wandering on 
 as loth to die." From the arms of silence, — 
 
 " List ! O list ! 
 The music bursteth into second life ; 
 The notes luxuriate, every stone is kissed 
 By sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife ; 
 Heart-thrilling strains, that cast, before the eye 
 Of the devout, a veil of ecstasy 1 n 
 
Ill 
 
 flDrpng— Beponn tlje leaning:, antr tfje 
 patience, of 31 ob* 
 
 THE most patient of men speaks of those who 
 "take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at 
 the sound of the organ" (Job xxi. 12). It would 
 tax the patience of Job to bear with, to bear up 
 against, the sound of the organ, were it a street- 
 organ, and the grinder near at hand. As to rejoicing 
 at it, or rejoicing with them that do rejoice at it, — 
 one hopes that Job would have become zV/zpatient 
 at the very idea. 
 
 Sufferers from the excruciating torture of street 
 organ-grinding may be forgiven if they sometimes 
 wish there were no such thing as music, in this 
 world or the next. But it is commonly the ear 
 most susceptible to real music that is tortured by 
 the "brown beasts" of your quiet street. It is in 
 a main degree because he knows what music is, 
 and can respond in his heart of hearts to its subtle 
 and sweet appeals, — deep calling to deep, not un- 
 
42 ORGAN GRINDERS: 
 
 answered, — that he winces and writhes under the 
 harrow of the grinder. The organ-man has his 
 patrons, his allies, his champions, his admirers* 
 
 * Who would have reckoned on Mr. Herbert Spencer re- 
 marking, in illustration of his thesis that Pleasure is coy, and 
 must not be too directly pursued, but must be caught un- 
 awares, — that " an air from a street piano, heard while at 
 work, will often gratify more than the choicest music played 
 at a concert by the most accomplished musicians"? Mr. 
 Leigh Hunt, in spite of his genuine musical sensibilities, was 
 so pronounced a lover of all that seemed to exhilarate any 
 class of his fellow-creatures, or might even remotely tend to 
 refine them, that no one is surprised at a similar remark 
 from him, as to a tree in London streets affecting the eye 
 something in the same way as " the hand-organ which brings 
 unexpected music to the ear." Mr. Hay ward tells us of 
 Samuel Rogers that when he dined at home, and alone, it 
 was his custom to have an Italian organ-grinder playing in 
 the hall, the organ being set to the Sicilian Mariners' air and 
 other popular tunes of the south. 
 
 M. Emile Deschauel, in his Causeries de Quinzaine, allows 
 that street music does not gratify a cultivated ear, that the 
 execution is necessarily imperfect, the audience not at all 
 fastidious. "Eh ! c'est lale mal, dites-vous, — Non, c'estun 
 bien, qui conduit a un mieux." This rude form of art, he 
 contends, awakens the ideaL 
 
 Mr. Windham has this entry in his Diary, sub anno 1786 : 
 " Some Irish tunes, from an organ which we had at the 
 door, gave me those sensations of happiness which music 
 sometimes inspires me with, and which I hardly know from 
 anything else." A parallel passage is that in Byron's Diary 
 of Feb. 2, 1 82 1 (at Ravenna) : "Oh, there is an organ 
 playing in the street— a waltz too ! I must leave off to listen. 
 They are playing a waltz which I have heard ten thousand 
 
THEIR PATRONS AND PAYMASTERS. 43 
 
 even, his persistent paymasters. And it is easy 
 to see that something may be said for him. But 
 with regard to those who pay him, and who en- 
 courage his once-a-week visits, if not oftener, all the 
 year round, notwithstanding their full knowledge 
 of the distress his grinding inflicts on some next- 
 times at the balls in London, between 181 2 and 181 5. 
 Music is a strange thing." In some such mood does Violet, 
 in the story bearing that name, give way to the associations 
 conjured up to her mind by " Portrait Charmant," when that 
 air is struck up by a street organ-boy. " In our busy moments 
 we have so contemned the tiresome Italian boy, with his one 
 tune. . . . But in the time of sorrow, of inactive sorrow, if 
 such an air as ' Portrait Charmant ' be heard mingling with 
 the vulgar street sounds, it will strike you as it never did 
 before, and in listening to the notes you find it is somehow 
 taking a gentle revenge for all the contumely you have cast 
 upon its hackneyed sounds in days gone by." Chacun a son 
 gout. The time of sorrow is the last the present annotator 
 would choose for hearing a street organ grind any air what- 
 soever. At the best of times, to him, the best of barrel- 
 organs is tolerable in no other sense than Dogberry's of not 
 to be endured. 
 
 Never was the simplicity of good old Colonel Newcome 
 more remarkably or perhaps less winsomely displayed, than 
 when, ever anxious to procure amusement for his darling 
 Rosey, then confined to her couch, he asked whether she 
 would not like a barrel-organ grinding fifty or sixty favourite 
 pieces, which a bearer could turn ; such an instrument as 
 the " very fine one " Windus, of his regiment, " who loved 
 music exceedingly," had out to Barrackpore in the year 18 10, 
 and relays of barrels by each ship with all the new tunes 
 from Europe. 
 
44 THE MAN WITH THE TORTURE-BOX. 
 
 door neighbour, — what can be said for them ? what 
 may not be said of them ? Granted, that there are 
 in existence cantankerous folk, cross-grained and 
 acidulous exceedingly, who oppose all street "music" 
 because it gives pleasure to some one else, and they 
 have no notion of letting any one be pleased if they 
 can help it. But is it fair, is it within the range of 
 common justice, common good feeling, or indeed 
 common sense, to impute indiscriminately to every 
 objector to barrel-organ-grinders and brass bands- 
 men this extravagant malice of motive? In ninety- 
 nine cases out of a hundred the suffering is real, 
 and very frequently it is intense. Iron constitu- 
 tions that boast themselves innocent of nerves, un- 
 conscious of a nervous system, — 'tis a thousand 
 pities they cannot realize something of the nervous 
 agitation, the absolute physical derangement, the 
 prolonged mental discomposure, all due to the man 
 with his torture-box under their window. Why 
 should not I and my children have it, if we like it, 
 and we do like it, cries your robust neighbour. But 
 he and his children can very much better bear with 
 a privation of that very odd pleasure, than you 
 can bear with the pain. A neighbour should show 
 himself neighbourly. Will nothing less than a 
 brain fever convince him that grinding may be 
 torture to some nerves ? Nothing at all, probably, 
 will convince him that the hater of organ-grinding 
 
GRINDING OPPRESSORS. 45 
 
 can like music. One may apply to the imperfect 
 sympathy between these twain, what the host says 
 to Julia, and what Julia answers, in The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona : 
 
 " Host. I perceive you delight not in music. 
 Jul. Not a whit, when it jars so." 
 
 And how it does jar, that creak of the torture- 
 box of pipes and foul wind ! It taxes one's 
 humanity to feel humane towards the dirty agents 
 of all this foul play, albeit while (in Mrs. Browning's 
 words) " the organ's grinding, the grinder's face is 
 dry and vacant of even woe." Dr. O. W. Holmes 
 has a rap at the breed, including the hurdy-gurdy 
 monsters, as 
 
 " Vagrants, whose arts 
 Have caged some devil in their mad machine,* 
 Which grinding, squeaks, with husky groans between." 
 
 All thanks to every scribe who utters a like 
 protest, however casually expressed, against the 
 grinders ; for every little helps, or ought to help. 
 To the author of Land at Last, for instance, for 
 his side-thrust (in passing) at * the grinding of the 
 
 * As a machine, Father Prout quarrelled with the barrel- 
 organ, — complaining that the old ballad-singers, blind fiddlers, 
 and pipers, had been forced to give place to a mere piece of 
 machinery, which superseded all intelligence and interest in 
 the player. 
 
46 THE ORGAN FIEND. 
 
 horrible organ which is murdering ' Ah, che la 
 morte' beneath my window." To the author of 
 Half a Million of Money, for an onslaught 
 against " the inevitable street-organ — that ' most 
 miraculous organ/ which can no more be silenced 
 than the voice of murder itself/'* To the author of 
 Twice Round the Clock, for his fling at the " Italian 
 organ-grinder, hirsute, sunburnt, and saucy," who 
 grinds airs from the Trovatore six times over, 
 follows with a selection from the Traviata, repeated 
 half a dozen times, finishes with the Old Hundredth, 
 and then begins again. To one of Blackwood's 
 most favoured poets, too early dead, (perhaps the 
 " organ-fiend " helped to kill him,) who recorded 
 once among the pleasures of memory the fact that 
 
 " The Organ-fiend was wanting there. 
 Not till the Peace had closed our quarrels 
 
 Could slaughter that machine devise, 
 (Made from his useless musket-barrels) 
 
 To slay us 'mid our London Cries. 
 "Why did not Martin in his Act 
 
 Insert some punishment to suit 
 This crime of being hourly rack'd 
 
 To death by some melodious Brute ? 
 
 * " And which in Transpontia hath its chosen home. The 
 oldest inhabitant of Brudenell Terrace confessed to never 
 having known the hour of any day (except Sunday) when 
 some native of Parma or Lucca was not to be heard grinding 
 his slow length along from number one to number twenty- 
 our." — Chap. I 
 
SUFFERERS' PROTESTS. 47 
 
 From ten at morn to twelve at night 
 
 His instrument the Savage plies, 
 From him alone there's no respite, 
 
 Since 'tis the Victim, here, that cries. 
 
 "Macaulay! Talfourd ! Smythe ! Lord John!* 
 
 If ever yet your studies brown 
 This pest has broken in upon, 
 
 Arise, and put the Monster down. 
 By all distracted students feel, 
 
 When sense crash'd into nonsense dies 
 Beneath that ruthless Organ's wheel, 
 
 We call ! O hear our London Cries ! n 
 
 A Saturday Reviewer can name no native 
 nuisance to compare with that inflicted by itinerant 
 musicians on those who have " no soul for popular 
 Italian music." He assumes that there is a class 
 of our fellow-citizens who love to steep their senses 
 in the eccentric melodies ground out of tortured 
 music-chests by able-bodied Piedmontese. He 
 knows too well that there is another class, the soft- 
 ness of whose hearts is only surpassed by that of 
 their heads, who, compassionating the sorrows of 
 the victims of a cruel system, do their best to make 
 it perpetual by subsidizing it. But he submits — 
 and with grateful earnestness we enforce the plea 
 — that a certain consideration should be shown for 
 intelligible differences of taste ; that even assuming 
 the harmonies of the organ to be the music of the 
 
 * This appeal was penned in 1849. 
 
48 A DA Y OF DELIVERANCE. 
 
 spheres, THEIR ABSENCE WOULD INFLICT LESS 
 PAIN ON THEIR RARE ADMIRERS THAN THEIR 
 PRESENCE DOES ON THE MANY WHOSE NERVES IT 
 JARS. This is a very mild and temperate way of 
 putting the question ; but it may be all the more 
 likely to commend itself to the calmly common- 
 sensical who will give it a thought. And, for 
 commonest charity sake, it deserves one. 
 
 The day will dawn, it may not be too ex- 
 travagant a hope to cherish, when no father of a 
 family that cares whether or not his neighbours 
 suffer, will allow the peripatetic grinder to grind 
 within earshot of his doors and windows, be they 
 shut or open ; and when no mother that cares for 
 her children having a jot of musical taste will 
 allow her servants to fee and retain the carrier of 
 that box of instrumental torture, in their delighted 
 recognition of music-hall monstrosities and tea- 
 gardens melodies, — flashy, flabby, frowsy, flatulent 
 stuff, — as loud and flaring as it is weary, stale, flat, 
 and (except to the grinder) most unprofitable. The 
 day will dawn, — for the sake of human nature and 
 of civilization, one cannot but hope it, — when there 
 shall be realized the pictorial prophecy outlined by 
 John Leech, or by some fellow-artist who felt like 
 him as well as drew like him : the picture of a 
 child-visitor at Madame Tussaud's starting back 
 in terror from the grim presence in waxwork of a 
 
NOTICE TO QUIT. 49 
 
 hirsute grinder in full play, horrible to the eye (the 
 bodily eye), and horrible to the ear (the mind's 
 ear). The child's alarm is soothed by a gentle 
 mother's reviving assurance that the man is not 
 real, not alive ; and she adds, " Why, I can re- 
 member when creatures of that sort were allowed 
 to go loose in the streets all about London ! " 
 Happy the people that are in such a case as the 
 lady and little boy in that prospective picture. 
 May the day for its entire realization dawn ere 
 long ! Meanwhile, every householder is a public 
 benefactor who exercises his legal right to send 
 out and stop the grinding that is, not merely 
 opposite, but even near, his house. He sets a good 
 example. He encourages more timid but also 
 more sensitive neighbours to do likewise ; and he 
 is not only doing what is right, and what is his 
 right, but, in behalf of all near him who are suffer- 
 ing, and desolate, and oppressed, he is doing a 
 work of real charity. 
 
So 
 
 IV. 
 
 %& (Hinrpr upon jfh'tre* 
 
 Proverbs xxv. 20. 
 
 "AS vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth 
 il songs to a heavy heart." There are people 
 who, it has been said, are so irresistibly impelled to. 
 sing songs, that, in a world where heavy hearts are 
 unfortunately common, it is difficult always to keep 
 the vinegar and nitre apart. They cannot sympa- < 
 thize with, for they cannot in the least understand, 
 the temperament which tends to constitute what 
 Sir Henry Taylor calls 
 
 " A recreant from festivities that grieve 
 The heart not festive." 
 
 The lament of the lady in the old ballad of Jamie 
 Douglas has this among other touches of nature : 
 
 " As on to Embro' town we came, 
 My guid father he welcomed me ; 
 He caused his minstrels meet to sound, — 
 It was no music at a' to me." 
 
UNWELCOME MUSIC. 51 
 
 The good king Rene, feeling his own genius for 
 recreative composition in music, makes the like 
 mistake when he resolves to exert it to the utmost, 
 in the hope of thereby relieving the melancholy 
 which has taken fast hold of his daughter, Margaret 
 of Anjou. What he devises for means of solace 
 and alleviation, serves but to disgust her as idle 
 folly ; and she makes her escape with all speed 
 from the elaborate mirth which is the bitterest 
 aggravation of her sorrows. Worse than useless 
 are the royal father's pains to place in requisition 
 every pipe and tambourine in the country ; Mar- 
 garet can receive no agreeable sensation from 
 sounds of levity; the sounding brass and the 
 tinkling cymbals do but grate and jar on her 
 ear ; and the king has to give way to reasons 
 which he cannot sympathize with. " He tried to 
 enliven, and therefore doubly saddened me," — the 
 record of this one experience is typical for all 
 time. Rowe's Calista deserves a hearing for the 
 plea, 
 
 " Let not thy fond officious love disturb 
 My solemn sadness with the sound of joy." 
 
 A broken tooth, is a simile of King Solomon's, 
 just before this one of vinegar upon nitre ; and the 
 having one's teeth set on edge by either unseason- 
 able or very bad music might be suggested by 
 
5? GRATING DISCORDS. 
 
 either figure. The latest King of Hanover, him- 
 self deprived of sight, treats of that sense as less 
 powerful and operative than that of hearing, "be- 
 cause inharmonious, jarring tones are capable of 
 shocking and torturing our feelings to their inmost 
 core to such an extent as to make us almost beside 
 ourselves " — an effect, he goes on to say, in his 
 Idem and Bctrachtungai iibcr die Eigenschaften der 
 Musik, it is impossible to produce by a bad paint- 
 ing, a desolate tract of country, or the worst of 
 poems. To this statement, exception was taken 
 by his reviewer in the Quarterly, who allows it to 
 be perfectly true that the bare contemplation of a 
 daub does not throw a connoisseur in painting into 
 convulsions like Hogarth's Enraged Musician ; and 
 that the worst epic ever laid on the reviewer's table 
 never provoked in him anything beyond a strong 
 tendency to slumber. But the obvious reason, he 
 points out, is that, amongst the several objects of 
 repugnance mentioned by the prince, disagreeable 
 sounds alone affect us physically through the 
 nerves : " for example, a person utterly devoid of 
 musical taste or sensibility may be made to suffer 
 acutely from a sound that sets the teeth on edge." 
 The proper analogy, therefore, as regards the sight, 
 would be, the critic submits, not between bad music 
 and bad pictures, but between the glare of a red 
 flame and the grating of a file. 
 
SENSITIVE CULTURE. 53 
 
 Now what the grating of a file is to the nerves 
 of hearing in an unmusical person, bad music is to 
 those of the musical — varying of course, in every 
 case, with the degree of badness in the music, and 
 of nervous irritability and musical sensibility con- 
 joined, in the afflicted hearer. One of the penal- 
 ties of an advancing refinement in taste, is a 
 proportionate disrelish, if not disgust* at, and 
 intolerance of the coarser, lower, more popular 
 type of compositions. The liabitue of Mr. Charles 
 Halle's " recitals," or of Mr. Ellas Musical Union, 
 cannot stomach the affronts of a miscellaneous or 
 ballad concert. Writing in 1840, on our alleged 
 national obtuseness with regard to the higher order 
 of music, Mr. de Quincey complained that so little 
 was the grandeur of this " divine art " suspected 
 amongst us generally, that men were to be found 
 who would pen an essay deliberately for the pur- 
 
 * Hamilton is apt to conclude of Hildegarde, in the 
 Initials, that she is incapable of appreciating good music 
 when she hears it ; but, on the contrary, she is so sensitively- 
 alive to its beauties that she cannot endure mediocrity. 
 
 So with Sidonia, in Mr. Disraeli's Coni7igsby. " You are 
 fond of music, Lord Eskdale tells me?" "When it is 
 excellent," said Sidonia. " But that is so rare." " And pre- 
 cious as Paradise. As for indifferent music, 'tis Purgatory ; 
 
 but when it is bad, for my part I feel myself " " Where ? " 
 
 said Lord Eskdale. " In the last circles of the Inferno," 
 said Sidonia. 
 
54 SHALLOW LOVERS OF A TUNE. 
 
 pose of putting on record their own preference of 
 a song, to the most elaborate music of Mozart or 
 Beethoven ; who would thus glory in their shame ; 
 and, though speaking in the character of one con- 
 fessing a weakness, would evidently regard them- 
 selves as models of candour, laying bare a state of 
 feeling which is natural and sound, opposed to a 
 class of false pretenders who, while servile to rules 
 of artists, in reality contradict their own musical 
 instincts, and feel little or nothing of what they 
 profess. Strange, Mr. de Quincey accounts it in 
 the instance of such a man, that even the analogy 
 of other arts should not open his eyes to the delu- 
 sion he is encouraging. " A song, an air, a tune, — 
 that is, a short succession of notes revolving rapidly 
 upon itself, — how could that by possibility offer a 
 field of compass sufficient for the development of 
 great musical effects ? The preparation pregnant 
 with the future, the remote correspondence, the 
 questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense 
 are asked in one passage, and answered in anothei ; 
 the iteration and ingemination of a given effect, 
 moving through subtle variations that sometimes 
 disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, 
 sometimes throw it out tumultuously to the day- 
 light, — these and ten thousand forms of self-con- 
 flicting musical passion — what room could they 
 find, what opening, for utterance, in so limited a 
 
CRUDE CRITICASTERS. 55 
 
 field as an air or song ? M A hunting-box, a park 
 lodge, the eloquent dissertator suggests, may have 
 a forest grace and the beauty of appropriateness ; 
 but what if a man should match such a bauble 
 against the Pantheon, or against the minsters of 
 York and Strasburg ? The conclusion is : let him 
 who finds the maximum of his musical gratification 
 in a song, be assured, by that one fact, that his 
 sensibility is rude and undeveloped.* 
 
 A later critic of the " critics of the parlour," 
 shallow and superficial, but glib and self-satisfied, 
 says of them that, with a vile affectation of hu- 
 mility, they ostentatiously avowf that they don't 
 
 * Yet exactly upon this level Mr. de Quincey affirmed the 
 ordinary state of musical feeling throughout Great Britain to 
 be, in 1840; and he cited the "howling wilderness of the 
 psalmody in most parish churches of the land " to counter- 
 sign the averment. At the same time he distinctly recognized 
 the accumulation in London of more musical science than in 
 any capital in the world ; and this, gradually diffused, would, 
 he gladly felt, improve the feeling of the country. 
 
 t Of constant recurrence, and ever sure of sympathizers in 
 plenty, are such avowals as that of Mackenzie's Montauban : 
 " I am delighted with those ancient national songs, because 
 there is a simplicity and an expression in them which I can 
 understand. Adepts in music are pleased with more intricate 
 compositions ; and they talk more of the pleasure than they 
 feel ; and others talk after them without feeling at all." 
 
 Burns writes to Mr. Thomson, " I am sensible that my 
 taste in music must be inelegant and vulgar, because 
 people of undisputed and cultivated taste can find no merit 
 
56 A SIMPLE SOXG. 
 
 understand high art, and are entirely ignorant of 
 grand critical principles; still they know what 
 
 in my favourite tunes. Still, because I am cheaply pleased, 
 is that any reason why I should deny myself that pleasure ? 
 Many of our Strathspeys . . . give me most exquisite enjoy- 
 ment, where you and other judges would probably be showing 
 disgust." 
 
 Over the hills and far away excites the enthusiasm of Mr. 
 Lammeter, in Silas Marner : " There's a many tunes I 
 don't make head or tail of ; but that speaks to me like the 
 blackbird's whistle." " Come, Mr. Bates," is the appeal of 
 Mr. Sharp in one of the Scenes of Clerical Life, "let us hear 
 ' Roy's Wife/ I'd rather hear a good old song like that, nor 
 all the fine Italian toodlin." 
 
 Francis Horner confesses in one of his letters, " I know 
 nothing of music myself more than the pleasure it gives me ; 
 and a march, or a plain song, or even a reel, is to me worth 
 all the skilful execution of Italy." But in another letter, of 
 nearly the same date, Horner congratulates another corre- 
 spondent on their common admiration of Handel : " Being 
 altogether as ignorant of music, both of us, as the dolphins 
 whom Arion charmed, or the stocks and stones that yielded 
 to Orpheus, it is fortunate that that ignorance prevents 
 neither stones nor dolphins nor Scotch lawyers from being 
 delighted with the divine compositions of HandeL" — (Horner 
 to Murray, April 10, 1S01.) 
 
 Of Xiebuhr we find that scientific music at no time of his 
 life afforded him gratification, but a simple song often affected 
 him even to tears. So with the Quaker philosopher Dalton, 
 who. despite his unpoetical temperament, and his indifference 
 to elaborate musical achievements, was deeply moved by 
 simple melodies, and would sit absorbed and spell-bound by 
 certain favourite airs. He might have explained the charm 
 after the manner of Gerard de Nerval — 
 
TRITE OLD TUNES. 57 
 
 gives them pleasure, and are not sure whether this, 
 after all, is not as good a test as another of artistic 
 
 ' ' II est un air pour qui je donnerais 
 Tout Rossini, tout Mozart, et tout Weber, 
 Un air tres-vieux, languissant et funebre, 
 Qui pour moi seul a des charmes secrets." 
 
 Samuel Rogers had a pronounced preference for simple 
 melodies to complicated harmonies ; a biographer says he 
 would have agreed with the critic who on being informed 
 that a brilliant performance just concluded was extremely- 
 difficult, ejaculated, " I wish it had been impossible." Sir 
 Walter Scott hails the "natural empire" over the "generous 
 bosom " of a " simple and even rude " music, such as " can- 
 not be attained by the most learned compositions of the first 
 masters, which are caviare to the common ear," although, 
 doubtless, as he is ready to concede, they afford a delight, 
 exquisite in its kind, to those whose natural capacity and 
 education have enabled them to comprehend and relish those 
 difficult and complicated combinations of harmony. 
 
 When Sir Walter's Black Knight asks his hermit host 
 what he will have him sing — whether a sirvente in the lan- 
 guage of oc, or a lai in the language of out, or a virelai, or 
 a ballad in the vulgar English, — " A ballad, a ballad," says 
 the hermit, " against all the ocs and outs of France." Squire 
 Western never relished any music but what was light and 
 airy, his most favourite tunes being "Old Sir Simon the 
 King," " St. George he was for England," and " Bobbing 
 Joan;" — and though Sophia, his daughter, "a perfect 
 mistress of music," would never willingly have played any 
 but Handel's, she learnt all those tunes to oblige the squire, 
 whose custom it was to hear her play on the harpsichord 
 every afternoon, for " he was a great lover of music, and 
 perhaps, had he lived in town, might have passed for a 
 
 connoisseur, for " — mark the irony of Fielding's syllogism 
 
 " he always excepted against the finest compositions of Mr. 
 
58 HO MEL Y FA VOURITES. 
 
 success. This modest way of putting the case is 
 justly said by their censor to really veil a profound 
 
 Handel." Mr. Spread, in the Bachelor of the Albany, "liked 
 music in a pleasant, social, unmusical sort of way ; that is to 
 say, he liked without understanding it, and thought the words 
 of a song a very important part of it." There is a genuine 
 touch of Fielding's irony in that last hit by Mr. Savage. 
 u I used to go to the Opera at Lisbon," says Captain Hopkin- 
 son, in The Semi-detached House, " and such a quavering, 
 and shaking, and screaming, with great loud crashes of the 
 orchestra at the end, enough to deafen you. When I went 
 on board again and heard John Leary, one of our best 
 mizzen-top-men, sing ' Home, sweet home,' the rest of the 
 watch joining in the chorus, I thought that was music, the 
 other was only noise." The captain was not the man to say 
 ditto to Homer's Telemachus, — 
 
 "For novel lays attract our ravish' d ears ; 
 But old, the mind with inattention hears." 
 
 You will never, affirms David Hume, in one of his meta- 
 physical essays, convince a man who is not accustomed to 
 Italian music, and has not an ear to follow its intricacies, 
 that a Scotch tune is not preferable. Pepys records in his 
 Diary a visit to a singer of the Italian school : " and indeed 
 she sings mightily well, and just after the Italian manner, but 
 yet do not please me like one of Mrs. Knipp's songs, to a 
 good English tune," all of the olden time. Mr. Barham is 
 fain to confess a like preference : 
 
 "You'll say that my taste 
 
 Is sadly misplaced, 
 But I can't help confessing these simple old tunes, 
 The Auld Robin Grays, and the Aileen Aroons, 
 The Gramachree Mollys, and Sweet Bonny Boons, 
 
 Are dearer to me 
 
 In a tenfold degree 
 Than a fine fantasia from over the sea." 
 
SUPERFICIAL AND SELF-COMPLACENT. $9 
 
 conviction that, though not learned in the pedantiy 
 of academies, they have a fine natural insight into 
 the true and the beautiful, which is worth infinitely 
 more than all that academies have got to teach: at 
 bottom they sincerely believe that the pleasure 
 which they derive from a song is in truth the 
 standard of its worth. Now the giving of pleasure 
 is admitted to be unquestionably an end of all 
 artistic composition ; only it is worth remember- 
 ing, these criticasters of the drawing-room are told, 
 that everything depends on the sort of people to 
 whom a piece is fit to give pleasure. " The jovial 
 song which fills with delirious transports the dull 
 brain of a beery clown in an alehouse may not be 
 very admirable in ears polite." And there may be 
 light-of-nature critics as little able as the beery 
 clown " to appreciate one of Beethoven's sonatas, 
 or one of Mendelssohn's Lieder. The incapacity, 
 which in the one case comes of beer and dulness 
 combined, is in the other the simpler fruit of dul- 
 ness and no beer." 
 
 Not that appreciation of the highest and even 
 the severest school of classical music need imply 
 indifference to, or a disrelish of, the very simplest 
 music that is good of its kind, and is therefore 
 melodious, individual, and characteristic. There is 
 a species of music which the sympathetic author 
 of ConsuelOy treating of the ancient canticles of 
 
6o SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY. 
 
 Bohemia, terms natural, because it is not the pro- 
 duction of science and reflection, but rather of an 
 inspiration which escapes from the trammels of 
 rules and conventions ; and such is popular music, 
 that of the peasants in particular, which educated 
 musicians will not trouble themselves to collect — 
 "the most part despising these fugitive ideas, for 
 want of an intelligence and sentiment sufficiently 
 elevated to comprehend them." Consuelo is de- 
 scribed as having all the candour, poetry, and sensi- 
 bility which are requisite to comprehend and love 
 popular music, and in this to have proved that she 
 was a great artist, and that the learned theories 
 which she had studied had in no respect impaired 
 the freshness and sweetness which are the treasures 
 of inspiration and the youth of the soul. She 
 would not have come under the lash of the French 
 satirist : 
 
 " Tous veulent etonner, et, surs d'etre applaudis, 
 Briguent, a qui mieux mieux, le titre d'erudits. 
 lis croiraient deVoger a leur grandeur future, 
 S'ils daignaient quelquefois consulter la Nature. 
 La Nature, en effet, se trompe fort souvent ; 
 Elle fait peu de cas d'un ouvrage savant : 
 Le patre et ses chansons, le eceur et son langage, 
 Un air simple, un ton vrai lui plaisent dax-a^age." 
 
 In his essay on Grandfathers and Grandchildren, 
 the author of Letters to Ensebiics, after recognizing 
 in Handel and Purcell composers of music for 
 
BUTTERFLY BRAVURAS. 61 
 
 men, grand and thought-creating, asked, "Who 
 composes music now, but mere tintinnabula of folly 
 or licentiousness, with their butterfly flip-flap 
 flights and die-away cadences ? " And the old 
 scholar expressed himself sure of this, that neither 
 grandfathers or grandmothers ought to be present 
 when their grandchildren trill and warble inter- 
 minable variations, that either have no meaning, or 
 a bad one. Wildrake is at fault when he hears an 
 old air thus misrepresented, 
 
 "'Twas so disguised 
 With shakes, and flourishes, outlandish things, 
 That mar, not grace, an honest English song, — " 
 
 especially when executed by what Sheridan's 
 Acres calls "such a mistress of flat and sharp, 
 squallante, rumblante, and quiverante." The pre- 
 sent musical world, Mr. Eagles complained, won't 
 compose for those old people who go about with 
 cotton in their ears ; and he thought the best thing 
 they can do is not to take it out, but to add a 
 little more wadding, that they might have a chance 
 of not hearing.* One of the interlocutors in 
 
 * As early as in the days of Salmagundi, Washington 
 Irving spoke of modern amateurs as estimating music in pro- 
 portion to the noise it makes, and as delighting in thundering 
 cannon and earthquakes. He makes a musical correspondent 
 and professor confess that he has already broken six pianos 
 in giving the proper force and effect to this style, but entertain 
 
62 HIGH-PRESSURE INSTRUMENTALISTS. 
 
 Gryll Grange, who commends Haydn's music 
 as a full stream of perfect harmony in subjection 
 
 a hope that by the time he has broken eight or ten more, he 
 shall have brought it to such perfection as to be able to teach 
 any demoiselle of tolerable ear, "to thunder away to the 
 infinite delight of papa or mamma, and the great annoyance 
 of those Vandals who are so barbarous as to prefer the 
 simple melody of a Scotch air to the sublime effusions of 
 modern musical doctors." Elsewhere Geoffrey Crayon has 
 his metrical fling at the same order of pupils, taught 
 
 *' To thump and thunder through a song, 
 Play fortes soft, and dolces strong ; 
 Exhibit loud piano feats, 
 Caught from that crotchet-hero, Meetz," etc. 
 
 Judge Haliburton's racy philosopher who hails from Slick- 
 ville, is outspoken to the same purpose. " What's that ? It's 
 music. Well, that's artificial too ; it's scientific, they say ; 
 it's done by rule. Jist look at that gal at the pianny ; first 
 comes a little Garman thunder. Good airth and seas, what 
 a crash ! it seems as if she'd bang the instrument all to a 
 thousand pieces. I guess she's vexed at somebody, and is a 
 peggin' it into the pianny out of spite." Mrs. Gore sketches 
 a German fraulein suddenly bursting into a crashing thunder- 
 ing sonata, of the high-pressure instrumental school, who 
 " had not skirmished up and down the keys five minutes 
 before my [Cecil's] nerves were demi-semiquavered and chro- 
 maticized into a state of anguish. — I felt as if I had swallowed 
 a glass of vitriol." 
 
 The Russian ladies, according to the author of A Journey 
 Due North, are accomplished and even scientific musicians ; 
 wonderful pianistes — but always in a hard, ringy, metallic 
 manner, without one particle of soul. Marvellous executantes 
 vocally, he calls them, who can rival Italian artistes in the 
 way of roulades and fioriture ; " but sing in time, or tune 
 
DRY DEVOTION TO COUNTERPOINT. 63 
 
 to exquisite melody, declares that in simple ballad 
 strains, that go direct to the heart, he is almost 
 supreme and alone ; and another of them affirms, 
 in words confessedly similar to those used by 
 Braham before a Parliamentary Committee in 1832, 
 that there is a beauty and an appeal to the heart 
 in ballads, which will never lose its effect except 
 on those with whom the pretence of fashion over- 
 powers the feelings of nature. Sir Walter Scott 
 repeats with glee the story of Mozart dissuading 
 Michael Kelly from devoting himself to the dry 
 and abstract study of counterpoint, to the neglect 
 of the powers of melody with which nature had 
 endowed him, — melody being, said the composer 
 of the Nozze, the essence of music ; — it is the 
 proper business of the fine arts, Sir Walter Scott 
 adds, as from himself, to delight the world at large 
 by their popular effect, rather than to puzzle and 
 confound them by depth of learning. For his part, 
 as he owns in the Quarterly Review, whenever 
 detected (in spite of his snuffbox) with closed eyes 
 during some piece of erudite and complicated 
 harmony, he determined to renounce his sometime 
 apology, that he shut his eyes to open his ears all 
 the better, and boldly to avow, instead, with Con- 
 
 (especially), they cannot." On the other hand, the populace 
 are complimented as " essentially melodious." 
 
64 FINE JUDGES OF FINE ART. 
 
 greve's Jeremy, that although he had a reasonable 
 ear for a jig, your sonatas gave him the spleen. 
 But this sort of doctrine is ever to be noted with a 
 caution. Dr. Crotch does battle with the proposi- 
 tion that the best music is that which naturally 
 pleases those who have not studied the science. 
 No such thing, he retorts. Among a number of 
 hearers, the majority will be best pleased by music 
 of an inferior kind ; and something analogous to 
 this takes place in all the arts, — for the finest 
 efforts of art will appear such to the finest judges 
 only, and these are always rare. A good ear and 
 good general taste, said the doctor,* are not suffi- 
 cient to qualify a man for being a judge of music. 
 11 We often hear such a one desire to be lulled to 
 sleep by what pleases him best. If he were really 
 a judge, the best music would much more probably 
 keep him awake." There is a test propounded by 
 a more recent authority which discriminates musical 
 compositions from a point of view diametrically 
 opposite to that of your mere popular critic — and 
 that is the tendency of everything really excellent, 
 be it poem, picture, or music, to improve and grow 
 upon us with further acquaintance ; nor need its 
 first impression be, comparatively speaking, vividly 
 
 * In his lectures on music at the Royal Institution, in 
 1820. 
 
CATCHING TUNES. 65 
 
 or acutely received. Now the mere popular critic, 
 the " ready-made censor," usually requires, in the 
 cant phrase of the brotherhood, "tunes which he 
 can carry away with him," — that is to say, which 
 he can pick up offhand, as a street-boy does from 
 an organ-grinder. " We once heard Meyerbeer's 
 Huguenots condemned with the utmost effrontery 
 by one who had never heard the opera before, and 
 whose knowledge of music was about equivalent to 
 his acquaintance with Lithuanian, on the highly 
 sufficient ground that, since he could not recall 
 a single air, this could, therefore, be in nowise 
 a remarkable production." The same writer in 
 another place observes that a child feeling a 
 perfectly honest delight at a barrel-organ tune is 
 hardly qualified to understand the music of Men- 
 delssohn. The Ellesmere of Friends in Council 
 gets a deserved rap from his lady-wife when, in 
 one of the intervals in Realmah, he institutes 
 invidious comparisons between the players of 
 Beethoven's music and the player of common tunes, 
 — " Old Dog Tray," "Early in the Morning," " Pop 
 goes the Weasel," and " Paddle your own Canoe," 
 — all of which tunes, quoth Sir John, "I think 
 beautiful ; but, of course, because the populace 
 approves of them, which populace is the best judge 
 of such things, my Lady Ellesmere must needs 
 turn up her nose (and a very pretty one it is) 
 
 5 
 
66 " E TH 10 PI AN SERENADERS." 
 
 against any one who admires these tunes, and she 
 declines to play them to me." Lady Ellesmcre 
 replies that she can well imagine he does admire 
 these " tunes," as he calls them ; and that certainly 
 it is worth her while to get up Beethoven for 
 him, when an Ethiopian melody satisfies him quite 
 as well. 
 
 But even Sir John Ellesmere, one hopes and 
 believes, would at any rate decline to pay the 
 street performers of his favourite strains * To him, 
 
 * One of Hogarth's biographers, well qualified to sym- 
 pathize with his Enraged Musician, freely own to a horror of 
 " Ethiopian serenaders," whose battered white hats, and pre- 
 posterous shirt collars and cravats, and abnormal eye-glasses, 
 as well as whose bones, banjos, and " hideous chants " he 
 holds in abhorrence. He sighs for an hour of despotism that 
 he might have those sooty scamps put under the pump, 
 scrubbed clean, set in the stocks to dry, scourged, clad in 
 hodden gray, and then set to break stones instead of rattling 
 bones, and to pick oakum instead of strumming catgut. Un- 
 bounded is his invective (which we are for applauding to the 
 echo) against the fellows who, willingly and of malice afore- 
 thought, blacken their faces and hands, and, in a garb 
 seemingly " raked out of the kennels of Philadelphia and the 
 niggers' dram-shops of the Five Points at New York," arm 
 themselves with the musical instruments of pagan savages, 
 repair to a place of public resort, and there, for hire and gain, 
 " howl forth by the hour together outrageous screeds of dis- 
 sonant cacophony, with words couched in a hideous jargon 
 that Bosjemen would be ashamed of, and baboons disdain to 
 imitate. . . . These fellows prance and yell in public thorough- 
 
IN THE QUIET STREET. 67 
 
 studying to-morrow's briefs, the sooty choristers 
 who wield banjo and bones would surely be un- 
 desirable company. What must the periodical 
 
 fares, and are rewarded with coppers by the unthinking and 
 the vulgar." 
 
 In another of his books this writer owns to remembering, 
 with much inward trouble, that he had in public committed 
 himself more than once in favour of street music — laughing 
 at the folly of putting down bagpipes and barrel-organs by 
 Act of Parliament ; and he essays to resign himself to the 
 axiom that the few must always suffer for the enjoyment of 
 the many ; that the sick, the nervous, the fastidious, and the 
 hypochondriacal are but drops of water in a huge ocean 
 of hale, hearty, somewhat thick-skinned and thick-eared 
 humanity ; of robust folk who " like the noisy vagabonds 
 who are my bane and terror in the quiet street, and admire 
 their distressing performance." — Quiet street, quotha ? There 
 revel the murderers of sleep, the banded destroyers of peace 
 of mind, the solitary singer " singing for the million," in 
 Hood's sense of the phrase ; for Hood has himself sung to 
 some purpose his story of how " in one of those small quiet 
 streets, where Business retreats, to shun the daily bustle and 
 the noise the shoppy Strand enjoys, but Law, Joint Com- 
 panies, and Life Assurance find past endurance, — in one of 
 those back streets to peace so dear," he heard one day " a 
 ragged wight begin to sing with all his might, 'I have a 
 silent sorrow here.' " . . . . 
 
 14 The noise was quite appalling, — 
 And was in fact 
 Only a forty boatswain power of bawling. 
 In vain were sashes closed, 
 And doors against the persevering Stentor,— 
 Through brick, and glass, and solid oak opposed, 
 The intruding voice would enter." 
 
68 COMPOSERS AND CLAMOUR. 
 
 presence of such a crew be to a sensitive composer 
 of crotchets and quavers ? How does M. Stephen 
 Heller feel, when their clamour overtakes him in 
 the midst of a Rivcric, surpassingly delicate and 
 refined ? How relishes M. Gounod their accom- 
 paniment to an opening theme of his ? or Sir 
 Sterndale Bennett their interposition of discord to 
 his placid harmonies ? or Mr. Macfarren their 
 boisterous obbligato to one of his ballad strains ? 
 If Longfellow's artist pines for the revival of an 
 ancient law which forbade those who followed any 
 noisy handicraft from living near literary men, still 
 more earnest and interested is his plea that musical 
 composers, poor and hard beset, and who, more- 
 over, are forced to coin their inspiration into gold, 
 to spin out the thread of life withal, should be 
 allowed to apply this law in their favour, and 
 banish out of the neighbourhood all ballad singers 
 and bagpipers. What, he asks, would a painter 
 say, while transferring to his canvas a form of ideal 
 beauty, if you should hold up before him all 
 manner of wild faces and ugly masks ? But then 
 he might shut his eyes, and in this way, at least, 
 quietly follow out the images of fancy. Whereas 
 in the case of brass bands, and the like, " cotton in 
 one's ears is of no use, one still hears the dreadful 
 massacre. And then the idea, the bare idea. ' Xow 
 they are going to sing — now the horn strikes up,' 
 
STOPPING A STREET-BAND. 69 
 
 is enough to send one's sublimest conceptions" 
 whither one would not. And this sort of thing you 
 are asked to pay for ! * Dr. Holmes may well be, 
 
 * Many a weakly goodnatured man pays very much in 
 the spirit and with the sense of the clown in Othello, when 
 the musicians have duly exercised their wind instruments in 
 front of the castle : 
 " Clo. Masters, here's money for you; and the General so likes your 
 
 music, that he desires you, of all loves, to make no more noise 
 
 with it. 
 " 1 Mus. Well, sir, we will not. 
 " Clo. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again : but, 
 
 as they say, to hear music the General does not greatly care. 
 " 1 Mus. We have none such, sir. 
 " Clo. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away. Go ; vanish 
 
 into air ; away." 
 
 Othello, Act iii., Sc. 1. 
 
 This sort of Ite, missa est, is of a sort with that of the Princess 
 Augusta addressed to Madame d'Arblay's little boy, when 
 the royal family were making much of him, and plying him 
 with toys. " Princess Elizabeth now began playing upon an 
 organ she had brought him, which he flew to seize. ' Ay, do ! 
 that's right, my dear ! ' cried Princess Augusta, stopping her 
 ears at some discordant sounds : 'take it to mon ami, to 
 frighten the cats out of his garden.' " A very legitimate use 
 of the instrument in general, — if only one cculd frighten the 
 cats without torturing humanity at the same time. 
 
 All our sympathies are with Matthew Bramble, " starting 
 and staring, with marks of indignation and disquiet," at the 
 sudden burst of sound from one street band — and with his 
 peremptory message to another, to " silence those dreadful 
 blasts." And even with Sheridan's Don Jerome, complaining 
 from his open window, 
 
 ' ' What vagabonds are these I hear, 
 
 Fiddling, fluting, rhyming, ranting, 
 
 Piping, scraping, whining, canting?" 
 
70 ' BRASS-BAND MAL-PRACTICE. 
 
 and does well to be, sore on that sore point, in 
 
 his Music-Grinders, where, after describing the 
 
 approach of the troublers from afar, getting nearer 
 
 and nearer, till you hear a sound that seems to 
 
 wear the semblance of a tune, as if a broken fife 
 
 should strive to drown a cracked bassoon, and 
 
 nearer, nearer still the tide of " music " seems to 
 
 come, with something like a human voice, and 
 
 something like a drum, the while you sit in agony, 
 
 until you ear is numb, listening in your own despite 
 
 to performers whose mission it seemingly is "to 
 
 crack the voice of Melody, and break the legs of 
 
 Time ; " — after thus picturing the performers and 
 
 the performances he continues — 
 
 " But hark ! the air again is still, the music all is ground, 
 And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of 
 
 sound ; 
 It cannot be, — it is, — it is, — a hat is going round ! 
 
 And with Anstey's fractious old gouty peer, protesting against 
 the fiddlers " come hither to make all this rout," with their 
 vile " squeaking catgut that's worse than the gout." And 
 with Hook anathematizing a brass band " with those terrible 
 wind instruments, which roar away in defiance of all rule, 
 except that which Hoyle addresses to young whist players 
 when in doubt— trump it." And with Ben Jonson's Morose, 
 excruciated by conspirators against his peace, who hire 
 musicians to strike up all together, so that he feels himself 
 their anvil to work on ; they grate him asunder. 
 
 " Daup. What ails you, sir? 
 
 " Mor. They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, 
 with their brazen throats." 
 
BRONZE FOR BRASS. 
 
 " No ! Pay the dentist when he leaves a fracture in your jaw, 
 And pay the owner of the bear that stunned you with his 
 
 paw, 
 And buy the lobster that has had your knuckles in his claw : 
 
 " But if you are a portly man, put on your fiercest frown, 
 And talk about a constable to turn them out of town ; 
 Then close your sentence with a slam, and shut the window 
 down. 
 
 " And if you are a slender man, not big enough for that, 
 Or if you cannot make a speech, because you are a flat, 
 Go very quietly and drop a button in the hat." 
 
 But, portly or slender, on no account pay them 
 to go away. That is paying them to come again. 
 And yet there is sweet simplicity enough in the 
 world to go on doing this. Of course the brazen- 
 faced brass-mouthed gentry like, of all things, to 
 be stopped short in their playing, and paid for 
 being so dismissed ; for that is getting the pay 
 without the windy-windy toil and trouble. And of 
 course they come again, under such auspices. 
 There is a shrewd organ-grinder who turns up 
 every Saturday morning at half-past eight in front 
 of a certain large house in a certain favourite 
 suburb ; for it is the hour of family prayers, and 
 as they can't stand his noise, they pay him to go 
 away after he has ground a few bars. Pay him 
 handsomely too, and keep on doing it. He will 
 not be the first to get tired of this. 
 
72 
 
 V. 
 
 »>aul'0 Sl^aiatip anti 2DaW£ Q$inmtl#y* 
 
 i Samuel xvi. 23 ; xix. 9, 10. 
 
 DEAN MILMAN, in that chapter of his 
 History of tJie Jews which treats of David 
 playing before Saul, makes a clear statement of 
 what the cardinal difficulty in the Scriptural narra- 
 tive is : — If David, according to the order of events 
 in the Book of Samuel, had already attended the 
 sick couch of Saul as minstrel, and had been 
 rewarded for his services with the office of armour- 
 bearer, and so became intimately attached to the 
 person of the king — how could he be the un- 
 known Shepherd-boy who appeared to combat with 
 Goliath in the field of Ephez-dammim ? On the 
 other hand, if already distinguished as the conqueror 
 
 * For additional illustrations of this subject, see the 
 section headed " Medicamental Music," in the First Series 
 of my Secular A?motatio?is on Scripture Texts, pp. 55 — 
 60. 
 
DA VIUS MINSTRELSY. 73 
 
 of Goliath, how could he be, as it appears from the 
 record, a youthful stranger, only known by report 
 as an excellent musician, when summoned to the 
 couch of Saul ? While taking what seems to him 
 the least improbable arrangement, Milman cannot 
 refrain from saying that the early life of David, in 
 the Book of Samuel, reads much like a collection 
 of traditions, unharmonized, and taken from earlier 
 lives (lives of David are ascribed to Samuel, to 
 Gad, and to Nathan), or from poems in his praise. 
 For of old time there were Songs to David such as 
 Christopher Smart in these latter days indited — to 
 David, great, valiant, pious, good, sublime, contem- 
 plative, serene, strong, constant, pleasant, wise, — 
 so the epithets run in Smart's ascription, and to 
 each epithet he devotes a stanza ; abundant stanzas 
 following in praise of the sweet singer, holy psalmist, 
 skilled harper, whose 
 
 " Muse, bright angel of his verse, 
 Gives balm for all the thorns that pierce, 
 
 For all the pangs that rage ; 
 Blest light, still gaining on the gloom, 
 The more than Michal of his bloom, 
 
 The Abishag of his age. 
 
 " Blest was the tenderness he felt, 
 When to his graceful harp he knelt, 
 And did for audience call ; 
 
74 SAULS MALADY. 
 
 When Satan with his hand he quell'd, 
 And in serene suspense he held 
 The frantic throes of Saul." * 
 
 Of course old Burton, in his Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly, neglects not to take special cognizance of 
 music as a potent remedy, or aid and appliance 
 towards perfect cure, of that too impracticable 
 malady. He cites the relief afforded by it, in the 
 hands of Asclepiades the physician, to many frantic 
 
 * Cowley speaks of David as sent for "in treacherous 
 haste " to the king, 
 
 "And with him bid his charmful lyre to bring. 
 The king, they saw, lies raging in a fit, 
 Which does no cure but sacred tunes admit ; 
 And twice it was soft music did appease 
 Th' obscure fantastic rage of Saul's disease." 
 
 And the author of the Davideis goes on to relate how 
 
 "sang the great musician to his lyre, 
 And Saul's black rage grew* softly to retire ; 
 Eut envy's serpent still with him remained, 
 And the wise charmer's healthful voice disdained." 
 
 James Grahame details, in blank verse, the very themes of 
 the Bethlehem minstrel's strain : 
 
 " Deep was the furrow in the royal brow 
 When David's hand, lightly as vernal gales 
 Rippling the brook of Kedron, skimmed the lyre : 
 He sang of Jacob's youngest born, the child 
 Of his old age, sold to the Ishmaelite ; 
 His exaltation to the second power 
 In Pharaoh's realm ; his brethren thither sent ; 
 Suppliant they stood before his face, well known, 
 Unknowing — till Joseph fell upon the neck 
 Of Benjamin, his mother's son, and wept 
 
SATURNINE SPORTS. 
 
 persons, and tells how Clinias and Empedocles 
 " cured some desperately melancholy, and some 
 mad," by the same means. A "sovereign remedy" 
 he calls it against despair and melancholy, and one 
 that "will drive away the devil himself." "It expels 
 cares, alters grieved minds, and easeth in an instant." 
 Many are the prescriptions suggested or sanctioned 
 by Luther, in his table-talk, for getting rid of the 
 devil ; and among these, music is of prime value in 
 the Reformer's esteem — "for the devil is a saturnine 
 spirit, and music is hateful to him, and drives him 
 far away from it." It is a countryman of his upon 
 whom Southey drops a passing note of admiration, 
 in The Doctor, for that he, a physician, "adminis- 
 tered cat's entrails as a panacea," Read catgut, 
 
 Unconsci6usly the warlike shepherd paused ; 
 But when he saw, down the yet quivering string, 
 The tear-drop trembling glide, abashed, he checked, 
 Indignant at himself, the bursting flood, 
 And, with a sweep impetuous, struck the chords : 
 From side to side his hands transversely glance, 
 Like lightning 'thwart a stormy sea ; his voice 
 Arises 'mid the clang, and straightway calms 
 The harmonious tempest, to a solemn swell 
 Majestical, triumphant ; for he sings 
 Of Arad's mighty host by Israel's arm 
 Subdued ; of Israel through the desert led 
 He sings ; of him who was their leader, called, 
 By God Himself, from keeping Jethro's flock, 
 To be a ruler o'er the chosen race. 
 Kindles the eye of Saul ; his arm is poised ; 
 Harmless the javelin quiversin the wall." 
 
/6 SOOTHING STRAINS. 
 
 and would not Luther have almost approved the 
 remedy ? 
 
 Kings, princes, courtiers, counts, barons, and 
 indeed men of every degree, love chansons, as an 
 Anglo-Norman jongleur, Denis Pyram, says, — 
 
 " Car ils otent le noir penser, 
 Deuil et ennui font oublier." 
 
 Charles IX. of France, whose "conscience-pangs" 
 
 on account of his share in the massacre of St. 
 
 Bartholomew admitted, as in Saul's case, of no 
 
 alleviation, save that afforded by music, invited 
 
 Orlando di Lasso to Paris, to become his maitre- 
 
 dc-chapelle, and the exorciser of the evil spirit that , 
 
 oppressed him. Ben Jonson in the praise of music 
 
 he versified and addressed to Alphonso Ferrobosco, 
 
 the composer of most of his masques, speaks of 
 
 this among her 
 
 " known effects, 
 
 That she removeth cares, sadness ejects, 
 
 And is to a body, often, ill inclined, 
 
 No less a sovereign cure than to the mind." 
 
 Old General Lepel who lived in the same house 
 in Rome with Mendelssohn, would steal into the 
 room and listen while Felix extemporized at the 
 pianoforte — and say that if assailed by bad thoughts, 
 how glad he should be to have them all breathed 
 away — so ! so !— just as the player had done in his 
 strains. 
 
MINSTREL AND MADMAN. 77 
 
 Allan M'Aulay, in Scott's Lege?id of Montrose, 
 is only to be calmed and softened in his dark moods 
 by the harp and voice of little Annot Lyle. Her 
 playing on the clairshach " produced upon the dis- 
 turbed spirits of Allan, in his gloomiest moods, 
 beneficial effects, similar to those experienced by 
 the Jewish monarch of old." "Send for Annot 
 Lyle, and the harp," is the bidding of Angus, when 
 Allan's fit is seen to be coming on. She comes at 
 once, and sings, and plays, and as the strain pro- 
 ceeds, Allan gradually gives signs of recovering his 
 self-possession : the deep-knit furrows of his brow 
 relax and smooth themselves ; and the rest of his 
 features, seemingly contorted with internal agony, 
 relapse into a more natural state. His countenance, 
 though still deeply melancholy, is divested of its 
 wildness and ferocity; and the eyes, which had 
 flashed with a portentous gleam, now recover a 
 steady and determined expression. "Thank God!" 
 he says, after sitting in silence for about a minute, 
 until the very last sounds of the harp have ceased 
 to vibrate, — "my soul is no longer darkened — the 
 mist hath passed from my spirit."* The darkened 
 
 * But ere long his converse is on a subject and in a tone 
 that makes Menteith say, as Allan leaves the room, " Should 
 he talk long in this manner, you must keep your harp in 
 tune, my dear Annot." — A Legend of Montrose, chap. vi. . 
 
7 8 THE MINSTREL WANTING. 
 
 recluse Clement, in The Cloister and the Hearth, 
 casting his despairing eyes over antiquity to see 
 what weapons the Christian arsenal contains that 
 may befriend him, finds the greatest of all to be 
 prayer ; but then it is a part of his malady to be 
 unable to pray with true fervour : he bethinks him, 
 anon, that a fiend of this complexion had been 
 driven out of King Saul by music ; so Clement takes 
 up the hermit's psaltery, and with much trouble 
 mends the strings, and tunes it. "No, he could 
 not play it. His soul was so out of tune. The 
 sounds jarred on it, and made him almost mad. 
 1 Ah, wretched me,' he cried. 'Saul had a saint to 
 play to him. He was not alone with the spirits of 
 darkness ; but here is no sweet bard of Israel to play 
 to me; I, lonely, with crushed heart, on which a 
 black fiend sitteth, mountain high, must make the 
 music to uplift that heart to heaven. It may not 
 be.' " * And he grovels on the earth, weeping and 
 tearing his hair. 
 
 * In another of Mr. Reade's books, a man in trouble 
 pleads for a song to be sung by the voice he loves best, — a 
 song of the olden time ; and " as spirits are said to over- 
 come the man at whose behest they rise, so this sweet air, 
 and the gush of reminiscence it awakened, overpowered him 
 who had evoked them." His eyes are no longer fiery, but 
 tearful ; and if his heart still swells, it is no longer with in- 
 dignation. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli's young duke (par excellence, and in pras- 
 
MILTONIC NOTES ANGELICAL. 79 
 
 Even in the inferno of Milton are heard bewitch- 
 ing strains in Dorian mood of flutes and soft re- 
 corders, 
 
 " Not wanting power to mitigate and swage, 
 With solemn touches, troubled thoughts,- and chase 
 Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain, 
 From mortal or immortal minds." 
 
 Even there too the harp is heard, as it is in heaven. 
 For if the spirits elect take their golden harps — 
 harps ever tuned, that glittering by their side like 
 quivers hung ; and if in their hosannahs "the harp 
 had work, and rested not ; " of the fallen angels 
 too we read, that some, the milder spirits among 
 them, retreated in a silent valley, sang with notes 
 angelical, to many a harp, their own heroic deeds 
 and hapless fall by doom of battle. 
 
 Lotharian days,) is similarly operated upon by Miss Dacre. 
 He is most miserable, he tells her. Why ? To ask, is to 
 agonize him. Well ; shall she sing, then ? " Shall I charm 
 the evil spirit ? " A ready assent ; and the charmer takes 
 her seat at the piano, and warbles, and fills the room with 
 the delight of her strain. "He listened, and each instant 
 the chilly weight loosened from his heart." 
 
 O'KeefTe, in his autobiography, tells how he soothed into 
 serenity, when ruffled into resentment, the composer, Thomas 
 Carter, by dint simply of singing to him his own delightful 
 composition, " Oh Nanny, wilt thou gang with me." Well 
 known is the story of the two assassins hired to kill Stradella, 
 who, waiting for the moment to strike their victim — it was by 
 night, and in church — were so overcome by the charm of his 
 voice and strains, that they renounced their purpose. 
 
So EXORCISED BY SONG. 
 
 " Their song was partial ; but the harmony 
 (What could it less, when spirits immortal sing ?) 
 Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment 
 The thronging audience." 
 
 Binsfeldius, quoted by Mr. Lecky in his chapter 
 . n Magic and Witchcraft, refers to what was always 
 >bserved by the inquisitors — that music, which 
 , oothes the passions, and allays the bitterness of 
 regret and of remorse, had an extraordinary power 
 over the possessed. King Saul had no such inward 
 recognition, cruelly definite, of an indwelling evil 
 spirit, to be exorcised by David's harp, as had these 
 unhappy creatures. But not even King Saul's 
 malady was more susceptible of alleviation by the 
 harp music, than was theirs. The cure in their in- 
 stance might have gained in speed and in efficacy, 
 could they have been led to believe, in those ages 
 of faith and of relics, that the harp they listened to 
 was David's own harp* — such tricks, in Shakspeare's 
 
 * Sir James Stephen tells us in his graphic account of the 
 so-called Clapham Sect, that among the barges which floated 
 of a summer evening by the villa of Pope and the chateau of 
 Horace Walpole, none was more constant and joyous than 
 that in which Granville Sharpe's harp or kettledrum sustained 
 the flute of one brother, the hautboy of another, and the 
 melodious voices of their sisters. The said harp was fashioned, 
 brother Granville maintained, in exact imitation of that of 
 the son of Jesse ; and to complete the resemblance, it was 
 his delight, at the break of day, to " sing to it one of the 
 
SOLACE TO THE SUFFERING. 81 
 
 phrase, hath strong imagination, and so potent hath 
 its agency been found in the way of remedial aids 
 and appliances. 
 
 Great is the solace afforded by music to some 
 that suffer keenly, and suffer unseen. Charles de 
 Bernard says that u pour le cceur priv6 d'un autre 
 cceur ou se puissent verser sa joie et sa peine, la 
 musique est un ami qui ecoute et repond. Sous 
 les doigts qui l'interrogent, l'instrument recoit la 
 pression de Tame souffrante, et s'anime pour la 
 consoler. Le souffle de la douleur errant sur le 
 clavier eveille une harmonie qui la berce et Tendort, 
 ou la distrait par une exaltation passagere." "Give 
 me some music," was the demand of the late 
 Duchess of Orleans, as she neared her end: "music 
 calms my thoughts ; it cheats me out of my feelings 
 without doing them violence." The girl-heroine of 
 a popular modern fiction, condemned to perpetual 
 silence in every other tongue, finds in music a new 
 and glorious language. Forbidden to read romance 
 or poetry, she is not forbidden to sit at her piano, 
 
 songs of Zion in his chamber — raised by many an intervening 
 staircase far above the Temple Gardens, where young stu- 
 dents of those times would often pause in their morning 
 stroll, to listen to the not unpleasing cadence, though the 
 voice was broken by age, and the language was to them an 
 unknown tongue," — for Granville Sharpe was learned in 
 Hebrew, and claimed to sing and play as Darid sang and 
 played. 
 
 6 
 
82 MUSIC A SOLACE 
 
 when the day's toils are over, and the twilight is 
 dusky, in her quiet room, playing dreamy melodies 
 from the great German masters, and making her 
 own poetry to Mendelssohn's wordless songs. 
 "Her soul must surely have shrunk and withered 
 away altogether had it not been for this one re- 
 source, this one refuge, in which her mind regained 
 its elasticity, springing up, like a trampled flower, 
 into new life and beauty." To apply the words of 
 one of Goethe's dramatic self-communers — 
 
 " One pleasure cheers me in my solitude, 
 The joy of song. I commune with myself, 
 And lull with soothing tones the sense of pain, 
 The restless longing, the unquiet wish, — 
 Till sorrow oft will grow to ravishment, 
 And sadness self to harmony divine." 
 
 Often, here and there, over the wide world, says 
 Balzac, "une jeune fille expirant sous le poids d'une 
 peine inconnue, un homme dont Tame vibre sous 
 les pincements d'une passion, prennent un theme 
 musical et s'entendent avec le ciel,* ou se parlent a 
 eux-memes dans quelque sublime melodie." The 
 
 * Or it may be, with Another Place. " There is a sonata 
 of Beethoven's (I forget the number)," writes Miss Gwilt in 
 her Diary. " which always suggests to me the agony of lost 
 spirits in a place of torment. Come, my fingers and thumbs, 
 and take me among the lost spirits, this morning ! " — Arma- 
 dale, book iv., chap. i. 
 
AND A SAFETY-VALVE. 83 
 
 author of Elsie Vainer 'bids us beware of the woman 
 who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy 
 inner life either in words or song. If she can sing, 
 or play on any musical instrument, all her wicked- 
 ness, he promises us, shall run off through her 
 throat or the tips of her fingers. (Miss Gwilt, in 
 the last foot-note, is sadly an exception to the 
 rule; a very strong exception indeed, but scarcely 
 strong enough to prove the rule.) Many a tragedy, 
 on Dr. Holmes's showing, finds its peaceful catas- 
 trophe in fierce roulades and strenuous bravuras; 
 many a murder is executed in double-quick time 
 upon the keys which stab the air with their dagger- 
 strokes of sound. What would civilization, he asks, 
 be without the piano? Are not Erard and Broad- 
 wood the two humanizers of our time? Therefore 
 professes he to love to hear the all-pervading turn- 
 turn from houses in obscure streets and courts 
 which to know is to be unknown, or even from the 
 "open windows of the small, unlovely farm-house, 
 tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine fla- 
 vours, and the flat-patterned woman of broken- 
 down countenance."* 
 
 * " For who knows that Almira, but for those keys, which 
 throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would 
 not have been floating, dead, in the brown stream which 
 slides through the meadows by her father's door — or living, 
 with that other current which runs beneath the gaslights over 
 
84 TO THE LAST 
 
 To the last, and at the last, music has been to 
 many that thing of beauty which is a joy for ever. 
 Sir Philip Sidney was solaced to the last, and at 
 the last, by music, — listening particularly to a 
 strange song which he had himself composed 
 during his illness, and which he had entitled " La 
 Cuisse rompue."* 
 
 Very characteristic was the title Rousseau gave 
 to that century, or thereabouts, of the romances he 
 set to music, — Consolations des Miseres de ma Vie. 
 Earl Russell tells us of Thomas Moore that to the 
 last day of his life he would sing, or ask his wife to 
 sing to him, the favourite airs of his bygone days : 
 dying, he " warbled ; " and a " fond love of music 
 never left him but with life." Fiction has its repre- 
 sentative men in this line of things. The old 
 German, Joseph Buschmann, in a well-known story, 
 reckons on one kind ministrant to hold his darling 
 musical-box to his ear, when his own strength shall 
 fail him, and his senses be dulled — the box that the 
 hand of Mozart had touched — to hold it "closer, 
 closer always, when Joseph moans for the friendly 
 music he has known from a baby, the friendly 
 
 the slimy pavement, choking with wretched weeds that were 
 once in spotless flower ? " — Elsie Ve?mer, chap, xxiii. 
 
 * The fatal wound at Zutphen was from a musket-ball 
 which struck him upon the thigh, three inches above the 
 knee. 
 
AND AT THE LAST. 85 
 
 music that he can now so hardly, hardly hear." To 
 the same author we owe a certain ode on music, 
 one stanza of which is pertinent in this connection; 
 impersonated music loquitur : 
 
 " Still pleased, my solace I impart, 
 
 Where brightest hopes are scattered dead ; 
 'Tis mine — sweet gift ! — to charm the heart, 
 Though all its other joys have fled." 
 
86 
 
 VI. 
 
 # Musical ££onarcIj* 
 
 2 Samuel vi. 5. 
 
 AT the bringing of the ark of God out of the 
 house of Abinadab, which was at Gibeah, 
 whence, after an unforeseen transfer to the house 
 of Obed-edom, it was brought, three months later, 
 into the city of David with gladness, " David, and 
 all the house of Israel, played before the Lord on 
 all manner of instruments made of fir-wood, even 
 on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on 
 cornets, and on cymbals." The royal harper was 
 in his element that day. That he played with his 
 might we are as sure, as the express assurance of 
 Scripture makes us that he " danced with his 
 might," when the ark was conveyed to the taber- 
 nacle he had pitched for it. 
 
 In the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury it is 
 argued, and in his lordship's * characteristic " way, 
 that if the first Jewish princes acted in real ac- 
 
MERRY" MONARCH. 87 
 
 cordance to the Mosaic institutions, " not only 
 music, but even play and dance, were of holy 
 appointment and divine right." The first monarch 
 of this nation, he goes on to remark, " though of 
 a melancholy complexion," joined music with his 
 spiritual exercises, and even used it as a remedy 
 under that " dark enthusiasm, or evil spirit," which 
 possessed him. " 'Tis certain that the successor of 
 this prince was a hearty espouser of the merry 
 devotion, and by his example has shown it to have 
 been fundamental in the religious constitution of 
 his people."* Nemo saltat sobrius, says the pro- 
 
 * The famous entry or high dance performed by him, after 
 so conspicuous a manner, in the procession of the sacred 
 coffer, shows that he was not ashamed of expressing any 
 ecstasy of joy or playsome humour, which was practised by 
 the meanest of the priests or people on such an occasion." 
 — Characteristics, vol. iii., MiscelL Reflections, chap. iii. 
 
 Shaftesbury appends a foot-note in which he studiously 
 views the royal dancer through Michal's eyes. 
 
 Many are the moderns that do so ; and not only the very 
 most but the very worst is made of David's performance. 
 Adam Smith observes that the man who skips and dances 
 about with that intemperate and senseless joy which we cannot 
 accompany him in, is the object of our contempt and indigna- 
 tion. That is said in the Theory of Moral Sentiment (Part I., 
 sec. iii., chap, i.) ; and lack of sympathy is the motive cause 
 (for this effect defective comes by cause) of the strictures on 
 King David. Scoffers of every size are glad to have a hit 
 at him ; whether in the spirit of the French satirist, 
 
 " Le roi David, danseur tr6s vigoureux, 
 Quitta sa harpe," — 
 
88 DANCING AND ITS DENOUNCERS. 
 
 verb : but in what kind of dance ? that is the 
 question, with Burton at least, in his Anatomy. 
 
 or in that of austere denouncers of dancing, absolute, and 
 universally. 
 
 Among the old Scottish noteworthies commemorated in 
 Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences is Dr. Scott, minister of 
 Carlisle, described as a fine, graceful, kindly man, bag- 
 wigged, and cane in hand, with a friendly word to every one ; 
 who, upon one occasion, after " officiating at a bridal " in his 
 parish, waited awhile till the young people were " fairly 
 warmed in the dance." The leader of a " dissenting body 
 that had sprung up in the parish " was present, and ques- 
 tioned Dr. Scott on the propriety of his thus sanctioning by 
 his presence " so sinful an enjoyment." " Weel, minister, 
 what think ye o' this dancing?" "Why, John," said the 
 minister, blithely, " I think it an excellent exercise for young 
 people, and, I dare say, so do you." " Ah, sir, I'm no sure 
 about it ; I see no authority fort in the Scriptures." " Umph, 
 indeed, John ; you cannot forget David." "Ah, sir, Dauvid; 
 gif they were a' to dance as Dauvid did, it would be a 
 different thing a-the-gither." " Hoot o fie, hoot o fie, John ; 
 would ye have the young folk strip to the serk ? " 
 
 It was not till the middle of the second dance, at sunset, 
 of the peasant family of three generations, at Moulins, that, 
 from some pauses in the movement, wherein they all seemed 
 to look up, Sterne fancied he could distinguish an elevation 
 of spirit, different from that which is the cause or the effect 
 of simple jollity ; — in a word, he thought he beheld Religion 
 mixing in the dance — but as he had never seen her so 
 engaged, he was for looking upon it now as one of the illu- 
 sions of a too perpetually misleading imagination, had not 
 the old man, as soon as the dance ended, said, that this was 
 their constant way ; and that all his life long he had made it 
 a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF DANCING. 89 
 
 " I know these sports have many oppugners, whole 
 volumes writ against them ; when as all they say 
 
 and rejoice : believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented 
 mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate 
 peasant could pay, — " Or a learned prelate either," is Parson 
 Yorick's consistent rejoinder. — " En quoi," demands a French 
 philosopher, who aspired to be essentially and distinctively 
 a religious one, "en quoi Dieu est-il offense par un exercice 
 agre'able et salutaire, convenable a la vivacite' de la jeunesse, 
 qui consiste a se presenter Pun a 1' autre avec grace et bien- 
 seance, et auquel le spectateur impose une gravity dont 
 personne n'oserait sortir?" Coleridge, by the way, in his 
 determined onslaught against everything French, declared of 
 the dancing of that people that it is void of grace and expres- 
 sion ; that with all their vivacity and animal spirits, they 
 dance not like men and women under the impression of 
 certain emotions, but like puppets,— twirling round like tour- 
 niquets. " Not to feel, and not to think, is all they know of 
 this art, or of any other. You might swear that a nation that 
 danced in that manner would never produce a true poet or 
 philosopher. They have it not in. them." For eloquent ex- 
 position of the philosophy and the poetry of dancing, com- 
 mend us to Thomas de Quincey, who affirms, in one place, 
 that of all the scenes which this world offers, none was to 
 him so profoundly interesting, none (he said it deliberately) 
 so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating 
 through the mazes of a dance ; under these conditions, how- 
 ever, that the music shall be rich, resonant, and festal, the 
 execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a 
 character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous motion 
 (which last condition excludes the quadrilles, etc., which, he 
 complained, had for so many years banished the "truly 
 beautiful country -dances native to England "). By " con- 
 tinuous " motion, he explains himself to mean, not interrupted 
 
90 DE QUINCE Y ON DANCING. 
 
 (if duly considered) is but ignoratio clcuchi. .... 
 Some out of preposterous zeal object many times 
 
 or fitful, but unfolding its fine mazes with the equability of 
 light in its diffusion through free space. And of such dancing, 
 to music not of a light, trivial character, but charged with 
 the spirit of festal pleasure, the dancers being so far skilful 
 as to betray no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, 
 Mr. de Ouincey is bold to affirm his belief, that many people 
 feel with him in such circumstances, viz., derive from the 
 spectacle "the very grandest form of passionate sadness 
 which can belong to any spectacle whatever." Sadness may 
 not be the exact word ; but then he doubts the existence of 
 any word in any language (because none in the finest 
 languages) which exactly expresses the state ; since it is not 
 a depressing, but a most elevating state to which he refers ; 
 many states of pleasure, and in particular the highest, being, 
 intelligibly enough, the most of all removed from merriment. 
 " Festal music, of a rich and passionate character, is the most 
 remote of any from vulgar hilarity. Its very gladness and 
 pomp is impregnated with sadness ; but sadness of a grand 
 and aspiring order." By various illustrations the impas- 
 sioned author here quoted seeks to make his reader com- 
 prehend, if he should not happen experimentally to have felt, 
 that the spectacle of young men and women " flowing " 
 through the mazes of an intricate dance under a full volume 
 of music, — the life, the motion, the sea-like undulation of 
 heads, the interweaving of the figures, the, avamjicXwais, or self- 
 revolving, both of the dance and the music, " never ending, 
 still beginning," and the continual regeneration of order from 
 a system of motions which for ever touch the very brink of 
 confusion ; that such a spectacle with such circumstances, — 
 the circumstantial adjuncts, namely, of rich men's halls for 
 the scene, and a blaze of lights and jewels to illuminate it — 
 may happen to be capable of exciting and sustainiug the very 
 
A MASK OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 trivial arguments, and because of some abuse will 
 quite take away the good use ; . . . . but in my 
 judgment they are too stern : there i is a time for 
 all things, a time to mourn, a time to dance'* 
 
 grandest emotions of philosophic melancholy to which the 
 human spirit is open. The reason assigned is, in part, that 
 such a scene " presents a sort of mask of human life, with 
 its whole equipage of pomps and glories, its luxury of sight 
 and sound, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable 
 revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation 
 treading upon the flying footsteps of another," — while the 
 overruling music is throughout attempering the mind to the 
 spectacle, the subject to the object, the beholder to the 
 vision. And although this is known to be but one phasis of 
 life — of life culminating and in ascent — yet the other (and 
 repulsive) phasis " is concealed upon the hidden or averted 
 side of the golden arras, known but not felt ; or is seen but 
 dimly in the rear, crowding into indistinct proportions." 
 
 The rhetoric of this master of prose may here be fitly set 
 off, both in matter and manner, with Milton's stately verse 
 with angels for its theme : — 
 
 "That day, as other solemn days, they spent 
 In song and dance about the sacred hill ; 
 Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere 
 Of planets, and of fixed, in all her wheels 
 Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, 
 Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular, 
 Then most when most irregular they seem, 
 And in their motions harmony divine 
 So smooths her charming tones, that God's own ear 
 Listens delighted." 
 
 * Describing the rustic dance at a harvest-home, in his 
 prose idyl of Clouds and Sunshine, Mr. Charles Reade 
 iterates the apostrophic refrain, "Dance, sons and daughters 
 
92 DANCING BY INSTINCT. 
 
 (Eccles. iii. 4)." The Royal Preacher, on the text 
 that all is vanity, is thus made by Prior to record 
 his experience, or experiments, in this direction : — 
 
 of toil. None had ever a better right to dance than you have 
 this sunny afternoon in clear September. . . . Harvest-tide 
 comes but once a year. Dance, sons and daughters of toil, 
 exult over your work, smile with the smiling year, and in this 
 bright hour, oh, cease my poor souls to envy the rich and 
 great ! Believe me, they are never, at any hour of their lives, 
 so cheery as you are now. How can they be ? With them 
 dancing is tame work, an every-day business — no rarity, no 
 treat — don't envy them — God is just, and deals the sources of 
 content with a more equal hand than appears on the surface 
 of things." Dance, too, without fear, he bids them ; let no 
 forbidding censor make them believe it wrong : " Things are 
 wrong out of season, and right in season ; to dance in harvest 
 is as becoming as to be grave in church. The Almighty has 
 put it into the hearts of insects to dance in the afternoon sun, 
 and of men and women in every age and every land to dance 
 round the gathered crop, whether it be corn, or oil, or wine, 
 or any other familiar miracle that springs up sixty-fold, and 
 nurtures and multiplies the life of man." In another of his 
 books Mr. Reade describes a dance got up among the 
 starving children of a penniless penman, by a visitor radiant 
 with beneficence, who has first fed them well, and now stirs 
 them all up to foot it blithely, herself showing them how, till 
 the careworn parents themselves catch the excitement, and 
 join in. "There was no swimming, sprawling, or irrelevant 
 frisking ; their feet struck the ground for every note of the 
 fiddle, pint as its echo ; their faces shone, their hearts leaped, 
 and their poor frozen natures came out, and warmed them- 
 selves at the glowing melody : a great sunbeam had come 
 into their abode, and these human motes danced in it." In 
 yet another the same master of his art expounds the prin- 
 
^ESTHETICS OF DANCING. 93 
 
 " I bade the virgins and the youth advance, 
 To temper music with the sprightly dance. 
 In vain ! too low the mimic-motions seem ; 
 What takes our heart must merit our esteem. 
 
 ciple of Scotch reel-dancing, which is articulation, — the foot 
 striking the ground for every accented note, and, in the best 
 steps of all, for every single note of the instrument. "All 
 good dancing," he continues, "is beautiful." But this 
 articulate dancing, compared with the loose, lawless difflu- 
 ence of motion that goes by that name, gives him, he con- 
 fesses, as much more pleasure as articulate singing is supe- 
 rior to tunes played on the voice by a young lady. What 
 says Goldsmith of the two styles ? " They swam, sprawled, 
 frisked, and languished ; but Olivia's foot was as pat to the 
 music as its echo " Mr. Arthur Helps somewhere declares, 
 as for dancing, that it is to him the most beautiful thing in 
 the world when it is supremely well done — while no one can de- 
 nounce more impatiently than he does the " loathsome " ugli- 
 ness as well as indecency of ballet performances, with their 
 " laboured intrepidity of indecorum." Rapturously Lardune 
 expatiates, in one of Roscoe's tragedies, on knightly Breton 
 
 dancers that 
 
 " make the air 
 Heavy in pace behind them, and still tread 
 With such a delicate feeling of the time, 
 As if the music dwelt in their own frames, 
 And shook the motion from them." 
 
 So Wordsworth's son-in-law and brother bard, "To Mary 
 dancing": — 
 
 " Diana's queenlike step is thine ; 
 And when in dance thy feet combine, 
 
 They fall with truth so sweet, 
 The music seems to come from thee, 
 And all the notes appear to be 
 
 ' The echoes of thy feet.' " 
 
 As was said of Madame, Duchesse d'Orleans, " son ame, sou 
 
94 DYNAMICS OF DANCING. 
 
 Nature, I thought, performed too mean a part, 
 Forming her movements to the rules of art ; 
 And vexed I found, that the musician's hand 
 Had o'er the dancer's mind too great command." 
 
 esprit animait tout son corps : elle en avait jusqu'aux pieds 
 et dansait mieux que femme du monde." 
 
 ' ' And every limb with all the notes 
 In that accordant beauty floats .... 
 The very soul of dance." 
 
 Hazlitt says, in one of his letters from Paris, that of all 
 things he saw there, it surprised him the most that the 
 French should fancy they can dance. To dance, is to move 
 with grace and harmony to music. " But the French, 
 whether men or women, have no idea of dancing but that of 
 moving with agility, and of distorting their limbs in every 
 possible way, till they really alter the structure of the human 
 form." The philosopher of the Haythornc Papers records his 
 watching a professional dancer, whose tours de fo7-ce he 
 inwardly condemned as barbarisms which would be hissed, 
 were not people such cowards as to applaud what they think 
 it's the fashion to applaud ; and he remarked that the truly 
 graceful motions occasionally introduced were those per- 
 formed with comparatively little effort. He accordingly main- 
 tains that whatever is most gracefully achieved, is achieved 
 with the least expenditure of force ; that grace, as applied to 
 motion, is effected with an economy of muscular power. The 
 theory of dancing, as propounded by Emerson, is, to recover 
 continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and 
 angular, but by gradual and curving movements. In Leigh 
 Hunt's phrase, 
 
 " Weaving motion with blithe repose." 
 Byron will have it that all foreigners excel the serious 
 
CASUISTRY OF DANCING. 95 
 
 For here too the sensuous monarch " found the 
 fickle ear soon glutted with the sound ; Con- 
 demned eternal changes to pursue, Tired with the 
 last, and eager of the new." To King Solomon, 
 in his recognized capacity of the Preacher, Eccle- 
 siastes, does Owen Feltham appeal, in support of 
 his argument that if dancing were unlawful, God 
 would not allow of being served by it, as in the 
 Jewish ritual He did; "nor would Solomon have 
 told us that ' there is a time to dance.' " Charlotte 
 Bronte's casuistry was consulted once, whether 
 dancing is objectionable, when indulged in for an 
 hour or two in parties of boys and girls. Her judg- 
 ment was, that " the sin of dancing " consists not 
 in the mere action of "shaking the shanks" (as the 
 Scotch say), but in the consequences that usually 
 attend it ; namely, frivolity and waste of time ; that 
 when used only, as in the case suggested, for 
 the exercise and amusement of an hour among 
 young people, "who surely may without any breach 
 of God's commandments be allowed a little light- 
 headedness," these consequences cannot follow. 
 
 Angles in the eloquence of pantomime ; and he makes his 
 model male dancer dance right well, 
 
 " With emphasis, and also with good sense — 
 A thing in footing indispensable : 
 He danced without theatrical pretence, 
 Not like a ballet-master in the van 
 Of his drill'd nymphs, but like a gentleman." 
 
96 APOLOGISTS FOR DANCING. 
 
 " Ergo (according to my manner of arguing), the 
 amusement is at such times perfectly innocent" 
 As Feltham states the question, it is not the thing 
 that is to be condemned, but the manner and cor- 
 rupt abuse of it. He, the grave moralist of the 
 Resolves, affirms that, beyond a doubt, it was " out 
 of the jollity of nature that this art was first in- 
 vented and taken up, among men. Bate but the 
 fiddle, and the colts, the calves, and lambs of the 
 field do the same." An old poet of a previous 
 generation, Sir John Davies, had written a poem 
 on Dancing, called Orchestra, from which Feltham 
 might have quoted a sequence of stanzas ; for Sir 
 John has his undulatory theory, as regards the 
 dancing of the air itself; "for what are breath, 
 speech, echoes, music, winds, but dancings of the 
 air* in sundry kinds ? " Of the winds, for instance, 
 he saysf that they keep their revelry, their " vio- 
 
 * Swift makes merry over Isaac BickerstafFs definition of 
 dancing as an " epitome of all human learning," — and over 
 his alleged tenet, proved by arguments physical, musical, and 
 mathematical, that dancing is not only the primum mobile 
 of all arts and sciences, but that the motion of the sun, moon, 
 and other celestial bodies, is but a sort of Cheshire Round, 
 which they dance to the music of the spheres. 
 
 + Writing when he did, Sir John was sure of a readier 
 sympathy with what he did write, however fanciful, upon such 
 a topic ; for in that age, as Mr. Herman Merivale observes, 
 not only the spirit of the art, but its high importance and 
 
HISTORICALLY REVIEWED. 97 
 
 lent turnings and wild whirling hays," in the air's 
 translucent gallery, " where she herself is turned 
 
 dignity were as yet unabated. We are misled, says he, by 
 our modern notions, when we marvel at Sir Christopher 
 Hatton, the dancing Chancellor ; or at Elizabeth, for being 
 smitten with his attractive movements. In France, he 
 reminds us, all the world danced, from the king to the 
 Savoyard with his monkey. Not only Richelieu dances a 
 new saraband in the queen's boudoir, with castanets in hand, 
 — though to be sure he gets provokingly derided for the feat ; 
 but even the great and grave Sully indulges in similar exhi- 
 bitions. Nay, the great Jansenist Abbe Arnauld recounts, 
 albeit with some embarrassment, how he was forced to dance 
 at the court of Modena. Dances of the saraband and galop 
 kind were performed in church in the middle ages, and wild 
 work they made of them. At Limoges, on St. Martial's day, 
 the people danced in church to the tunes of the canticles, 
 and at the end of each chant repeated this refrain, by way of 
 doxology : 
 
 " Saint Martial, priez pour nous, 
 Et nous, nous danserons pour vous." 
 
 There is no art so fallen from its high estate as that of 
 dancing, affirms a reviewer of its history — and formal histo- 
 rians it has had, the French Bonnet, for instance (Histoire 
 de la danse), and more recently the German Czerwinski 
 (Geschichte dcr Tanzkunst) — the latter of whom details with 
 "all the ardour which belongs to the stanch votary of a 
 decaying cause," the former glories of his now neglected 
 study — an art which " boasts of an ancient pedigree and many 
 renowned professors." ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Epaminondas, 
 a classical authority reminds us, were distinguished dancers 
 in their day ; while Socrates and Plato not only danced 
 themselves, but applied very unpolite language to those who 
 were too ignorant to follow their example. " The instances 
 
 7 
 
98 bANCING IN DIVINE SERVICE. 
 
 a hundred ways" while playing with these mer- 
 curial maskers — 
 
 " Yet in this misrule they such rule embrace, 
 As two at once encumber not the place" — 
 
 of David and the daughter of Herodias show the influence 
 the art had among the Jews." And it is shown to have not 
 lost its favour with the early Christians, among whom so much 
 of Jewish thought and feeling survived : Gregory Thauma- 
 turgus introduced it into divine service, and St. Basil strongly 
 recommended the art to his hearers, telling them that it would 
 be their principal occupation in heaven, and therefore they had 
 better practise it betimes on earth. Scaliger is cited as even 
 deducing from the custom of employing it in divine service 
 the name of prcesules, which was given to the bishops — 
 deriving it a prcesiliendo, from the fact of their " skipping 
 first," or being foremost in the dance at the head of their 
 clergy. But if the Hattons and Sullys and Richlieus could 
 revisit the earth, how little, exclaims one historian of the 
 art, would they recognize as dancing the ungainly shuffle 
 which is the lineal representative of their stately gambadoes ! 
 " We may safely assume that St. John the Baptist would have 
 lived to a respected old age, if Herodias's daughter had 
 had nothing more graceful wherewith to entertain her 
 stepfather's guests ; and that St. Basil would never have 
 deterred his congregation from the path of virtue by holding 
 up to them an eternity of such an exercise as their reward. 
 In fact, if Dante had lived to enjoy our experiences of new 
 varieties of human misery, doing teetotum for ever in a hot 
 room would have furnished a suitable circle in the Inferno 
 for fashionable sinners." Besides, our dances now represent 
 nothing, their modern censor complains ; whereas those of 
 the ancient world generally embodied a thought — not merely 
 a desire to kick, or a promiscuous shuffle. 
 
ANALOGIES AND APOLOGETICS. 99 
 
 a passage that may remind us of what the masterly 
 translator and annotator of Lessing's Laokoon ob- 
 serves, in one of his foot-notes, — that the beauty 
 of dancing, as to one part of it, lies in the conflict 
 between the freedom of the motion and the law 
 of equilibrium, which is constantly threatened by 
 it ; sometimes also " in the intricacy of the figure, 
 which is constantly tending to swerve from a law 
 which it constantly obeys ; " and sometimes in the 
 " mutual reference of two corresponding dancers or 
 a centripetal reference of the whole, where the 
 launch, as it were, of the motion and passion of 
 the music, seems likely to impress a centrifugal 
 tendency." The dancing of the waves to the in- 
 fluence of the moon is another of the examples 
 drawn by Sir John Davies de rerum naturd. Be 
 some of his fancies too fanciful or not, for the 
 argument of Owen Feltham, that argument is that 
 the thing dancing, in itself, seems to be natural 
 and innocent, "begotten and born at first out of 
 the sprightly and harmless activity and rarification 
 of the blood and spirits ; " whence the less he 
 wonders that some of the ancient Grecians should 
 so much extol it, as even to deduce it from Heaven 
 itself, as being practised there by the stars, "the con- 
 junctions and oppositions, the aspects and revolu- 
 tions, the ingresses and the egresses, and the like ; 
 making such a harmony and concert, as to seem to 
 
ioo FELTHAMS PLEA FOR DANCING. 
 
 be a well-ordered dance amongst them." If dancing 
 were absolutely ill in itself, or if the ill which some- 
 times accompanies it were inseparable from it, " it 
 were better all were gone," Feltham concludes, 
 "than for the greatest pleasure, to keep the least 
 of mischief." But if it be for a harmless exercise, 
 for a recreation merely, or to express inoffensively 
 a justifiable joy, he sees not why it should be con- 
 demned. He cannot bring himself to think that 
 " there cannot be dancing without danger to 
 morals." Granted that some of the fathers have 
 highly declaimed against this recreation ; " yet, I 
 take it to be, as it was rudely and lasciviously used 
 by the vulgar, and the pagans of those times. But 
 surely, at orderly entertainments among great per- 
 sons, and meetings of love and friendship among 
 persons of condition, there is nothing more modest, 
 more decent, or more civil." In fine, he takes 
 dancing to be like usury, — something difficult to 
 be kept in the mean, easy to be let into excess, 
 and by almost all nations at once decried and 
 practised. 
 
 The word prelate, or even the word pope, could 
 hardly have produced so appalling an effect upon 
 the ear of David Deans, his author tells us, as did 
 the word dancing, which he overhears* from the 
 
 * What would he, or the like of him, have said to the 
 
BUNYAN'S PILGRIMS FOOTING IT WELL, ior 
 
 lips of Jeanie and Effie ; for, of all exercises, that 
 of dancing, which he termed a voluntary and regular 
 fit of distraction, he deemed most destructive of 
 serious thoughts, and the readiest inlet to all sorts 
 of licentiousness. "Dance!" he exclaims. "Dance? 
 — dance, said ye ? I daur ye, limmers that ye are, 
 to name sic a word at my door-cheek ! It's a dis- 
 solute, profane pastime, practised by the Israelites 
 
 introduction of the word, and the thing, without a hint of dis- 
 approval on the Divine speaker's part, in the parable of the 
 Prodigal Son ? 
 
 Good and thoroughbred Puritan as John Bunyan was, 
 there was nothing of this stringent straitlacedness about him. 
 When the pilgrims in their progress are shown the head 
 of Giant Despair, they have music and dancing for joy. 
 Christian plays upon the viol, and Mercy upon the lute, and 
 Mr. Ready-to-halt takes Despondency's daughter, Much- 
 afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they go along the road. 
 " True, he could not dance without one crutch in his hand, 
 but I promise you, he footed it well : also the girl was to be 
 commended, for she answered the music handsomely." 
 
 To be commended? — One of our religious journals not 
 long ago asserted it to be a " well-known fact that praying 
 dancers have never yet made their appearance in the world. 
 The species is altogether unknown. An earnest, humble, 
 spiritual-minded dancing Christian is a phenomenon not yet 
 brought to light." Mr. Dallas refers to a catena of divines 
 opposed to dancing, from St. Ambrose to the Rev. John 
 Northbrooke, who have yet had much to say in favour of 
 what they call spiritual dancing, such as that of King David. 
 — But the vexed question must not be further vexed in this 
 place, or by this pen. 
 
SCRIPTURE WARNING 
 
 only at their base and brutal worship of the Golden 
 Calf at Bethel, and by the unhappy lass wha 
 danced aff the head of John the Baptist." Nothing 
 doubts he of her having had cause to rue the day 
 that " e'er she suld hae shook a limb on sic an 
 errand." And better for her, he pronounces it, to 
 have been born a cripple, and carried " frae door to 
 door, like auld Bessie Bowie, begging bawbees, 
 than to be a king's daughter, fiddling and flinging 
 the gate she did." And David Deans blesses God 
 (with that singular worthy, Peter Walker the pack- 
 man at Bristo-Port,) that ordered his lot in his 
 dancing days, so that fear of his throat, dread of 
 bloody rope and swift bullet, stopped the light- 
 ness of his head, and the wantonness of his feet 
 — Dr. Currie speaks of the prevalence of a taste, or 
 rather passion for dancing, among a people so 
 deeply tinctured with the spirit and doctrines of 
 Calvin, as one of those contradictions which the 
 philosophic observer so often finds in national cha- 
 racter and manners; and this one he thinks is to be 
 ascribed to the Scottish music, which, in its livelier 
 strains, " awakes those vivid emotions that find in 
 dancing their natural solace and relief." He com- 
 ments on the toleration rather than approval, on 
 the part of the more elderly and serious part of 
 the people, of " those meetings of the young where 
 dancing is practised to their spirit-stirring music, 
 
AIStD SCRIPTURE WARRANT. . 103 
 
 where care is dispelled, toil is forgotten," etc. 
 Quite recently, Dr. Boyd has protested against 
 parents not allowing their children to be taught 
 dancing, " regarding dancing as sinful " — the result 
 being that the children are awkward, and not like 
 other children. Sir Ralph Esher complains in his 
 autobiography that he had never learned to dance, 
 in a home where it was looked upon as a thing 
 heavenly to abolish " every innocent recreation." 
 The most innocent people dance, he muses ; shep- 
 herds and country lasses. " The Jews danced. 
 Miriam danced and played on the timbrel, and 
 so did the royal psalmist. I have heard him 
 quoted a thousand times in defence of a good 
 slaughter ; why not in behalf of a saraband ? " 
 Mr. Erskine Clarke's plea for dancing, as one of 
 the most universal instincts of human nature, won 
 sympathy, at a Church Congress, not long ago, from 
 those who yet saw the practice, in the form most 
 easily attainable by the working classes, to be open 
 to the gravest possible objection, though attempts 
 have been made in several cases to surround it 
 with some of the safeguards which attend it in the 
 higher orders. "The difficulty of the experiment 
 seems to have been chiefly owing to the careless- 
 ness of parents " — there being usually among the 
 poor no middle course between forbidding all 
 amusement to the younger members of the family, 
 
104 DAXC1XG FOR JOY. * 
 
 and allowing them to do what they like in this way, 
 without check or supervision. 
 
 In joy and thanksgiving, said the pious and or- 
 thodox Jones of Xayland, the tongue is not content 
 with speaking ; it must evoke and utter a song, 
 " while the feet are also disposed to dance to the 
 measures of music, as was the custom in sacred 
 celebrations of old among the people of God, before 
 the world and its vanities had engrossed to them- 
 selves all the expressions of mirth and festivity. 
 They have now left nothing of that kind to religion, 
 which must now sit by in gloomy solemnity, and 
 see the World with the Flesh and the Devil assume 
 to themselves the sole power of distributing social 
 happiness." * 
 
 Reverting from the dance into which King David 
 
 * That very lovable and withal devout pastor, Mr. Che- 
 riton, in the story of The Gordian Knot, is condemned by 
 some of his more rigid brethren for permitting his children to 
 learn music and dancing ; but he smiles at some of his more 
 rigid brethren, and the lessons go on. To his wife, however, 
 he says, " I look to you, Nelly, to make Allan understand that 
 a deep love even of Mendelssohn does not comprise all the 
 virtues. And though you need not set the case of Herodias 
 before Bertha and Maggie, as poor, shallow, good old Rigby 
 did before me the other day. as an argument for stopping the 
 poor children's dance, I know that you, love, will make them 
 see why a carpet quadrille to-night does not mean an assembly 
 room ball to-morrow." — Chapter iiL 
 
ROYAL MUSICIANS. 105 
 
 has led us, to the music which was also his kingly 
 accomplishment, we may take note of the exist- 
 ence of an order of what may be called musical 
 monarchs, of whom — apart however from the dis- 
 tinctive characteristic of religious feeling in him — 
 the sweet singer and harpist of Israel may be ac- 
 cepted as the type. 
 
 It is remarked by Scott, in one of his critical 
 treatises, that in a very early period of civiliza- 
 tion, ere the division of ranks had been generally 
 adopted, the poetical art, with its adjunct, music, is 
 found to assure to its professors a very high rank ; 
 and that when separated into a distinct class (as 
 with the Celtic Bards, and perhaps the Skalds of 
 Scandinavia,) they rank high in the scale of society, 
 insomuch that we find kings not only listening to 
 them with admiration, but emulous of their art, and 
 desirous of being enrolled among their numbers. 
 Several of the most renowned northern kings, and 
 very many of the Welsh princes and Irish kings, 
 were musical practitioners. But in process of time, 
 as society graduates, the professor of music "be- 
 comes the companion and soother only of idle and 
 convivial hours ;" and his presence would be un- 
 becoming on occasions of gravity and importance, 
 for his art is now come to be " accounted at best 
 an amusing but useless luxury." At this stage, for 
 royalty to harp or lutanize is scouted severely as 
 
106 MUSICAL MONARCHS. 
 
 infra dig. "Are you not ashamed to sing so well ?" 
 was Philip's upbraiding question to his son, when 
 at a certain entertainment he charmed the company 
 by his vocal execution. Plutarch's comment on the 
 incident is, that it suffices for a prince to bestow a 
 vacant hour upon hearing the musical performance 
 of others ; and that he does the muses quite honour 
 enough if he patronizes with his presence the 
 exhibition of trained musical skill. As for that 
 degenerate Spartan king, Cleomenes, "beating a 
 drum with his royal hands about the palace," — to 
 Plutarch hardly could Parolles and his drum be an 
 object of more supreme contempt. Even so Gul- 
 liver, at Glubbdubdrib, when he craves a glimpse 
 of "a dozen or two of kings," professes to have 
 been, in the event, unexpectedly and grievously dis- 
 appointed ; for there were "fiddlers" among them, 
 and — in short, " I have too great a veneration for 
 crowned heads to dwell any longer on so nice a 
 subject." A sceptre is one thing, a fiddlestick 
 another, says the Latin proverb : Alia res spectrum, 
 alia plectrum. When Young would show how low 
 Imperialism may sink, to what depths of degrada- 
 tion Caesarism may descend, he pictures 
 
 "A Nero quitting his imperial throne, 
 And courting glory from the tinkling string." * 
 
 * The Caxtonian Essayist bestows a passing note of admi- 
 ration upon the eighteen hundred laurel crowns awarded by 
 
NERO'S SUSCEPTIBILITY TO MUSIC. 107 
 
 And yet the "good king Thibault " of Dante won 
 in part his good name and fame by his skill in 
 
 Athens to Nero as a musician. And it is suggested of that 
 misplaced Caesar that if his career had been a musician's, and 
 not an emperor's, he might indeed have been a voluptuary 
 (a musician not unfrequently is) — but a soft-tempered, vain, 
 praise-seeking infant of art, studying harmony, and nervously 
 shocked by discord, — as musicians generally are. 
 
 Nero's exclamation in the anguish of contemplating his 
 own death, " What an artist {artifex) is in me about to 
 perish !" has been taken to explain the enigma of his nature. 
 Qualis artifex pereo / Now by artifex Lord Lytton under- 
 stands something more than musician, as our current trans- 
 lations render the word, and even something more than artist, 
 as translated above. "Artifex means an artificer, a contriver ; 
 and I suspect that, in using the word, Nero was thinking of 
 the hydraulic musical contrivance which had occupied his 
 mind amidst all the terrors of the conspiracy which destroyed 
 him — a contrivance that really seems to have been a very 
 ingenious application of science to art, which we might not 
 have lost if Nero had been only an artificer, and not an 
 emperor." — Essay on the Sympathetic Temperament. 
 
 Harshness of conduct is said with truth to be no contra- 
 diction of extreme susceptibility to sentiment in writing — in 
 fact, argues the author of The Student, the one may be rather 
 a consequence than a contradiction of the other. Nor is the 
 contrast between softness in emotion and callousness in 
 conduct peculiar to poets. That sternest of tyrants, Alex- 
 ander of Pherse, shed a torrent of tears upon the acting of a 
 play ; (yet what was 'Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that 
 Alexander, king of Pherae, any more than Hamlet, prince of 
 Denmark, should weep for her ?) and " Nero was woman- 
 ishly affected by the harp." 
 We read of Gerald Durant, in Archie Lovell, with all his 
 
108 ROYAL HARPERS. 
 
 music as well as verse-making ; for the verses he 
 composed he used to sing in public to the viol, and 
 by all accounts very well he sang too. Dr. Burney's 
 History of Music gives what are believed to have 
 been the original melodies of two of the songs. 
 The middle ages offer us here and there what 
 Sainte-Beuve calls des henreuses surprises, from 
 Alfred finding a way with his harp into the camp 
 of the Danes, to Richard Cceur-de-Lion with trou- 
 vere's harp at his prison window. a Le siecle de 
 Saint Louis applaudissait aux chansons de Thibaut, 
 roi de Navarre." And so long as poetry was a 
 song, so long as harp and lyre were not mere meta- 
 phors, there was grace of a certain kind in the fact 
 of its being cultivated in the highest rank of all.* 
 
 loose ways and means, that a little French song could send 
 the tears into his eyes ; and the query is ironically proposed, 
 a son addresse, Are such natures to be called wicked or weak, 
 or only philosophical ? "While Rome burnt, Nero distracted 
 his thoughts with his violin. Perhaps when his turn for re- 
 habilitation comes, we shall be taught to see how blithe and 
 gentle and debomiaire poor Nero really was, and make a hero 
 of him." — Chapter vi. 
 
 * " Mais du moment que les vers, ramene's a Pe'tat de simple 
 composition litteraire, devinrent un art plus pre'eis, du moment 
 que les rimes durent se coucher par ecriture, et quil fallut, 
 bon gre mal gre, et nonobstant toutes metaphores, noircir du 
 papier, comme on dit, pour arriver a l'indispensable correction 
 et a 1 elegance, des lors il fut a peu pres impossible d'etre a 
 
RENE THE TROUBADOUR. 109 
 
 The son of Hugh Capet, Robert the Wise, con- 
 sulted at once his pronounced taste for music, 
 and his devotional temperament, when, as was fre- 
 quently the case, he led the choir of St. Denis. 
 He also composed hymns for monastic use. The 
 Portuguese chronicle, cited by Michelet, teaches 
 us that Don Pedro, after the death of Inez, was 
 possessed by a strange craving for music. But he 
 required it to be stunning, violent, made up of wind 
 instruments, and there were specially made for him 
 silver trumpets of inordinate length. The eldest 
 of Charles the Sixth's sons, the first dauphin, was 
 an indefatigable player on the harp and spinet. 
 Special mention, among musical monarchs, is due 
 to him Schiller introduces as 
 
 " Old king Rend, 
 Of tuneful song the master, most renown'd," 
 
 and whose daughter, Margaret of Anjou, in one of 
 Scott's historical novels, expresses herself weary 
 to disgust of the eternal tinkling of harps, and 
 squeaking of rebecks, and snapping of castanets, at 
 his little court.* James the First, of Scotland, 
 
 la fois roi et poete avec biense'ance." — Demiers Portraits 
 Litteraires : Francois I er Poete. 
 
 * The troubadour's crown of flowers was accounted by Rend 
 a valuable compensation for the diadems of Jerusalem, of 
 Naples, and of both Sicilies, of which he now possessed the 
 
no SHALLOW CONTEMPT FOR 
 
 sang beautifully, Tytlcr says, and not only accom- 
 panied himself upon the harp and the organ, but 
 
 empty titles only. A concert of fiddlers, and a troop of 
 morricc-dancers, seemed now his sole earthly wants. Freed 
 by diplomatic interest from personal and pecuniary vexations, 
 Rene was enabled to go piping and tabouring to his grave. 
 
 Scott makes the hot Duke of Burgundy exclaim on one 
 occasion, impatiently capping and at the same time dismissing 
 a proposition of the Earl of Oxford's, — "And King Renews 
 five hundred fiddlers to tune their cracked violins in my 
 praise? and King Rene' himself to listen to them, and say, 
 'Well fought, Duke— well played, fiddler !'" The scorn for 
 fiddling was highly pronounced in those days, and for many 
 a long day afterwards. During the reign of James III., 
 Rogers, whose musical compositions were fitted, say modern 
 critics, to refine and improve the barbarous taste of the age, 
 and eventually were highly esteemed in Scotland, was " ridi- 
 culed as a common fiddler or buffoon." A Saturday Reviewer, 
 discussing a sister art, somewhere hails in the massive head 
 of Herr Joachim, in the gravity of his face, and the energy of 
 its expression, a just rebuke of the Philistines, who consider 
 fiddling a light and trifling occupation ; asserting with em- 
 phasis that to pass one's life in the interpretation of great 
 music, as Herr Joachim does, and to bring to the task some 
 true greatness of one's own, is a destiny which, though beyond 
 the reach of most of us, and outside of our faculties and 
 tastes, is at least as noble as common business, and perhaps, 
 for the full development of modern civilization, almost as 
 necessary. A brother critic refers to the " old and charac- 
 teristically English notion about fiddling" — which in Chester- 
 field's time seems to have been the name for all musical 
 performance or predilection — " being an unmanly business, 
 only fit for Italians," as surviving even now in the minds of 
 many honest persons. An able anonymous essayist (in 
 
FIDDLING AND FIDDLERS. in 
 
 composed various airs and pieces of sacred music, 
 in which there was to be recognized the same 
 original and inventive genius which distinguished 
 this remarkable man in everything to which he 
 applied his mind. James the Third was also noted 
 for an addiction to the science and practice of music. 
 Our Richard the Third was so fond of singing that 
 he designed what Mr. Miles Beale calls " a sort of 
 Hullah class" — empowering an officer to seize for 
 
 Macmillan) on Classical Music and British Musical Taste, 
 utters a lament over a class of which he despairs utterly, — 
 those, namely, who consider the fruit of the thoughts which 
 absorbed the whole lives of such men as Handel and Beeth- 
 oven as pleasing trifles, fitted only for the occupation of 
 women ; and who place a fiddler in the same category with 
 man-milliners, men-cooks, and male opera-dancers. They 
 are said to be usually fond of repeating Swift's sneer 
 about tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, and to pride themselves 
 on their ignorance that tweedle-dum may possibly bear the 
 same relation to tweedle-dee that the tawdry lithograph on 
 the cover of the music-seller's ballad does to the Sistine 
 Madonna. "A writer in a late number of a well-known 
 journal delivered himself of one of the common opinions of 
 this class, when he spoke with contempt of those men who 
 fiddled and fluted to please women. The mere dangler after 
 women, at whom he justly sneers, is a man very unlikely to 
 play the fiddle. Indeed, we might say that we fancy that 
 your amateur fiddler is somewhat impatient of the presence 
 of the fair sex. An old friend of ours, much addicted to 
 quartett playing, would as soon have thought of sawing his 
 beloved ' Strad' up for firewood as of admitting his wife into 
 the music-room during the celebration of the mysteries." 
 
ROYAL MUSICIANS. 
 
 the king's chantries all such singing men and 
 children as he could find with voices up to the 
 mark. Lord Herbert records of our Henry VIII. 
 that "he was (which one might wonder at in a 
 king) a curious musician, as two entire masses 
 composed by him, and often sung in his chapel, 
 did abundantly witness." Kaiser Karl VI. was a 
 great musician, say the histories quoted by Mr. 
 Carlyle, — fit to lead orchestras, and had composed 
 an opera, — " poor Kaiser," is Mr. Carlyle's paren- 
 thetical comment on that fact. But no such plaintive 
 parenthesis is assigned to the flute-playing propen- 
 sities of his pet prince, Frederick the Great, whose 
 attachment to music so vexed that royal ursa major, 
 his peremptory sire — the latter flinging his son's 
 music into the grate, and breaking his flute ; so 
 that young Fritz was driven, as Archdeacon Coxe 
 tells us, to pass whole nights by stealth in pursuit 
 of his favourite recreation, holding concerts in 
 forests and caverns, during his hunting excursions, 
 with musicians privately supplied by his mother. 
 Those stolen waters were very sweet 
 
H3 
 
 VII. 
 temple QJttgfc* 
 
 I Chron. xvi. 41, 42 ; 2 Chron. v. 12, 13. 
 
 FOR the worship of the Temple, or of the 
 Tabernacle rather, since as yet the ark of 
 the covenant of the Lord remained under curtains, 
 King David appointed Heman* and Jeduthun, and 
 
 * Connected with the name of Heman there is a Curiosity 
 of Literary Blundering on recent record. Robert Southey, as 
 one narrator of it tells us, took some pains to give a correct 
 text of the Pilgrim's Progress; and in his edition, Hopeful 
 having wondered why Littlefaith had not plucked up a heart 
 and stood one brush with such a company of cowards as the 
 three brothers Faintheart, Mistrust, and Guilt, when they 
 robbed and wounded him in Deadman's Lane, Christian re- 
 plies that many had called them cowards, but few had found 
 it so in the time of trial ; that they had made David groan, 
 mourn, and roar, had sorely brushed the coats of Mordecai 
 and Hezekiah, though champions in their days, and had 
 handled Peter so that they made him afraid of a sorry girl. 
 N ow. as the critical detective remarks, it seems a thing for 
 wonder that Bunyan should have ranked Mordecai with 
 David, Hezekiah, and Peter ; but in truth he did not. " He 
 
 8 
 
114 HEM AN AXD HAM AX. 
 
 chosen others, expressed by name, to give thanks 
 to the Lord, because His mercy endureth for ever : 
 " And with them Heman and Jeduthun, with trum- 
 pets and cymbals for those that should make a 
 sound, and with musical instruments of God." In 
 His house should they praise Him, with the sound 
 of the trumpet, praise Him with the psaltery and 
 harp, praise Him with the timbrel and pipe, praise 
 Him with stringed instruments and organs, praise 
 Him upon the loud cymbals, praise Him upon the 
 high-sounding cymbals, — teaching by example 
 everything that hath breath to praise the Lord. — 
 When the Tabernacle of David gave place to the 
 Temple of Solomon, the Levites which were the 
 
 had set in the place which Southey gives to Mordecai one 
 who may be the man celebrated as second in wisdom to 
 Solomon, and certainly was a psalmist who in spiritual dark- 
 ness and terror cried from the lowest deep as a castaway. 
 This was Heman. Some editor who had never heard Heman's 
 name — like the mere matter-of-fact godfather who, being ask 
 to give the child a Bible name, proposed Baal-zebub — took the 
 next text that came, and changed Heman to Hainan. Then 
 Southey, or the editor from whom he copied, assured that 
 Bunyan could not have numbered Haman among the cham- 
 pions of the faith, concluded that since it was not Haman it 
 must be Mordecai. Mr. Offer has pointed out the progress 
 of this error, which in all probability was overlooked, not in- 
 vented, by Southey." One or two cognate cases of literary 
 .ring are exposed in the Saturday Review, vol. xxxi.. 
 
CHORAL UNISON. u 5 
 
 Singers, all of them of Asaph, of Heman, of Jedu- 
 thun, with their sons and their brethren, were 
 present at the consecration, arrayed in white linen, 
 having cymbals and psalteries and harps, and with 
 them an hundred and twenty priests sounding with 
 trumpets ; and it came even to pass, as the trum- 
 peters and singers were as one, — a choral unison 
 like that commemorated by Wordsworth among 
 the mountains, when, after a day of flooding rains, 
 loud was the vale — 
 
 " A mighty unison of streams 
 Of all her voices, one ! " — 
 
 to make one sound to be heard in praising and 
 thanking the Lord ; and when they lifted up their 
 voice (of all those voices one) with the trumpets and 
 cymbals and instruments of music, and praised the 
 Lord, saying, For He is good ; for His mercy 
 endureth for ever : that then the house was filled 
 with a cloud, even the house of the Lord ; so 
 that the priests could not stand to minister by 
 reason of the cloud ; for the glory of the Lord 
 had filled the house of God — which glory, never- 
 theless, so far as that house was concerned, was to 
 be done away. The Temple made with hands was 
 to be dissolved ; indeed Temple after Temple was 
 to dislimn like the baseless fabric of a vision, 
 leaving not onestone upon another, leaving not 
 
n6 STRINGED AND WIND INSTRUMENTS. 
 
 a rack behind. But music should survive that 
 Temple, and all Temples. Heaven should be 
 without a Temple, but in Heaven music should 
 never cease. " I saw no Temple therein," declares 
 the Revealer, St. John the Divine. But he heard 
 music, such as mortal ear elsewhere never heard, 
 neither had it entered into the heart of man to 
 conceive. 
 
 In order to give the best effect to the music of 
 the tabernacle, David made a division of the four 
 thousand Levites into twenty-four classes, who 
 sang psalms, and accompanied them with music. 
 Jahn gives a separate account, one by one, in his 
 Archccologia Biblica, of the various instruments in 
 use among the Hebrews ; whose music, he casually 
 remarks, may be thought to have been too 
 loud and noisy, " but opinion depends much on 
 personal habits and experience." Of stringed in- 
 struments he treats in succession of the most 
 ancient of its class, the harp, to which Josephus 
 in his Jewish Antiquities assigns twelve strings, a 
 small bow (plectrum) being used in his time, though 
 the instrument was originally played with the hand 
 only; and the psaltery, called in the Psalms "a 
 ten-stringed instrument," though Josephus gives 
 twelve for ten ; while of wind instruments the 
 most noteworthy are the so-called organ, nearly 
 
CONCERTED MUSIC. 117 
 
 equivalent to Pan's pipe; the horn or crooked 
 trumpet — whether made of the horns of oxen, or 
 of rams' horns, or of brass fashioned to resemble 
 these ; and the straight trumpet, a cubit in length, 
 an instrument largely in use, alike in peace and in 
 war, though sounded in different tones for such dif- 
 ferent issues. Tabrets, timbrels, and cymbals were 
 also in established use. From Babylon were adopted 
 various other instruments, if not all comprised in 
 the compendious list iterated and reiterated in the 
 Book of Daniel, — of cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, 
 psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music. Con- 
 certed music, of however simple and rude a character, 
 is of patriarchal antiquity; there is a hint of the 
 choral symphony in Laban's reproach of Jacob for 
 stealing away secretly, instead of being dismissed 
 with honour, after a festive parting, to be celebrated 
 "with songs, with tabret, and with harp." Sym- 
 phony, by the way, is the very word used in the 
 Greek, when the prodigal son in the parable is 
 welcomed back with a similar manifestation — for 
 as the elder brother, out in the fields, drew nigh 
 to the house, he heard av\i^viaq. The sym- 
 phonies of Jewish temple-sendee appear to have 
 been mainly, if not exclusively, choral ; that is, 
 with the intermingling of voices. Devoted (not to 
 say devout) admirers of the modern symphony 
 in its most perfect form, are apt to be jealous 
 
n8 VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL. 
 
 of the encroachment of vocal* upon instrumental 
 rights. The author of Contarini Fleming avows a 
 passion for instrumental music, and an indifference 
 to the human voice, which, in the concert-room, at 
 least, " appears to me, with all our exertions, a poor 
 instrument. Sense and sentiment, too, are always 
 sacrificed to dexterity and caprice. A grand 
 orchestra fills my mind with ideas — I forget every- 
 thing in the stream of invention. A prima donna 
 is very ravishing ; but while I listen I am a mere 
 man of the world, or hardly sufficiently well bred 
 to conceal my weariness." Whether he is more 
 than ravished by the Eroica or the Pastorale of 
 the master of all symphony-writing, one can only 
 
 * Some are even of opinion in the instance of Handel's 
 choruses, despite the overwhelming effect of the combined 
 masses of sound, that the junction of voices with instruments 
 is, upon the whole, disappointing, and undesirable ; an unac- 
 companied volume of voice-music being often so vastly more 
 effective, than when swelled by the co-operation of a band, 
 however magnificent in numbers and perfect in execution. 
 But the verdict of the majority would no doubt be the other 
 way. Milton might be quoted on their side, in regard of a 
 passage about the continuous strain of harp music, with 
 
 " The solemn pipe 
 And dulcimer, all organs of sweet stop, 
 All sounds on fret by string or golden wire, 
 Temper d soft tunings, intermix' d with voice 
 Choral or unison." 
 
 Paradise Lost, vii. 594. 
 
BEETHOVEN'S SYMPHONIES. no 
 
 speculate, and hope ; possibly Mr. Disraeli could 
 and would say with Dr. Ludwig Nohl, that he feels 
 to this day just as he felt to the innermost depths 
 of his heart in the days of his youth when he first 
 heard a symphony of Beethoven's — that a spirit 
 breathes from it bearing us aloft with giant power 
 out of the oppressive atmosphere of sense, stirring 
 to its inmost recesses the heart of man, brin^ino- 
 him to the full consciousness of his loftier beine. 
 and of the undying within him.* King George 
 of Hanover claims for instrumental music the 
 high prerogative, not merely of expressing every 
 sensation of the human heart, but also ot 
 portraying, in a manner universally intelligible, 
 the incidents of social life, the glad and sad occur- 
 rences of earthly existence, its occupations and 
 repose, its perfect tranquillity, nay, the very neigh- 
 bourhoods and landscapes, better, more closely, and 
 more home to the feelings, than painting and poetry 
 can do it. For this reason he compares it to a 
 universal language. It does not, he remarks, like 
 
 * "And even more distinctly than when a new world was 
 thus disclosed to his youthful feelings is the man fully 
 conscious that not only was this a new world to him, but a 
 new world of feeling in itself, revealing to the spirit phases 
 of its own, which, till Beethoven appeared, had never been 
 fathomed." — L. Nohl, Pref. to his edit, of Beethoven's Letters, 
 (Lady Wallace's translation). 
 
120 REPRESENTATIVE FUNCTIONS 
 
 vocal music, require the aid of words from any 
 language whatever to make itself understood in the 
 same sense and manner amongst all civilized com- 
 munities on the face of the globe, and exercise the 
 same influence on the heart and soul of nations 
 differing the most widely, according to the object 
 which the composer has in view. " The composer, 
 then, who is thoroughly acquainted with the pecu- 
 liar properties — the compass, the power, the softness 
 of each instrument, and can calculate their effects, 
 is qualified to attain the most surprising and won- 
 derful results by the skilful application of these 
 properties ; he has within his reach the means of 
 producing a complete, animated, and intelligible 
 poetry by instrumental music, without ever feeling 
 the necessity for words." Many classical compo- 
 sitions, the royal author adds, prove this : above 
 all the masterpieces of Beethoven, whose Pastoral 
 Symphony he analyses in some detail, to illustrate 
 his thesis ; his conclusion being, that " after an 
 accurate and profound examination of so complete 
 and masterly a composition," it were impossible to 
 dispute the high province of music to represent by 
 tones the various incidents of life more clearly and 
 impressively than any other art, as well as to excite 
 and express the manifold feelings of the human 
 heart. The former of these two functions may 
 easily be exaggerated ; the latter, not so. Goethe's 
 
OF INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC. 121 
 
 English biographer, with his wonted clearness 
 and force, urges the respect due to one car- 
 dinal consideration which lies at the very basis 
 of all argument on representative art. And this is, 
 that if the artist desire to express certain philoso- 
 phic conceptions by means of symbols, he must 
 never forget that, Art being Representative, the 
 symbols chosen must possess "in themselves" a 
 charm independent of what they mean : the forms 
 which are his materials, the symbols which are his 
 language, must in themselves have a beauty and an 
 interest, readily appreciable by those who do not 
 understand the occult meaning. Unless they have 
 this, Mr. Lewes says, they cease to be Art ; they 
 become hieroglyphics. "Art is picture-painting, 
 not picture-writing. Beethoven, in his Symphonies, 
 may have expressed grand psychological concep- 
 tions, which, for the mind that interprets them, may 
 give an extra charm to strains of ravishment ; but 
 if the strains in themselves do not possess a magic 
 if they do not sting the soul with a keen delight, 
 then let the meaning be never so profound, it will 
 pass unheeded, because the primary requisite of 
 music is not that it shall present grand thoughts, 
 but that it shall agitate the soul with musical 
 
 emotions 
 
 " * 
 
 * So again the poet who has only profound meanings, and 
 
122 ANALOGIES IN THE SISTER ARTS. 
 
 There are strains in music, it has been said, 
 masterpieces of great masters, epitomes of their 
 genius, which in actual performance occupy a few 
 minutes — a mere point of time ; but fraught with 
 such fulness of harmony, suggestive of such vast 
 ideas, pressing on the soul with such a weight of 
 undeveloped meaning, so absorbing to sense, rea- 
 son, and intellect, that the impression left on 
 
 not the witchery that must carry his expression of those 
 meanings home to our hearts, has failed. " The primary 
 requisite of poetry is that it shall move us ; not that it shall 
 instruct us." — Lewes' Life of Goethe, book vii., chap. vi. 
 
 Our best critics are generally, if not, like Hartley Coleridge, 
 always pleased with the discovery of analogies between the 
 sister arts ; and the refined critic last named pleases himself 
 with a parallel between English sacred architecture and the 
 music of Handel. Of the Grecian orders he says that, like 
 pictures, they are to be seen and comprehended at once, — 
 the whole and the parts are viewed together, and their 
 coherence is judged by the eye ; but our cathedrals, from their 
 screens, side aisles, transepts, and subsidiary chapels, can 
 never be seen altogether ; there is always, as when you are 
 listening to a solemn, rich, and varied harmony, employment 
 at once for memory and anticipation ; the whole is not 
 objected to the senses, but must be constructed by the imagi- 
 nation, — always implied, but never present. " Now the music 
 of Handel, though multitudinous as the ocean, possesses as 
 complete an unity as the simplest air, with the high excellence 
 that each part is prophetic, as it were, of the parts that are 
 successively to be unfolded." But here the dissertator breaks 
 off with a significant, " But I fear I don't make myself quite 
 understood." — Ignoramus o?i the Tine Arts, part i. 
 
SPELL IN SACRED MUSIC. 123 
 
 the memory is an event engaging a considerable 
 period of time ; or rather, for the space when we 
 sat under the spell, time* ceased, and we were 
 under another dispensation, dimly awake to the 
 influences of that eternity which runs along with 
 time, but is not measured by its moments or hours, 
 which for ever broods over us, but eludes the 
 slippery grasp of our senses. A critic of rare 
 culture and insight has said that we feel, on 
 returning from hearing The Messia/i, as if we had 
 shaken off some of our dirt and dross — as if the 
 world were not so much with us : our hearts are 
 elevated, and yet subdued, as if the glow of some 
 good action or the grace of some noble principle 
 had passed over them. "We are conscious of 
 having indulged in an enthusiasm which cannot 
 lead us astray — of having tasted a pleasure which 
 is not of the forbidden tree, for it is the only one 
 which is distinctly promised to be translated with 
 us from earth to heaven." Lady Eastlake almost 
 feels as if Handel's sacred music would have re- 
 
 * So Wordsworth, in reference to another sense ; but the 
 lines are here quoted from memory, and may be inexact : 
 
 " On a fair prospect some have look'd, 
 And felt, as I have heard them say, 
 As if the moving time had been 
 A thing as steadfast as the scene 
 On which they gazed themselves away." 
 
124 RELIGION AND HIGH ARI. 
 
 proved the French of infidelity, and enticed the 
 Scotch from Presbyterianism, — the latter the less 
 feasible of the two, she surmises, — for, of all the 
 fancies of a fretful conscience which liberty of 
 opinion has engendered, that which many excel- 
 lent people entertain on the subject of sacred 
 music seems to her the most perverse. Useless she 
 accounts it to argue with those who mistake a total 
 ignorance of the sacred things of art for a higher 
 sense of the proprieties of religion ; and who, if they 
 consistently follow up their own line of argument, 
 must class Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and indeed all 
 those whose powers have been of that high order 
 which only the highest themes could expand, as so 
 many delegates of Satan, mysteriously permitted 
 to entrap man to his fall through his loftiest in- 
 stincts of beauty and reverence — as if, alas ! he had 
 not enough to ruin him without that. " For those 
 who forge the temptation are the real foes. There 
 is no reasoning with those who think it wrong 
 to be edified except when in actual worship, and 
 wicked to praise God in any music but such as 
 is ordinary enough for the whole congregation to 
 join in. Human nature is a strange thing — never 
 a greater puzzle perhaps than when it conscien- 
 tiously abjures one of the few pure pleasures with 
 which the hands of virtue are strengthened here 
 below." This writer avows an unwillingness to 
 
HANDEL'S SUBLIMITY. 125 
 
 believe that any of the great composers ever at- 
 tempted to express the awful truths of sacred 
 subjects without hearts attuned to the task they 
 had undertaken * And the same pen denies the 
 possibility of conceiving that any religious com- 
 positions should exceed those of Handel in true 
 sublimity, that majesty of music surpassing his can 
 be heard in the flesh. " We feel that the sculptured 
 grandeur of his recitative fulfils our highest con- 
 ception of Divine utterance — that there is that in 
 some of his choruses which is almost too mighty 
 for the weakness of man to express, — as if those 
 stupendous words, ' Wonderful ! Counsellor ! The 
 
 * The instance is cited of Handel's jealousy when the 
 bishops sent him words for anthems, as he felt this implied 
 his ignorance of the Holy Scriptures. " I have read my 
 Bible," said he ; " I shall choose for myself," — and his 
 selection is pronounced better than theirs. Haydn is quoted 
 as writing at the commencement of all his scores, In nomine 
 Domini, or Soli Deo Gloria, and at the end of them 
 Laics Deo. " When I was occupied upon the Creation" 
 he says, " always before I sat down to the piano I prayed to. 
 God with earnestness that He would enable me to praise 
 Him worthily." And in reference to the fact that Mozart 
 composed his Requiem with the shadow of death upon him, 
 feeling it to be a solemn duty which he must work while 
 there was still life to fulfil, — the question is put : And who 
 is there that can hear it without the sense of its sublimity 
 being enhanced by the remembrance of its being the work 
 of the dying for the dead ? 
 
126 AIRS FOR CHURCH MUSIC. 
 
 Prince of Peace! ' could hardly be done justice to 
 till the lips of angels and archangels had shouted 
 them through the vast Profound in his tremendous 
 salvos of sound : and yet that, though the power, 
 of such passages might be magnified by heaven's 
 millions, their beauty could hardly be exalted." 
 The poetry of prose like this is of a higher strain, 
 and pays Handel deeper homage than does the 
 prosiness of poetry like Shenstone's — 
 
 "When Handel's solemn accents roll, 
 Each breast is fixed, each raptured soul 
 In sweet confusion lost." 
 
 But the oratorio has led us too far away from 
 church music, more properly so-called. What sort 
 of airs should be sung in church, is a very practical 
 question ; yet too often an impracticable one. It 
 was among the cherished' tenets of Kavanagh that 
 sacred melodies were becoming to sacred themes ; 
 he did not wish that in his church, as in some of 
 the French Canadian churches, the holy profession 
 of religion should be sung to the air of "When 
 one is dead, 'tis for a long time," — the command- 
 ments, aspirations heavenward, and the necessity 
 of thinking of one's salvation, to " The Frolics of 
 Spain," " Louisa was sleeping in a grove," or a 
 grand " March of the French Cavalry." Well 
 known as any jest perhaps in the copious collection 
 
PUTATIVE FATHERHOOD OF JESTS. 127 
 
 ascribed to Joseph Miller, is the mot fathered on 
 Rowland Hill, by way of plea for the appropriation 
 to hymnal purposes of secular airs, that 'twas a 
 shame the devil should have all the pretty tunes. 
 The venerable sometime pastor of Surrey Chapel 
 might be another Joseph Miller, to judge by the 
 paternity recklessly imputed to him of jests of all 
 sorts and sizes, with quite unlimited liability. 
 Facetiae that were already withered, stale, flat, and 
 unprofitable before he was born, have been freely 
 fathered upon him now he is dead. As though 
 upon the good man's tombstone the permit, or 
 special licence, had been engraved, Rubbish may be 
 shot here.' Talleyrand and Sheridan divide honours 
 with him in this respect, — there" being between all 
 three a pretty equal division made of these jocular 
 assets. George Selwyn, in his time, was recognized 
 by the voice of his contemporaries as Receiver- 
 General of Waif and Stray Jokes — a sufficient 
 proof, remarks a later wit, that he had plenty of 
 his own ; for as DAlembert sarcastically observed 
 to the Abbe Voisenon, who complained that he 
 was unduly charged with the absurd sayings of 
 others — " Monsieur TAbbe, on ne prete qu'aux 
 riches." Johnson, in his Life of Waller, after 
 repeating a mot ascribed to him, speaks to having 
 once heard it of some other man, and adds : 
 " Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about 
 
128 UNLIMITED LIABILITY. 
 
 the world, and are assigned successively to those 
 whom it may be the fashion to celebrate." Sainte- 
 Beuve writes of the bishop-count of Noyon, Cler- 
 mont-Tonnerre, that "selon l'usage du monde 
 cnvers ces reputations riches, une fois faites et 
 adopters, on lui pretait quantite de mots." Judge 
 Haliburton's Senator professes to be not very fond 
 of telling stories himself, for though one may know 
 them to be original, still they may not be new ; so 
 certain is he that the same thing has often been 
 said in different ages, and by people in different 
 countries, who were not aware that a similar idea 
 had occurred to and been expressed by others.* 
 
 , * "I have heard repartees and smart sayings related here 
 [in England], as having been uttered by well-known wits, 
 that I have myself heard in America, and often long before 
 they were perpetrated here. If you relate a story of that 
 kind, you are met by the observation, ' Oh, that was said by 
 Sydney Smith, or Theodore Hook, or some other wit of the 
 day.' " — The Season Ticket, chap. ii. 
 
 A reviewer of Mr. Timbs' Lives of Wits and Humorists 
 pointed out at the time that the very same story was told 
 by him, almost in the same words, of Foote and Sheridan : 
 the adjuncts were certainly different, and were very circum- 
 stantial, as in most of these verbal faceticej but the joke was 
 precisely the same. 
 
 George Peele's memory is truly said to have suffered con- 
 siderably by the Merry Conceited Jests that go under his 
 name ; his innocence of many of the scurrilous jests imputed 
 to him being probable enough. "It was an easy step," says 
 
129 
 
 VIII. 
 trumpet %om^ 
 
 Exod. xix. 16, sq.\ Judges vii. 18, sq. ; I Cor. xv. 52. 
 
 THE trumpet is second to no other musical 
 instrument as regards prominent mention in 
 holy writ. The voice of the trumpet exceeding loud, 
 was among the causes that made all the people in 
 the camp tremble, when the mount burned with 
 fire. And it was after the voice of the trumpet 
 
 one of his critics, to saddle " George," on the credit of some 
 real peccadilloes, as well as witticisms, of the Sheridan sort, 
 with many imaginary ones. 
 
 Many of the apophthegms ascribed to Publius Syrus are 
 thought to be probably due to others ; yet, as Lord Lytton 
 observes, the very imputation to him of sayings so exquisite, 
 attests his rank as the sayer of exquisite things. 
 
 Mr. Theodore Martin tells us that the reputation of Pro- 
 fessor Aytoun, as a motive power in Blackwood, absorbed by- 
 its powerful attraction all fragments of matter similar to his 
 own which entered the common system. 
 
 We find Lord Chesterfield writing to Sir Thomas Robinson, 
 in 1757, that "people have long thrown out their wit and 
 
 9 
 
130 TRUMPET TONES. 
 
 had sounded long, waxing louder and louder, that 
 Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice. 
 Gideon's stratagem against the host of Midian com- 
 prised a special use of the trumpet by each man of 
 his three hundred ; all, in unison, were to blow their 
 trumpets, at the appointed signal, and to cry, " The 
 sword of the Lord, and of Gideon ! " And the ex- 
 pedient was a triumph. The prophet is bidden cry 
 aloud, spare not, " lift up thy voice like a trumpet." 
 Homer can offer no simile so effective as that of 
 the trumpet to indicate the vibrant, ringing, clangor- 
 ous, resonant accents of the voice of Achilles : 
 
 humour under my name, by way of trial : if it takes, the true 
 father owns his child ; if it does not, the foundling is mine." 
 So Butler words it, in one of his metrical satires : 
 
 " The world is full of curious wit 
 Which those, that father, never writ," etc. 
 
 So again Hudibras in his epistle to Sidrophel, remarking, 
 
 " That all those stories that are laid 
 Too truly to you, and those made, 
 Are now still charged upon your score, 
 And lesser authors named no more." 
 
 Fra Rupert, in Landoi^s dramatic trilogy, exclaims, 
 
 ' ' And this too will be laid upon my shoulders. 
 If men are witty, all the wit of others 
 Bespangles them." 
 
 To apply the reflection of Shakspeare's cloistered, philo- 
 sophic duke : 
 
 " thousand 'scapes of wit 
 
 Make thee the father of their idle dream." 
 
A SUDDEN BLAST. 131 
 
 " As the loud trumpet's brazen mouth from far 
 With shrilling clangor sounds th' alarm of war, 
 Struck from the walls, the echoes float on high, 
 And the round bulwark and thick towers reply ; 
 So high his brazen voice the hero rear'd ; 
 Hosts dropp'd their arms, and trembled as they heard." 
 
 And was not the voice which John heard in Pat- 
 mos, saying, " I am Alpha and Omega," and which 
 sounded as from behind him, a great voice, as of a 
 trumpet ? 
 
 With trumpets the conspirators proclaimed Jehu 
 to be king. And when Athaliah, looking, saw the 
 newly proclaimed king, young Jehoash, standing 
 by a pillar, as the manner was, and heard how the 
 people of the land rejoiced, and "blew with trum- 
 pets," — then it was that the foiled and baffled dowa- 
 ger rent her robes, and cried " Treason, treason ! " 
 Racine makes his precautionary high-priest enjoin 
 his agents, in taking measures for the discomfiture 
 of cette reine, ivre d y iin fol orgueil, — 
 
 " Prenez soin qu'a l'instant la trompette guerriere 
 Dans le camp ennemi jette un subit effroi." 
 
 And one of his subordinates thus describes, in an 
 after scene, the success of that sudden blast — that 
 bray and blare of brazen trumpets : 
 
 " Partout en meme temps la trompette a sonnd ; 
 Et ses sons et leurs cris dans son camp etonnd 
 Ont repandu le trouble et la terreur subite 
 Dont Gideon frappa le fier Madianite." 
 
132 THE TRUMPET IN HOLY WRIT. 
 
 Trumpets were blown by the priests before the 
 ark. When Hezekiah commanded to offer the 
 burnt-offering upon the altar, the priests with the 
 trumpets stood by, and " the song of the Lord 
 began with the trumpets." With trumpets the 
 psalmist would have a joyful noise made before the 
 Lord. At the fall of Babylon, in apocalyptic vision, 
 the voice of trumpeters should be heard no more 
 at all in her. But the seer of Patmos has to tell of 
 seven angels, with each his trumpet,* which he 
 prepared to sound. And another apostle declares 
 in one epistle that the Lord Himself shall finally de- 
 scend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of 
 the archangel, and the trump of God ; awaking the 
 dead in Christ to rise first ; — and in another, that we 
 shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling 
 of an eye, at the last trump ; for the trumpet shall 
 sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, 
 and w r e shall be changed. 
 
 Milton once and again makes reference to the 
 sounding of that last blast of all. As where, in the 
 
 * An Edinburgh divine has told the world how, some time 
 since, an "individual" calling himself the Angel Gabriel held 
 large assemblages of the Modern Athenians in breathless 
 attention by preaching with a trumpet in his hand, which he 
 sounded at the end of each paragraph of his sermon. The 
 story implies that the modern, like the ancient Athenians, 
 love something new — anything for a sensation — r\ Kaivorepov. 
 
THE LAST TRUMP. 133 
 
 penultimate book of the Paradise Lost, we read of 
 
 the Son giving signal high to the bright minister 
 
 that watched : 
 
 "he blew 
 His trumpet, heard in Oreb since perhaps 
 When God descended, and perhaps once more 
 To sound at general doom." 
 
 Again, in the Ode on the Nativity : 
 
 " Yet first, to those ychain'd in sleep 
 The wakeful trump of doom must thunder thro' the deep ; 
 
 With such a horrid clang 
 
 As on Mount Sinai rang, 
 While the red fire and smouldering clouds out brake : 
 
 The aged earth aghast, 
 
 With terror of that blast, 
 Shall from the surface to the centre shake ; 
 
 When, at the world's last session, 
 The dreadful Judge in middle air shall spread His throne." 
 
 Young was no Milton ; and though he made 
 
 "The Last Day" his special topic, the strain we 
 
 hear is less sublime in effect than design : 
 
 " When, lo ! a mighty trump, one half conceal'd 
 In clouds, one half to mortal eye reveal'd, 
 Shall pour a dreadful note ; the piercing call 
 Shall rattle in the centre of the ball ; 
 The extended circuit of creation shake ; 
 The living die with fear, the dead awake. 
 
 Oh ! powerful blast, to which no equal sound 
 Did e'er the frighten'd ear of nature wound." 
 
 George Herbert cannot refrain from quaint con- 
 cetti even with " Doomsday " for his theme, picturing 
 as he does the stirring dust that rubs its eyes 
 
134 THE LAST TRUMP. 
 
 at the clarion summons, " while this member jogs 
 the other, each one whispering, Live you, brother ? 
 
 " Dust, alas, no music feels, 
 But thy trumpet : then it kneels, 
 As peculiar notes and strains 
 Cure Tarantula's raging pains." 
 
 The close of Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia's 
 Day recognizes the movement of the spheres as 
 initiated by the power of sacred lays ; and — 
 
 " So when the last and dreadful hour 
 The crumbling pageant shall devour, 
 The trumpet shall be heard on high, 
 The dead shall live, the living die, 
 And Music shall untune the sky." * 
 
 Sound the horns ! is the bidding of the royal 
 
 warrior, in the Saga of King Olaf: 
 
 "And suddenly through the drifting brume 
 The blare of the horns began to ring, 
 Like the terrible trumpet shock 
 
 Of Regnarock, 
 On the Day of Doom ! » 
 
 Plutarch narrates as it w T ere with 'bated breath, 
 
 in his Life of Sulla, how, one day, when the sky 
 
 was serene and clear, there was heard in it the 
 
 sound of a trumpetf so loud, so shrill and mourn- 
 
 * The last line is disapproved of by the critics as falling 
 flat upon the preceding description. " I could wish/' says 
 Johnson, "the antithesis of music untuning had some other 
 place." 
 
 t We read in the life of Anthony a Wood of an alarm at 
 
THE BLAST THAT WAKES THE DEAD. 135 
 
 ful, that it frightened and astonished all the world. 
 " The Tuscan sages said it portended a new race 
 of men, and a renovation of the world." Mrs. 
 Hemans has a lyric the first stanzas of which 
 describe the rousing of a land by trumpet blast ; 
 while the closing one peals a solemn note of inter- 
 rogation : 
 
 " And all this haste, and change, and fear, 
 By earthly clarion spread ! 
 How will it be when kingdoms hear 
 The blast that wakes the dead ?" 
 
 A later and more vigorous poetess has this anti- 
 papal stanza in her Poems before Congress, on the 
 subject of Christmas Gifts at Rome : His Holiness, 
 who "sits in the place of the Lord," the central 
 figure, and the object of metrical onslaught : 
 
 " Cardinals left and right of him, 
 Worshippers round and beneath, 
 
 The silver trumpets at sight of him 
 Thrill with a musical blast : 
 
 But the people say through their teeth, 
 1 Trumpets ? we wait for the Last ! ' n 
 ***** 
 
 The sound of a trumpet, in Mozart's infancy, is 
 
 Oxford one Sunday during service-time, when a terrible wind 
 raged, — " and at that time a trumpet or trumpets sounding 
 neare that Cross-inn dore, to call the soldiers together, because 
 of the present plott, they in the church cried out that the Day 
 of Judgment was at hand." — Life of Wood, July 31, 1659. 
 
136 THE TRUMPETS LOUD CLANGOR. 
 
 said to have threatened him with convulsions. To 
 such a man, observes the essayist of the Seer, and 
 especially so great a master, every right of a horror 
 of discord would be conceded,* supposing his ear 
 to have grown up as it began ; but that it did not 
 so is manifest from his use of trumpets. The 
 essayist himself, by the way, is, in his poetical mis- 
 cellanies, largely given to the use of trumpets. 
 Thus, in the Story of Rimini, we have a sustained 
 
 blast of 
 
 " trumpets clear, 
 A princely music, unbedinn'd with drums ; t 
 The mighty brass seems opening as it comes, 
 And now it fills, and now it shakes the air, 
 And now it bursts into the sounding square ; . . . 
 Then with a long-drawn breath the clangors die, 
 The palace trumpets give a last reply," etc. 
 
 In Captain Sword and Captain Pen, " the trum- 
 pets their visible voices reared." And in another 
 section of that poem, Leigh Hunt combines, 
 with characteristic epithets, the two instruments 
 
 * In reference to the moot-point, who is to judge at what 
 nice degree of imperfection the disgust is to begin, where no 
 disgust is felt by the general ear. 
 
 + Dryden is not careful to favour any such superstition : 
 
 " The trumpet's loud clangor 
 
 Excites us to arms, 
 With shrill notes of anger 
 
 And mortal alarms, 
 The double double double beat 
 
 Of the thundering drum," eta 
 
AN INSPIRITING BLAST. 137 
 
 we have seen him fain to keep asunder: "Sneereth* 
 the trumpet, and stampeth the drum." In his 
 verses, again, entitled " Power and Gentleness," he 
 repeats the epithet when speaking of "the harsh 
 bray the sneering trumpet sends across the fray." 
 There is no sneer in the trumpet tones heard by 
 Bunyan when Christiana and her boys are let in at 
 the wicket gate : " This done, he [the keeper of the 
 gate] called to a trumpeter that was above, over 
 the gate, to entertain Christiana with shouting, and 
 sound of trumpet, for joy. So he obeyed, and 
 sounded, and filled the air with his melodious 
 notes." But the accepted function of the instru- 
 ment seems to be Martem accendere cantu, as Virgil 
 says of a trumpeter; so martially inspiriting is 
 the blare. The goddess of Athens was supposed 
 to have invented a peculiar trumpet used by her 
 favoured votaries. At the battle of Salamis, " the 
 trumpet inflamed them with its clangor," says 
 ^Eschylus, who was there that day. Lipsius has 
 much to tell us of the Roman trumpet, in his 
 De Militid Rornanu : one noteworthy point, re- 
 
 * Why this is affectations, censors of the Cockney school, 
 as it once was styled, will be apt to say. John Keats, the 
 cock of that Cockney school, so called, has an equally odd 
 epithet for the trumpet, in his Eve of St. Agnes, where we 
 read how, " up, aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to 
 chide? 
 
138 SONOROUS METAL. 
 
 counted by Gibbon, is, that the charge was sounded 
 by a horse-trumpet of solid brass, as distinguished 
 from the retreat, which was sounded by the foot- 
 trumpet of leather and light wood ; but this per- 
 tains rather to the times of the decline and fall of 
 the empire than to the palmy days of ancient 
 Rome. In his elaborate description of the triumph 
 of Paulus ^Emilius, Plutarch is particular to men- 
 tion that the trumpets came first, not with such 
 airs as are used in a procession of solemn entry, but 
 with such as the Romans sounded when animating 
 their troops to the charge. 
 
 In Chaucer's Knightes Tale we catch on echo of 
 
 " Pypes, trompes, nakers, and clariounes, 
 That in the batail blewe bloody sownes." 
 
 That is a sonorous line of Milton's, in the pro- 
 cession to the Stygian Council, "Sonorous metal 
 blowing martial sounds." And in the following 
 book, when describing the departing from the 
 council of the " grand infernal Peers," he writes : 
 
 " Then of their session ended they bid cry, 
 With trumpets' regal sound the great result: 
 Towards the four winds four speedy Cherubim 
 Put to their mouths the sounding alchemy, 
 By herald's voice explain'd ; the hollow abyss 
 Heard far and wide." * 
 
 * The metallic clangor is in this instance answered with 
 a vocal outburst fully its match ; for, " all the host of Hell 
 
STIRRING SOUND OF THE TRUMP. 139 
 
 Jam litui strcpunt, is the sure signal for doughty 
 deeds of arms. Experience has proved, says 
 Gibbon, that the mechanical operation of sounds, 
 by quickening the circulation of the blood and 
 spirits, will act on the human machine more forcibly 
 than the eloquence of reason and honour. Butler 
 speaks of " trumpet and of drum, that makes the 
 warrior's stomach come — 
 
 " For if a trumpet sound, or drum beat, 
 Who has not a month's mind to combat ?" 
 
 Fray Antonio Agapida bears record of the famous 
 Count de Tendilla, that he permitted no sound of 
 
 with deafening shout return'd them loud acclaim." Readers 
 of Scott may recall his account of the thrilling and astounding 
 clamour to which each Welshman lent his voice with all the 
 energy of defiance, thirst of battle, and hope of conquest, 
 when the standard of Gwenwyn was raised against Raymond 
 Berenger ; the blast of the Norman trumpets being fairly over- 
 borne by the vocal vehemence of the Welshmen. " Cherily 
 as they rung, the trumpets, in comparison of the shout which 
 they answered, sounded like the silver whistle of the stout 
 boatswain amid the howling of the tempest." In another of his 
 works Sir Walter speaks of the " long and melancholy notes 
 sent forth " by trumpets, — as if this were their characteristic 
 music ; but the occasion is funereal, and the trumpets have 
 " banners of crape " attached to them. Funereal that music, 
 however, inevitably sounds in some ears ; as in those of the 
 matres in Horace's first ode : "aghast pale mothers hear the 
 trumpeter, and loathe the murderous blast," — as Father Prout 
 pretty freely Englishes the lituo tubce fiermixtus sonitus 
 passage, bellaque matribus detestata. 
 
i4o CLAMOROUS HARBINGERS OF WAR. 
 
 lute, or harp, or song, or other emasculating min- 
 strelsy, to be heard in his fortress : no other music 
 was allowed than "the wholesome rolling of the 
 drums, and braying of the trumpet, and such-like 
 spirit-stirring instruments as fill the mind with 
 thoughts of iron war." Not but that warrior bold 
 can, on occasion, if it is in him, wax sentimental 
 too at the trumpet's sound ; after the manner, for 
 instance, of Dr. Croly's Salathiel, who thus dis- 
 courses of its effect : " Every blast from the palace- 
 roof was answered for miles around. The whole 
 horizon was alive with enemies; and yet, if in every 
 call captivity and death had not been the language, 
 this circling echo of the noblest of all instrument, 
 coming in a thousand various tones from the varied 
 distances, softened by the dewy freshness of the 
 night, and breathing from sources invisible, as if 
 they were inspired by the winds, or poured from 
 the clouds, might have seemed sublime." 
 
 Shakspeare had an open ear for the martial 
 influences of what Macduff calls " those clamor- 
 ous harbingers of blood and death." His Antony 
 summons the trumpeters, before Alexandria, with 
 brazen din to blast the city's ear. His Agamem- 
 non summons one to give with his trumpet a loud 
 note to Troy, that " the appalled air may pierce 
 the head of the great combatant," Hector, and 
 hail him hither. Ajax is still broader and more 
 
ARCHANGELS TRUMP. i 4 r 
 
 boisterous in style, as becomes the manner of the 
 man : 
 
 " Thou, trumpet, there's my purse. 
 Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe ; 
 Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek 
 Outswell the colic of puff'd Aquilon ; 
 Come, stretch thy chest, and let thine eyes spout blood : 
 Thou blow'st for Hector." 
 
 But of these trumpet tones the echo is endless, 
 will be unless a pause be enjoined, a full stop 
 peremptorily enforced. With one brief flourish 
 from Wordsworth be the strain concluded, and yet 
 no flourish either, but a grave passage, suggestively 
 solemn, if not sublime : — 
 
 " The trumpet (we, intoxicate with pride, 
 Arm at its blast for deadly wars) 
 To archangelic lips applied, 
 The grave shall open, quench the stars." 
 
142 
 
 IX. 
 pairing; (Cattf, but bearing not* 
 
 Jeremiah v. 21. 
 
 LARGE is the meaning, as well as frequent the 
 reference, in Scripture, to ears which lack 
 the sense of hearing. An aesthetical application of 
 it in the interests of music may perhaps be sanc- 
 tioned for the nonce. Be it, then, allowably (and, 
 as old-fashioned divines understand the phrase, 
 accommodatingly) applied in this place in the sense 
 of Elia's celebrated Chapter on Ears. That essay 
 opens with the bold announcement, unconditionally 
 made in a one-line paragraph per se, " I have no 
 ear." By which negative affirmation, however, the 
 essayist means, forthwith explaining his meaning, 
 not that he was by nature destitute of those " ex- 
 terior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and 
 (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the 
 human capital;" nor that, like Defoe, he had 
 suffered hideous disfigurement in that quarter ; but 
 
NO EAR FOR MUSIC. T43 
 
 that he had simply no ear for music. True, it were 
 a foul self-libel in him to say that his heart never 
 melted at the concord of sweet sounds — for " In 
 Infancy," and that other dulcet strain of Dr. Arne's, 
 " Water parted from the sea," never failed to move 
 it strangely ; and Elia even believed that " senti- 
 mentally " he was predisposed to harmony. But 
 "organically" he was, on his own showing, incapable 
 of a tune;* and scientifically, he could never be made 
 to understand (though he had taken some pains) 
 what a note in music is ; or how one note should 
 differ from another.t There is Charles Lamb's 
 usual whimsicality of exaggeration in all this. But 
 with something of a grotesque seriousness he com- 
 
 * " I have been practising ' God save the King ' all my 
 life ; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary 
 corners ; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many 
 quavers of it." — Essays of Elia; A Chapter on Ears. 
 
 t " Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from 
 a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass I contrive to 
 guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and disagree- 
 able." — Ibid. 
 
 At Mr. Macpherson's, in Slate, Dr. Johnson told his en- 
 tertainer that he knew a drum from a trumpet, and a bagpipe 
 from a guitar ; and that he declared to be about the extent 
 of his knowledge of music. Boswell speaks of him, during 
 their tour to the Hebrides, as apparently fond of the 
 bagpipe ; for he would often stand for some time with his ear 
 close to the great drone ; and at Armidale, Dunvegan. Col, 
 etc., they had the music of the bagpipe every day. 
 
144 ELIA'S AVOW. 
 
 plains how hard it is to stand alone in an age like 
 this, — (constituted to the quick and critical per- 
 ception of all harmonious combinations, he verily 
 believes, beyond all preceding ages, "since Jubal 
 stumbled upon the gamut,") — to remain, as it were, 
 singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an 
 art " which is said to have such an especial stroke 
 at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions." 
 Yet, for his part, Elia candidly owns to having 
 received a great deal more pain than pleasure from 
 "this so cried-up faculty." He denies not that, in 
 the opening of a concert, he has experienced some- 
 thing vastly lulling and agreeable ; but afterwards, 
 and all too soon, followed the languor and the 
 oppression ; and " like that disappointing book in 
 Patmos " were these bitter-sweets to him. 
 
 When Homer says of his own blind bard that the 
 Muse gave him good and evil, depriving him of his 
 eyes, but granting him the gift of song, we under- 
 stand, says Robert Southey, the compensation : 
 
 Tbu iripi MoOcr £<pi\r}cre, didov d'ayaddv re Kaicbv re, 
 '0(pda\fiQv yJkv dfiepae, didov dydelav doid-qv ; — 
 
 but what, the Doctor asks, can compensate a 
 musician for the loss of hearing ? There is no 
 inward ear * to be the bliss of solitude ; though, as 
 
 * Victor Hugo's deaf bellringer of Notre Dame finds his 
 delight in seeing the movements he cannot hear. On one 
 
A DEAF MUSICIAN. 145 
 
 Wordsworth has taught us, an inward eye there 
 is. The Doctor's discourse concerns that good old 
 Lutanist of the seventeenth century, Master Thomas 
 Mace, whose Musics Monument is a folio volume 
 of mark — " matchless " is Dr. Burney's epithet for 
 it, — and to whom " Time did this wrong," that it 
 deprived him of his highest gratification, for he 
 became so deaf that he could not hear his own lute. 
 A deaf musician is not the man one would consult 
 for an impartial judgment on the vexed question, 
 whether total deafness or stone blindness is the 
 greater calamity* Milton's total eclipse of eye- 
 
 occasion, for instance, we read of Quasimodo, that when, 
 in the high loft of the belfry, he had set the six bells in 
 motion, when he felt that bunch of bells swinging in his 
 hand ; when he saw, for he could not hear, the palpitating 
 octave running up and down that sonorous scale, like a bird 
 hopping from twig to twig ; when u the demon of Music, 
 that demon which shakes a glittering quiver of stretti, trills, 
 and arpeggios," had taken (demoniacal) possession of the 
 poor deaf bellringer, he forgot all his troubles, and was once 
 again happy. 
 
 * Chesterfield is recording his sufferings from the stone 
 (not stone-blindness), _when he thus writes to his son : " God 
 keep you from that and deafness ! other complaints are the 
 common and almost the inevitable lot of human nature, but 
 admit of some mitigation ; " which, by implication, deafness 
 does not. Chesterfield spoke feelingly ; but what were his 
 feelings to a Beethoven's, but as moonlight is to sunlight, or 
 as water is to wine ! As for your ordinary deaf man, cynical 
 Chamfort disposes of hi?n, and of the pity that is felt (or at 
 
 10 
 
j 46 MENDELSSOHN'S DREAD OF DEAFNESS. 
 
 sight wrought him no such misery, either in degree 
 or in kind, as Beethoven suffered from the deafness 
 which for him totally eclipsed the sunshine of Life. 
 How the horror of such a fate affected Mendelssohn 
 may be seen in a passage of Madame Polko's Life 
 of him, where we read that at a rehearsal of the 
 "Messiah" at Leipzig, "Mendelssohn started up 
 from the piano in the most violent agitation, ex- 
 claiming, 'I am deaf!'" At once his physician 
 was summoned, and the attack soon passed away; 
 but never was the patient so scrupulous as then in 
 not throwing the prescribed physic to the dogs, but 
 
 least expressed) for him, after this style : " On croit le sourd 
 malheureux dans la societe. N'est-ce pas un jugement 
 prononce par l'amour-propre de la societe, qui dit : Cet 
 homme-la n'est-il pas trop a plaindre de n'entendre pas ce que 
 nous disons ?" 
 
 Montaigne says in one of his essays, " If I were compelled 
 to choose, I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight 
 than my hearing and speech." It was mainly in regard of 
 the pleasures of conversation that he pronounced this hypo- 
 thetical preference. 
 
 David Hartley incidentally observes that, from comparing 
 the imperfections of such persons as have never heard, with 
 those of persons that have never seen, it appears that the ear 
 is of much more importance to us, considered as spiritual 
 beings, than the eye. This he ascribes to the great use and 
 necessity of words for the improvement of our knowledge, 
 and enlargement of our affections. See Hartley's Theory of 
 luman Mind, Sect, v., Prop. xxvi. 
 
BEETHOVEN'S DIRE AFFLICTION. 147 
 
 conscientiously swallowing it, day and night, if 
 haply, and happily, so overwhelming a calamity 
 might be warded off; as most happily, and com- 
 pletely, it was. 
 
 As early as 1800 we find Beethoven complain- 
 ing in his letters of the too evident inroads of this 
 aggressive malady. " Your Beethoven is very un- 
 happy," he writes to Pastor Amenda in that year ; 
 "you must know that one of my most precious 
 faculties, that of hearing, is become very defective. 
 .... Whether I shall ever be cured remains to be 
 seen ; it is supposed to proceed from the state of 
 my digestive organs." Again : " Oh, how happy 
 should I now be, had I my full sense of hearing ; 
 ... I must withdraw from everything. My best 
 years will thus pass away, without effecting what 
 my talents and powers might have enabled me 
 to perform. How melancholy is the resignation in 
 which I must take refuge ! I had determined to 
 rise superior to all this, but how is it possible ? If 
 in the course of six months my malady be pro- 
 nounced incurable, then, Amenda, I shall appeal 
 to you to leave all else and come to me, when 
 I intend to travel (my affliction is less distressing 
 when playing and composing, and most so in inter- 
 course with others), and you must be my com- 
 panion." To Wegeler he writes in the same year, 
 that his hearing during the last three, has been 
 
148 BEETHOVEN NO MISANTHROPE. 
 
 getting gradually worse ; that his doctor has striven 
 to restore the tone of his digestion by tonics, and 
 his hearing by oil of almonds, all to no effect ; for 
 while his digestion continued in its former plight, 
 his hearing became worse. " My ears are buzzing 
 and ringing perpetually, day and night. I can with 
 truth say that my life is very wretched ; for nearly 
 two years past I have avoided all society, because I 
 find it impossible to say to people, / am deaf ! In 
 any other profession this might be more tolerable, 
 but in mine such a condition is truly frightful. 
 Besides, what would my enemies say to this ? — and 
 they are not few in number." * Numerous anecdotes 
 
 * Later again he tells the same correspondent, " You could 
 scarcely believe what a sad and drear}- life mine has been for 
 the last two years ; my defective hearing even-where pursuing 
 me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear 
 a misanthrope ; and yet no one in reality is less so. ;: In the 
 remarkable letter addressed by Beethoven in 1802 to his 
 brothers Carl and Johann, he describes himself as one who, 
 born with a passionate and susceptible temperament, and 
 keenly alive to the pleasures of society, had been obliged 
 early in life to isolate himself, and to pass his existence in 
 solitude. If at any time he resolved to surmount all this, he 
 was repelled by the ever-saddening experience of his defective 
 hearing : and he found it impossible to bid others u speak 
 louder, shout ! for I am deaf." How could he proclaim his de- 
 ficiency in a sense which ought to have been more perfect with 
 him than with other men ? — a sense which he once possessed 
 in the utmost perfection, to an extent indeed that few of his 
 
BEETHOVEN'S INCURABLE MALADY. 149 
 
 represent Beethoven as very susceptible, and very- 
 passionate. The fact is made use of by Mr. Herbert 
 
 profession ever enjoyed. " My misfortune is doubly severe 
 from causing me to be misunderstood." Therefore prays he 
 to be forgiven by his brothers when they see him withdraw 
 from those with whom he would so gladly mingle. " What 
 humiliation when any one beside me heard a flute in the dis- 
 tance, while I heard nothing, or when others heard a shep- 
 herd singing, and still I heard nothing ! Such things brought 
 me to the verge of desperation, and well-nigh caused me to 
 put an end to my life." Towards the close of this letter the 
 tempest-tossed and not comforted writer appeals to the 
 Searcher of hearts, as knowing that love for man and feelings 
 of benevolence have their abode in His, — "Oh, ye who may 
 one day read this, think that you have done me injustice." 
 And then he bids Carl and Johann, as soon as he is no more, 
 beg Professor Schmidt, in his name, to describe his malady, 
 " and to add these pages to the analysis of my disease, that 
 'at least, as far as possible, the world may be reconciled to 
 me after my death." Six years later we find him telling his 
 " dear old friend " Wegeler again of the demon that has taken 
 up a settled abode in his ears ; and again mooting in morbid 
 mood the question of self-slaughter. To Bettina, about the 
 same time, he writes : " My ears are, alas, a partition-wall, 
 through which I can with difficulty hold any intercourse with 
 my fellow-creatures." 
 
 Of the effect this malady produced upon Beethoven's 
 character, we may be reminded by that produced by it in the 
 instance of the painter Goya, whose deafness, so complete 
 that he could not hear the discharge of firearms, was the 
 result of a violent cold. Though the infirmity was in Goya's 
 instance absolutely incurable, and all hope of even alleviating 
 it was wanting, he is said to have found means of replacing 
 the lost sense to some extent by his extraordinary precision of 
 
EMOTIONAL ELABORATION. 
 
 Spencer in his argument touching the extremely 
 acute sensibilities of musical composers as a rule ; 
 it is part of his evidence to show that as the tones, 
 intervals, and cadences of strong emotion were the 
 elements out of which song was elaborated, so a 
 still stronger degree of emotion produced the 
 elaboration. And he shows that the same passion- 
 ate, enthusiastic temperament which naturally leads 
 the musical composer to express the feelings pos- 
 sessed by others as well as himself, in extremer 
 intervals and more marked cadences than they 
 would use, also leads him to give musical utter- 
 ance to feelings which they either do not experience, 
 or experience in but slight degrees. Hence arise 
 more involved musical phrases, conveying more 
 complex, subtle, and musical feelings. And thus, 
 we may, as he suggests, in some measure under- 
 stand how it happens that music not only so excites 
 our more familiar feelings, but also produces feel- 
 ings we never had before — arouses dormant senti- 
 ments, of which we had not conceived the possibility 
 and do not know the meaning ; or, as Richter says, 
 
 ocular observation ; persons who knew him saying that so 
 long as he could watch the lips of the speaker there was not 
 even a suspicion of his deafness. But the influence of the mis- 
 fortune upon his character was confessedly most unfavour- 
 able: he became irritable and sarcastic, saying and writing 
 the severest things even of his most intimate friends. 
 
FROM BEETHOVEN TO SHAKSPEARE. 151 
 
 " tells us of things we have not seen and shall not 
 sec." This the music of deaf Beethoven emphati- 
 cally does : 
 
 " The tones are mix'd, 
 Dim, faint, and thrill and throb betwixt 
 The incomplete and the unfix'd. 
 " Therein a mighty mind is heard 
 In mighty musings, inly stirr'd, 
 And struggling outward for a word. 
 " Until these surges, having run 
 This way and that, give out as one 
 An Aphrodite of sweet tune." 
 
 But this is digressing; and whom would not 
 Beethoven make to digress, and within what limits ? 
 Paulo minora canamus. 
 
 More than one grave objector has fallen foul of 
 Shakspeare's celebrated lines, assuming them to have 
 expressed his own personal feeling in the matter, 
 and not merely to have a dramatic propriety from 
 the lips of Lorenzo, when moonlight was sleeping 
 on the bank in the avenue at Belmont, and the 
 sounds of music crept in the ears of him and 
 Jessica, — soft stillness and the night heightening 
 the touches of sweet harmony : 
 
 " The man that hath no music in himself, 
 Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
 Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; 
 The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
 And his affections dark as Erebus : 
 Let no such man be trusted." 
 
IXDIFFEREXCE TO MUSIC. 
 
 Just so, again, does Shakspeare's Caesar avow his 
 distrust of " that spare Cassius" (would he were 
 fatter !), who so seldom smiles, and, though he 
 reads much, "he hears no music."* Owen Feltham 
 affirms of those who altogether despise music, that 
 they may well be suspected to be somewhat of a 
 savage nature. " And I think he has not a mind 
 rightly formed, whose zeal is not inflamed by a 
 heavenly anthem. . . . We find that in Heaven 
 there are Hallelujahs sung." William Tytler, natu- 
 rally partial to music, used to assign to it what Mac- 
 kenzie calls " a degree of moral importance which 
 some might deem a little whimsical." He used to say 
 
 * Olivia Marchmont, in the novel, is specially and cha- 
 racteristically denied anything like musical sensibility. All 
 things that compose the poetry and beauty of life are denied 
 to her, in common with the tenderness which constitutes the 
 main charm of womanhood. She would indeed sit by the 
 piano while Mary, her step-daughter, revelled in the delights 
 of the great masters, and would watch those slight hands 
 wandering over the keys, while the player's soul wended its 
 flight into trackless regions of dreamland ; but the elder 
 woman " heard nothing in the music but so many chords, so 
 many tones and semi-tones, played in such or such a time." 
 King Rene, in Anne of Geierstein, being assured by one of 
 the musicians whom he presses to remember the tunes his 
 daughter Queen Margaret approved, that he had never known 
 her Majesty endure any strain with patience, threatens to turn 
 the plain-spoken truth-speaker out of his service for slandering 
 the taste of his daughter. 
 
MUSIC OF THE EASTERNS. 153 
 
 that he never knew a good taste in music associated 
 with a malevolent heart* The table-talk of 
 Luther is no way chary of praise of song. Except 
 theology, there is no art which can be placed in 
 comparison with music, he says on one occasion ; 
 on another, — " As for them who despise music, the 
 dreamers and mystics, I despise them." Again : 
 " Singing is the best exercise there is : we have 
 nothing else at all comparable with it. ... I am 
 glad that God has denied to those obstinate rebels 
 of peasants a gift so valuable, so full of consolation ; 
 they do not care for music, and they reject the 
 word of God." 
 
 That the Easterns, generally, have no ear, may 
 be a travellers' tale, but it is a more than twice-told 
 one. " Djebel Druse," for instance, is certainly not 
 the land of song, the author of The Modern Syrians 
 remarks, " and nothing harrows up the ears like its 
 merciless music." Not that he means to say that 
 Arab music is altogether disagreeable when one 
 gets accustomed to it ; but he never heard the song 
 and tabor of the Druses without pain. " The per- 
 fection of vocal music in Lebanon is to be throaty 
 
 * Being asked what prescription he would recommend for 
 attaining an old age as healthful and happy as his own, — 
 " My prescription," said he, " is simple : short but cheerful 
 meals, music, and a good conscience." — Bwgorfs Life of P. E, 
 Tytler, p. 7. 
 
154 NO EAR OR SOUL FOR MUSIC. 
 
 and nasal," while that " most offensive guttural, the 
 ghain," equivalent to the Northumbrian burr, fills 
 up the intervals, and acts as the vehicle of all fiori- 
 turi* The Countess Hahn-Hahn, in her Oricntal- 
 ischc Brief c, describes some minstrels at a wedding 
 at Beyrout as singing, with all their bodily might, 
 in the "most discordant tones that can issue from 
 the human throat, mingling together wild screams 
 with guttural and nasal sounds — a terrible concert," 
 from which she made all haste to escape. 
 
 The Asiatic has no ear and no soul for music, we 
 are assured by the Howadji who printed, in Eothen 
 style, a volume of Nile Notes. " Like other savages 
 and children, he loves a noise, and he plays on 
 shrill pipes — on the tarabuka, on the tar or tam- 
 bourine, and a sharp one-stringed fiddle, or rabab. 
 Of course, in your first Oriental days, you will de- 
 cline no invitations, but you will grow gradually 
 deaf to all entreaties of friends or dragomen to 
 sally forth and hear music. You will remind him 
 that you did not come to the East to go to Bed- 
 lam." Mr. G. W. Curtis calls the want of music not 
 
 * In another passage the Oriental Student, describing an 
 Easter Day in Damascus, records his impression of some 
 uncouth songs chorused by old women, and relates how 
 the Hanum sang entirely through her nose, and put her 
 stretched hand to her cheek in order to make the sound 
 louder; and how the din of tambourines, kettledrums, and the 
 snivelling songstress, nearly gave him a headache. 
 
ORIENTAL DISQUALIFICATIONS. 155 
 
 strange, for silence is natural to the East and to 
 the tropics. Nor was any Mozart needed, he goes 
 on to say, to sow Persian gardens with roses 
 breathing fragrance and beauty ; no Beethoven 
 was needed to build mighty Himalayas ; no Ros- 
 sini to sparkle and sing with the birds and streams. 
 " Those realities are there, of which the composers 
 are the poets to Western imagination. In the East 
 you feel and see music, but hear it never." 
 
 Yet, to declare the Easterns incapable of im- 
 provement in the art, is to go a little too far. It is 
 to contradict experience. Singing was one of the 
 things taught to the Moslem girls Miss Whately 
 succeeded in getting to her school in Cairo ; and it 
 is on record, by one who quotes Mr. Hullah's 
 dictum, that Oriental music is fundamentally and 
 systematically diverse from our own, that the girls' 
 first discordant attempts at a gamut might have 
 suggested a belief that the cats,- instead of the 
 daughters of Cairo, had been secured as pupils. But 
 as in three months the sweet singing of the children 
 was what visitors most admired in the school, the 
 inference is drawn that no organic disqualification 
 exists in Egyptians, at least, for conversion to 
 Western belief and practice about scales and tones.* 
 
 * "I suppose you may have read," says Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu, in one of her letters from the East, "that the 
 
156 TWO EARS AND NO EAR. 
 
 Swift commemorates con amove his own lack of 
 
 musical taste : 
 
 "Grave Dean of St. Patrick's, how comes it to pass 
 That you, who know music no more than an ass,''* etc. 
 
 Turks have no music but what is shocking to the ears ; but 
 this account is from those who never heard any but what is 
 played in the streets, and is just as reasonable as if a 
 foreigner should take his ideas of English music from the 
 bladder and string, or the marrowbones and cleavers. I can 
 assure you that the music is extremely pathetic." True, her 
 ladyship inclines to prefer the Italian, but makes the con- 
 fession apologetically, saying that perhaps she is partial ; 
 and she quotes an accomplished Greek lady, very well skilled 
 in both, who gives the preference to the Turkish. 
 
 * The asinine reference recalls what Mr. Thackeray says 
 of one of his favourite characters : " Warrington scarcely 
 knew one tune from another, and had but one tune or bray 
 in his repertoire, — a most discordant imitation of God save 
 the King." 
 
 Sheridan's attempts in the like direction are described by 
 Michael Kelly as canine : " He made a sort of rumbling noise 
 with his voice (for he had not the slightest idea of turning a 
 tune), resembling a deep bow, wow, wow. . . . There was 
 not the slightest resemblance of an air in the noise he made." 
 Sir Joseph Banks is supposed to proclaim in Peter Pindar, 
 glorying in the defect, — 
 
 "To these two ears, a bear Marchesi growls, 
 Mara and Billington a brace of owls." 
 
 With astoundment Mr. Pepys in his Diary makes this entry 
 of the affirmation of a noble lord : " But strange to hear my 
 Lord Lauderdale say himself that he had rather hear a cat 
 mew than the best music in the world ; and the better 
 
MR. PEPYS'S DIURNAL. 157 
 
 Nevertheless he is known to have had the power of 
 mimicking it in a wonderful degree — witness his 
 
 the music, the more sick it makes him" — not, however, for 
 the same reason as in the case of Miss Lee's Stanhope, 
 in the Canterbury Tales. " He must be very unsociable," 
 remarks the lady of the house ; and, as he does not love 
 music, " Then he has no sensibility." " I doubt the conclu- 
 sion," says Rivaz, with a shrug ; and when Stanhope is him- 
 self appealed to on the subject, " It is only good music that 
 I shun/' he says ; " I have no objection to the mediocre." 
 " Surely one objection is rather more unaccountable than the 
 other." " Indeed ! — I hope you will always think so, madam." 
 Pepys himself was a bit of an enthusiast over music, and 
 not a little impatient of what marred its beauties, and of 
 those who meddled with it who ought not. Of some boys 
 whose day was over at the Chapel Royal, he writes, for in- 
 stance, " Notwithstanding their skill, yet to hear them sing 
 with their broken voices, which they could not command to 
 keep in tune, would make a man mad — so bad it was." — 
 (Aug. 21, 1667.) The untunableness of Mistress Pepys was 
 a standing grievance with her and our Samuel ; who, how- 
 ever, upon one occasion thus delivers himself in his diurnal : 
 "How did I please myself to make Betty Turner sing, to 
 see what a beast she is as to singing, not knowing how to 
 sing one note in tune ; but, only for the experiment, I would 
 not for 4.0s. hear her sing a tune ; worse than my wife a 
 thousand times, so that it do a little reconcile me to her."— 
 (Jan. 22, 1667-68.) 
 
 One or two other entries in the Diary, on the same subject, 
 have the Pepysian piquancy in full flavour. "Being returned 
 home, I find Greeting, the flageolet-master come, and teaching 
 my wife ; and I do think my wife will take pleasure in it, 
 and it will be easy for her, and pleasant. So to the office, 
 and then before dinner making my wife to sing. Poor 
 
158 MR. PEPYS IN ECSTASIES. 
 
 burlesque imitation of the chromatics of Mr. Rosin- 
 grave on the organ, to the inexpressible amuse- 
 ment of his guests, excepting one matter-of-fact 
 old gentleman who retained his gravity, and re- 
 mained unmoved, because, as he said, he "had 
 heard Mr. Rosingrave himself perform the same 
 piece that morning." 
 
 It is said of Brienne that being at the Sistine 
 Chapel at Rome in the Holy Week, he allowed 
 that the singing was very fine, to the gratification 
 of a friend, who was thus encouraged to exclaim, 
 
 wretch ! her ear is so bad that it made me angry, till the 
 poor wretch cried to see me so vexed at her, that I think I 
 shall not discourage her so much again, but will endeavour to 
 make her understand sounds, and do her good that way ; 
 for she hath a great mind to learn, only to please me." — 
 (March I, 1666-67.) J u st a year later we have Mr. Pepys in 
 ecstasies at the effect of certain "wind musick" at the King's 
 House, which did please him "beyond any thing in the whole 
 world" — "so sweet that it ravished me, and, indeed, in a 
 word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, 
 just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife 
 [before she became the poor wretch] ; that neither then, nor 
 all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think 
 of anything, but remained all night transported, so that I 
 could not believe that ever any musick hath that real com- 
 mand over the soul of a man as this did upon me ; and 
 makes me to resolve to practise wind-musick, and to make 
 my wife do the like."— (Feb. 27, 1667-6S.) Fresh storm 
 brewing for that poor — woman, in this promise (or threat) of 
 wind-music. Blow, gentle gales, was never written for her. 
 
UNMUSICAL POETS. 159 
 
 "Ah, I see you begin to like music." "No," was 
 the reply, " I can't go as far as that, but I can now 
 understand the possibility of a person being fond 
 of music without being either a fool or a mad- 
 man." Wordsworth is free to avow himself one 
 
 " of whose touch the fiddle would complain, 
 Whose breath would labour at the flute in vain, 
 In music all unversed." * 
 
 Sir Walter Scott expressly affirms in his auto- 
 biography that, his mother being anxious to have 
 all her children taught psalmody, the " incurable 
 defects" of his voice and ear drove his teacher f 
 to despair. " It is only by long practice that I 
 have acquired the power of selecting or distin- 
 
 * In a letter of Leigh Hunt's, dated July 8, 1848, occurs 
 this obiter scriptum : " Wordsworth, I am told, does not 
 care for music ! And it is very likely, for music (to judge 
 from his verses) does not seem to care for him. I was 
 astonished the other day, on looking in his works for the 
 first time after a long interval, to find how deficient he was 
 in all that may be called the musical side of a poet's nature, 
 — the genial, the animal-spirited or bird-like, — the happily 
 accordant." Had Mr. Leigh Hunt in that same interval, 
 perhaps too long an interval, also lost his ear for what there 
 is of grand and solemn organ-like harmony in Wordsworth's 
 higher strains and loftier flights ? 
 
 t Alexander Campbell, an enthusiast in Scottish music, 
 who however would not allow that Walter had a bad ear ; 
 it. was mere want of will, he contended. 
 
160 SIR WALTER SCOTT: EAR OR NO EAR? 
 
 guishing melodies ;" and though in mature life 
 few things delighted or affected him more than a 
 simple song sung with feeling, he avowed that even 
 this pitch of musical taste had only been gained 
 by attention and habit, and, as it were, by his 
 feeling of the words being associated with the 
 tune* In his Diary of November, 1825, we come 
 across this entry, apropos of some after-dinner 
 music at the house of Sir Robert Dundas : " I do 
 not know and cannot utter a note of music ; and 
 complicated harmonies seem to me a babble of 
 confused though pleasing sounds." Yet simple 
 melodies, he adds, especially if connected with 
 words and ideas, had the same effect on him as on 
 most people. But then he demanded expression 
 and feeling ; he could not bear a voice that had 
 " no more life in it than a pianoforte or a bugle- 
 
 * The late C. R. Leslie, in his pleasant pen-picture of Sir 
 Walter at Home, records his belief, from personal observa- 
 tion, that in music Scott's enjoyment arose chiefly from the 
 associations called up by the air or the words of a song. 
 " I have seen him stand beside the piano or harp when 
 Lady Compton, Miss Clephane, or Mrs. Lockhart were 
 playing Highland music, or a military march, his head and 
 whole figure slightly moving in unison with the instrument, 
 and with an expression in his face of inward delight, that 
 told more plainly than words could tell, how thoroughly 
 he relished the performance." — Autodiogr, Recollections of 
 C. R. Leslie, ch. iv. 
 
THOMAS HOOD. 161 
 
 horn." " Tom Moore's is the most exquisite war- 
 bling I ever heard." Some critics refuse to believe 
 that a man capable of writing such lyrics as Sir 
 Walter wrote, could have other than a real ear 
 for music. But the apparent inconsistency is of 
 no singular occurrence. Thomas Hood, his daugh- 
 ter bears witness, though endowed with the most 
 delicate perception of the rhythm and melody 
 of versifying, and the most acute instinct for any 
 jarring syllable or word, and peculiarly happy in 
 the musical cadence of his own poetry, had yet not 
 the slightest ear for music : he could not sing a 
 tune through correctly.* 
 
 The Haunted Man, in Mr. Dickens' Christmas 
 story so called, shudders when he stops to listen 
 to a strain of plaintive music, but can only hear a 
 
 * To what Mrs. Broderip relates in the text, her brother 
 adds a foot-note which mentions how people would comment 
 on this deficiency to their father, and how he took it. One 
 flourisher, for instance, "just safe landed from a rhapsody 
 on music," with which Mr. Hood's looks betokened a very 
 imperfect sympathy, ventured on the compassionating re- 
 mark, "Ah, you know, you've no musical enthusiasm — you 
 don't know what it is." The author, however goodnaturedly 
 aware of, and prompt to recognize, his deficiency, was not 
 to be snubbed by this sort of man, and in this sort of way, 
 so he answered, " Not know it? oh yes, I do — it's like turtle 
 soup — for every pint of real, you meet with gallons of mock, 
 with calves' heads in proportion." 
 
 II 
 
i62 DULL OF HEARING. 
 
 tune, made manifest to him by the dry mechanism 
 of the instruments and his own ears, with no ad- 
 dress to any mystery within him, without a whisper 
 in it of the past, or of the future, powerless upon 
 him as the sound of last year's running water, or 
 the rushing of last year's wind.* Which things 
 are an allegory ; and the haunted man is an ano- 
 maly ; but his incapacity is more or less shared 
 by shoals of commonplace mortals, of the normal 
 type. Says one such, in a dramatic fragment of 
 Barry Cornwall's — 
 
 * In another, earlier, and more popular of those Christmas 
 stories, that sombre man of stratagems and spoils, Tackleton, 
 growls at coming upon old Caleb in the act of essaying a 
 fragment of a song. " What ! you're singing, are you ? / 
 can't sing." Nobody would have suspected him of it, says 
 his author : he had not what is generally termed a singing 
 face, by any means. As Moliere's Sosie exclaims in the 
 Amphitryon, 
 
 " Cet homme assurement n'aime pas la musique." 
 
 It is Moliere's Maitre de Musique who assures le bourgeois 
 gentilhomme that " tous les desordres, toutes les guerres qu'on 
 voit dans le monde, narrivent que pour n'apprendre pas la 
 musique ; " which thesis he demonstrates by a music-master's 
 syllogism. If Monsieur Jourdain ever came to care for 
 music, it would probably be, like his attainments in prose, 
 without the knowing it : possibly his personal predilections 
 would have jumped with those of Bottom the weaver, who 
 tells Titania, " I have a reasonable good ear in music : let us 
 \ave the tonsrs and the bones." 
 
CHROMATIC SCALES. 163 
 
 " I see small difference 
 'Tween one sound and its next. All seem akin, 
 And run on the same feet ever." 
 
 Which candid avowal is hushed, not to say is 
 snubbed, by a remonstrant's 
 
 " Peace ! Thou want'st 
 One heavenly sense, and speak'st in ignorance. 
 Seest thou no differing shadows, which divide 
 The rose and poppy ? 'Tis the same with sounds. 
 There's not a minute in the round of time 
 But's hinged with different music. In that small space, 
 Between the thought and its swift utterance, — 
 Ere silence buds to sound, — the angels listening 
 Hear infinite varieties of song." 
 
164 
 
 W$z Grate=(L(iloriD anti SQuftiu 
 
 Job xxxix. 24, 25 ; Psalm lviii. 5. 
 
 A ~\ 7"E have recognition in holy writ of the effect 
 
 * » of musical sounds upon four-footed creatures 
 and creeping things. The Psalmist makes a sug- 
 gestive simile of the deaf adder that, an exception 
 to the rule, stoppeth her ears, and refuseth to hear 
 the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. 
 In the book of Job, the horse that paweth in the 
 valley, and rejoiceth in his strength, mocking at 
 fear, and no way affrighted at the sword, is de- 
 scribed as (for thus Umbreit renders the passage) 
 " standing not still when the trumpet soundeth," 
 but stirred by it, even as a Philip Sidney might be, 
 and was. And when the trumpet sounds, his voice 
 is heard as if he said Aha ! — or said that he heard 
 the summons to battle. The bray* of the trumpets 
 is answered by the neighing of the steed. 
 
 * Bray would be answered by bray, were the wild ass, and 
 
ASS'S BRAY. 165 
 
 How music tells upon the brute-world is a topic 
 of frequent illustration in miscellaneous literature. 
 
 not the horse, the subject of the description ; and in Scripture 
 the ass is not the mean creature which European associations 
 have made of it : degrading usages had not vulgarized it into 
 a by-word for contumely and ridicule. The bray of the ass 
 would no more sound contemptible to eastern ears, in old 
 times, than the bray of the trumpet. 
 
 Poets and prose essayists of our own have plentifully had 
 their say, sung or said, about the ass's bray, and generally in 
 terms the reverse of admiring or appreciative. An asinine 
 anthology of this kind might be easily and copiously collected, 
 — but it would be thought too asinine an affair altogether. 
 Cowper says, in one of his letters to John Newton, that all 
 the sounds uttered by nature are delightful, at least in this 
 country ; adding, however, that he might not, perhaps, find 
 the roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia, very 
 pleasing ; " but I know no beast in England whose voice I 
 do not account musical, save and except always the braying 
 of an ass." The gentle bard of Olney was almost sore upon 
 this subject. In a letter to Unwin he apologizes for an 
 abrupt close by pleading the constraints of a distracting bray. 
 " A neighbour of mine, in Silver-end, keeps an ass ; the ass 
 lives on the other side of the garden wall, and I am writing 
 in the greenhouse : it happens that he is this morning most 
 musically disposed, whether cheered by the fine weather, or 
 by some new tune which he has just acquired, or by finding 
 his voice more harmonious than usual. It would be cruel to 
 mortify so fine a singer ; therefore I do not tell him that he 
 interrupts and hinders me, but I venture to tell you so, and to 
 plead his performance in excuse for my abrupt conclusion." 
 Boileau credits Monsieur l'Ane with more moderation ; de- 
 claring of him, that, " instruit par la nature," he 
 
1 66 ASININE APOLOGETICS. 
 
 Dr. John Brown tells a story, in his Horce Subsecivce, 
 of a certain Wandering Willie, " an Orpheus, an 
 
 " Ne va point follement de sa bizarre voix 
 D^fier aux chansons les oiseaux dans les bois." 
 
 Hartley Coleridge does well to disallow Cowper's exclusive 
 condemnation of the bray as the one unmusical sound in 
 nature. The son of that S. T. C. who had the courage to 
 pen civil things of the Ass, in poetry too, himself had the 
 courage to avow that to him the sound of braying had 
 " something joyous in it " — and he cited as far more dis- 
 cordant noises, the caterwauling of a cat, the squeak of a pig 
 being ringed, the nocturnal dialogue of two chained dogs 
 howling responsive, the roaring of a spoiled boy, and, at 
 some times, the crowing of a cock, — than which nothing, says 
 Hartley, can be more annoying to an invalid just dropping 
 into a doze. Christopher North moots the question which is 
 the more musical of the two, the gabble of a gander, or the 
 braying of a jackass. And he quotes approvingly the remarks 
 (at one with Hartley Coleridge's) of the American author of 
 A Year in Spain, who says of the ass's bray (as favourably 
 contradistinguished from the mule's) that it " has something 
 hearty and whole-souled about it. Jack begins his bray with 
 a modest whistle, rising gradually to the top of his powers, 
 like the progressive eloquence of a well-adjusted oration, and 
 then, as gradually declining to a natural conclusion." Again, 
 is the chatter of monkeys more musical than the bray of the 
 ass ? Pope couples the two discords in the Dunciad i where 
 the goddess of Dulness promises three cat-calls to the dunce- 
 poetaster " whose chattering shames the monkey tribe," and 
 a drum to him whose 
 
 " hoarse heroic bass 
 Drowns the loud clarion of the braying ass." 
 
 Forthwith, of course, a thousand tongues are heard in one 
 
BRAYING BIPEDS. 167 
 
 Orpheus," to whose strains the beasts of the field 
 were eager listeners. A Galloway farmer was 
 
 loud din, and monkey-mimics rush discordant in ; 'tis chat- 
 tering, grinning, mouthing, jabbering all ; anon sound forth 
 the brayers, and the welkin rend. Loud 
 
 "swells each windpipe ; ass intones to ass, 
 Harmonious twang ; " 
 
 but one pre-eminent (sonorous Blackmore's strain) : 
 
 "Walls, steeples, skies bray back to him again. 
 In Tot' nam fields, the brethren, with amaze, 
 Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze ; . . . 
 All hail him victor in both gifts of song, 
 Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long." 
 
 Bipeds are Pope's game. Like the two aldermen in Cervantes 
 who challenge each other to a braying match. " In braying, 
 I yield to none — no, not to asses themselves," quoth one of 
 the worshipful dual ; — " We shall soon see that," exclaims the 
 other, " go you that way, and I this, and let us walk round 
 the mountain, and you shall bray, and I will bray ; and the 
 ass," which, like Saul, they were in search of, " will certainly 
 hear us and answer us, if he remains in these parts." Agreed. 
 Each alderman brays, and each comes running in haste to 
 the other, not doubting but the ass is found. Each warmly 
 compliments the other on there being, really, no vocal dif- 
 ference between him and an ass. The result is unhappy for 
 the aldermen, and involves calamitous issues for the town of 
 Bray, as may be read in the twenty-fifth chapter of the second 
 part of Don Quixote. In an after chapter we, with the Knight 
 of La Mancha, light on a troop with a banner or pennant of 
 white satin, " on which an ass was painted to the life, of the 
 small Sardinian breed, with its head raised, its mouth open, 
 and over it, written in large characters, 
 
168 SANCHO PANZA'S DAPPLE. 
 
 awakened by music one June morning, before 
 sunrise ; looking out, he saw no one, but- at the 
 
 "The bailiffs twain 
 Bray'd not in vain." 
 
 Sancho Panza has a special endowment that way. " Putting 
 his hands to his nostrils, he began to bray so strenuously that 
 the adjacent valleys resounded again," — and got well cudgelled 
 for his pains, like the ass in the fable who'emulated the lion's 
 roar. Much earlier in the history it had chanced that Don 
 Quixote's steed, Rosinante, and Sancho's ass, Dapple, set up 
 their voices together, which both knight and squire regarded 
 as a good omen. But the braying of Dapple so outdid the 
 neighing of the steed, that Sancho piqued himself on his good 
 fortune promising to exceed his master's. On a later occasion, 
 Sancho, all but buried alive in a cavern, appeals to Dapple's 
 voice to confirm a certain affirmation he is making. " Now 
 it would seem the ass understood what Sancho said, and 
 willing to add his testimony, at that instant began to bray so 
 lustily that the whole cave resounded. ' A credible witness !' 
 quoth Don Quixote ; 'that bray I know as well as if I myself 
 brought it forth,' " etc. The Don had as nice an ear, nearly, for 
 asinine accents, as the cure commemorated by M. Philare'te 
 Chasles in his Etudes sur FAllemagne, who, when " l'ane 
 releve la tete et se met a braire avec le plus majesteaux 
 desespoir" at being offered a book for a thistle, explained, 
 " C'est sa maniere de prononcer la voyelle A ; [the cure' was 
 teaching asses their alphabet ;] il n'en est encore qu' a cette 
 lettre de l'alphabet, et vous voyez qu'il a prononce' a l'alle- 
 mande, avec un accent circonflexe." 
 
 The proverbial reputation, it has been said, of a useful 
 quadruped does not come of having a hoarse voice or a bad 
 ear for music, but because the creature brays as if it thought 
 the sound should satisfy all lovers of harmony. Historically 
 
HISTORICAL ECHOES OF BRAY. 169 
 
 corner of a grass-field he saw his cattle, and young 
 colts, and fillies, huddled together, and looking 
 
 even, the bray, as well as the creature itself, has been found 
 useful, now and then. Herodotus tells us of a vast army 
 of Scythians put to flight in a panic terror by the braying of 
 an ass ; as in the case of La Fontaine's fable, where the lion, 
 out hunting, avails himself of la voix de Stcntor de Fane, and 
 finds it very available indeed. Wild boars and deer are the 
 prey. 
 
 " Le lion le posta, le couvrit de ramee, 
 Lui commanda de braire, assurd qua ce son 
 Les moins intimides fuiraient de leur maison. 
 Leur troupe n'etait pas encore accoutumee 
 
 A la tempete de sa voix ; 
 L'air en retentissait d'un bruit epouvantable : 
 La frayeur saississait les hotes de ces bois ; 
 Tous fuyaient, tous tombaient au piege inevitable 
 Ou les attendait le lion." 
 
 There is a story in Pausanias of a plot for betraying a city 
 discovered by the braying of an ass. Plutarch relates the 
 joyous acceptance of that clamour by Cams Marius on a 
 certain occasion, as a felicitous omen — for " the animal, with 
 a vivacity uncommon to its species, fixed its eyes steadily on 
 Marius, and then brayed aloud." The late Sir Fowell Buxton 
 seems to have mainly ascribed his preservation from ship- 
 wreck off the coast of Calais, in 181 7, to the braying of an 
 ass, which warned the crew by night of their too near approach 
 to land. Remembering the result of that sonorous outburst, 
 he might have half inclined to favour the favouritism of that 
 old writer who, within the last decade of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, published a tract (noticed by Mr. Collier in his Poetical 
 Decameron, and by Charles Lamb in Eliana) which has for 
 title as well as subject-matter " The Nobleness of the Ass" — 
 whose most singular and delightful gift is therein held to 
 
170 ASININE HARMONICS. 
 
 intently down into what he knew was an old quarry. 
 So, putting on his clothes, he walked across the 
 
 be his voice, the " goodly, sweet, and continuous brayings " 
 of which " forme a melodious and proportionable kinde of 
 musicke." " Nor thinke I," the tract-writer adds, " that any 
 of our immoderate musitians can deny but that their [asses] 
 song is full of exceeding pleasure to be heard : because 
 therein is to be discerned both concord, discord, singing in 
 the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, then 
 following into rise and fall, the halfe-note, whole note, mu- 
 sicke of five voices, firme singing by four voices, three to- 
 gether, or one voice and a halfe. Then their variable con- 
 trarieties among them, when one delivers forth a long tenor 
 or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in measure, 
 breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last 
 of all, to heare the musicke of five or six voices chaunged 
 to so many of asses is amongst them to heare a song of 
 world without end." There is no accounting for ears, as 
 Elia observes, or for that laudable enthusiasm with which an 
 author is tempted to invest a favourite subject with the most 
 incompatible perfections. Elia would otherwise, for his own 
 taste, have been disposed rather to class these "extraordinary 
 musicians " with those imagined by Jeremy Collier (Essays, 
 1698, part ii., on Music), where after describing the inspiriting 
 effects of martial music in a battle, he hazards an ingenious 
 conjecture, whether a sort of anti-music might not be in- 
 vented, which should have the quite contrary effect of 
 " sinking the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, 
 and inspiring despair and cowardness and consternation." 
 Old Jeremy thinks it probable that the warbling of cats and 
 screech-owls, together with a mixture of the howling of dogs, 
 not to forget the roaring of lions, judiciously imitated and 
 compounded, might go a great way in this invention. Lamb 
 
PANIC AT PEALING BRAY. 171 
 
 field, everything but that strange wild melody, still 
 and silent in this the "sweet hour of prime." As 
 
 allows the dose to be pretty potent, and skilfully enough pre- 
 pared. " But what shall we say to the Ass of Silenus, who, 
 if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, 
 without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismayed and put to 
 rout a whole army of giants ? Here was anti-music with a 
 vengeance ; a whole Pan-dis-harmonicon in a single lung of 
 leather ! " The sheep in Cowper's fable hesitate between the 
 terrors of huntsman's horn and ass's bray, as to which is the 
 most terrifying — sounds that seem by tongues of demons 
 uttered, from whatever lungs ; "be it D apple's bray, or be it 
 not, or be it whose it may." As the lion has it, in yet 
 another fable of La Fontaine's, " L'ane effraiera les gens, nous 
 servant de trompette." Thomson closes a satirical poem 
 with this simile : — 
 
 " So when an ass with sluggish front appears, 
 The horses start, and prick their quivering ears ; 
 But soon as e'er the sage is heard to bray, 
 The fields all thunder, and they bound away." 
 
 Very effectively indeed in Wordsworth's poem does Peter 
 Bell's ass to all the echoes, south and north, and east and 
 west, send pealing forth a long and clamorous bray : once 
 and again that devoted animal is heard to lengthen out most 
 ruefully a deep-drawn shout, — 
 
 "The hard dry see-saw of his horrible bray." 
 
 That is surely a very graphic line. Coleridge must have ad- 
 mired it, though in the verses for which in his younger days 
 he got so much laughed at he expressed a longing to take a 
 Young Ass with him, in the Dell of Peace and mild Equality 
 to dwell :— 
 
172 ASS AND NIGHTINGALE. 
 
 he got nearer the "beasts," the sound grew louder; 
 the colts with their long manes, and the nowt with 
 
 1 ' Yea, and more musically sweet to me 
 Thy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be, 
 Than warbled melodies that soothe to rest 
 The aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast." 
 
 But the then pantisocratic poet does, at any rate, allow the 
 bray to be harsh and dissonant. " Speak with a moderate 
 tone," the Koran bids the faithful ; " for the most ungrateful 
 of all voices is the voice of asses." Bishop Coplestone, who 
 deprecates some of the tones of the Flemish as " hideous," 
 compares them to "that laborious effort which an ass makes 
 towards the end of his braying." Dumeril the entomologist 
 compares the acute or creaking sound emitted under alarm 
 15y the Capricorn tribes (Lamza, Cerambyx, etc.) to the bray- 
 ing of an ass. A rough-and-ready contemporary of S. T. C.'s 
 was more dubiously complimentary in his address to the 
 creature : — 
 
 " Some people think thy tones are rather coarse ; 
 Even love-sick tones addressed to lady asses — 
 Octaves, indeed, of wondrous force ; 
 And yet thy voice full many a voice surpasses." 
 
 Easy enough to convince the asinine vocalist of that. On the 
 night of Mr. Lowell's stay at the albergo just below the village 
 of Colonna, at his first visit to Rome, a nightingale sang exqui- 
 sitely from a full-blossomed elder-bush on the edge of a brook 
 just across the road. And as Nature, according to the racy 
 penman of the Biglow Papers, " understands thoroughly the 
 value of contrasts," so it chanced that a donkey from a shed 
 hard by, hitched and hesitated and agonized through his bray, 
 so that his listeners might be conscious at once of the positive 
 and negative poles of song. " It was pleasant to see with 
 what undoubting enthusiasm he went through his solo, and 
 vindicated Providence from the imputation of weakness in 
 
COLTS AND COWS ALL EAR. 173 
 
 their wondering stare, took no notice of him, strain- 
 ing their necks forward entranced. There, in the 
 old quarry, the young sun " glintin " on his face, 
 and resting on his pack, which had been his pillow, 
 was Wandering Willie, playing and singing like an 
 angel. When reproved for wasting his health and 
 time by the prosaic farmer, the poor fellow said, 
 "Me and this quarry are lang acquent, and I've 
 mair pleasure in pipin' to thae daft cowts, than 
 if the best leddies in the land were figurin' awa' 
 afore me." Shakspeare's Lorenzo bids us but note 
 a wild and wanton herd, or race of youthful and 
 unhandled colts, 
 
 " Fetching mad bounds, bellowing, and neighing loud, 
 Which is the hot condition of their blood : 
 If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, 
 Or any air of music touch their ears, 
 
 making such trifles as the nightingale yonder. ' Give ear, O 
 heaven and earth ! ' he seemed to say, ' nor dream that good, 
 sound common sense is extinct or out of fashion as long as / 
 live.'" Mr. Lowell supposes Nature made the donkey half 
 abstractedly, while she was feeling her way up to her ideal in 
 the horse, and that his bray is in like manner an experimental 
 sketch for the neigh of the finished animal. 
 
 But this unconscionably long foot-note (long as the ears of 
 its subject or object) is an unconscionably wide digression 
 from, in Wolcot's diction, 
 
 "Job's war-horse snorting flame, 
 To that slow brute whom few or none revere, 
 Famed for his fine bass voice and length of ear." 
 
174 LISTENERS EQUINE AND BOVINE. 
 
 You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, 
 Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze 
 By the sweet power of music." 
 
 Therefore, he goes on to say, the poets feigned 
 1 that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods ; since 
 nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage, but 
 music for the time doth change his nature. The 
 complaint of a modern Amphion is, that in such a 
 brassy age he cannot move a thistle ; that the very 
 sparrows in the hedge scarce answer to his whistle ; 
 
 " Or at the most, when three-parts sick with strumming 
 and with scraping, 
 A jackass heehaws from the rick, the passive oxen 
 gaping." 
 
 Happier in his experience is Wordsworth's 
 Danish boy, who suits the melody of his harp to 
 " words of a forgotten tongue," and is the darling 
 and the joy of flocks upon the neighbouring hill : 
 
 " And often, when no cause appears, 
 The mountain ponies prick their ears, 
 
 They hear the Danish Boy, 
 
 While in the dell he sings alone 
 Beside the tree and corner-stone." 
 
 Addison professes not to have heard that any of 
 the performers at the opera he loved to write down 
 pretended to equal the Pied Piper who (see Mr. 
 Browning's poem) " made all the mice of a great 
 town in Germany follow his music, and by that 
 means cleared the place of those little noxious 
 
RATS, MICE, AND SUCH SMALL DEER. 175 
 
 animals." * Madame Polko tells us of Mendelssohn 
 playing the Krattzcr with Rietz one night at 
 Berlin, and how all present were reverentially 
 listening, when a little mouse glided out of a corner, 
 and sat in the midst of the circle motionless, as 
 if spell-bound. She has no doubt that it would 
 have so remained till the playing ceased, had not 
 one of the ladies present made an abrupt gesture 
 of horror, and caused a commotion which " eventu- 
 ated " in the flight of the mouse. 
 
 Stedman's Expedition to Surinam includes a 
 description of certain "charming" negresses, whose 
 art avails to conjure down from the trees a variety 
 of serpents, making them wreath about the arms, 
 neck, and breast of the ebon charmer, whose charm 
 lies in her voice. In eastern India it is, or was, 
 common for skilled natives to rid the houses of the 
 most venemous snakes, by charming them out of 
 their holes with the sound of a flute.f Sir William 
 
 * Swift has this sample of wit in his Art of Punning : 
 " Why are rats and mice so much afraid of bass-viols and 
 fiddles ?" " Because they are strung with catgut" 
 
 t Isaac Disraeli records as a " fact," however the reader 
 may account it a trial of credulity, the story of an officer im- 
 prisoned in the Bastile, whose lute brought mice frisking out 
 of their holes, and spiders descending from the webs, "petri- 
 fying him with astonishment," as they formed a large and 
 most attentive circle around the player. Now he disliked 
 vermin. So, finding that his lute was an infallible attraction, 
 
176 SNAKE CHARMING. 
 
 Jones quotes a learned Hindu who told him that he 
 had frequently seen the most venomous and malig- 
 nant snakes* leave their holes upon hearing tunes 
 
 he arranged with the keeper to have a cat ready in a cage, 
 and at a signal given the cat was " let loose at the very in- 
 stant when the little hairy people were most entranced by the 
 Orphean skill" of the lutist. 
 
 Pelisson, when in the Bastile, used, as the Abbe d'Olivet 
 relates of him, to amuse himself by summoning by sound of 
 bagpipe (played by his valet) a spider, for which he became 
 purveyor-in-ordinary of flies ; these the spider would seize 
 even on the prisoner's knee, at the sound of the pipes. 
 
 The Curiosities of Literature omit not " a modern travel- 
 ler's" assurance that, in the island of Madeira, he had often 
 seen the lizards attracted by the notes of music, and had re- 
 peatedly so attracted them himself. When the negroes catch 
 them, for food, they are said to accompany the chase by 
 whistling some tune, which has always the effect of drawing 
 great numbers to them. 
 
 * Chateaubriand tells us of his sojourn among the prairies 
 near the banks of the Genessee, " It was there I first met with 
 that snake with rattles, which allows itself to be fascinated by 
 the sound of a flute. The Greeks would have transformed my 
 Canadian into Orpheus, his flute into a lyre, the rattlesnake 
 into Cerberus, or perhaps Eurydice." 
 
 " Orpheus could lead the savage race ; 
 And trees uprooted left their place 
 Sequacious of his lyre," 
 
 says Dryden. Less reverent is Swift's rationale of the man 
 and his method : — 
 
 •' Orpheus, a one-eyed blearing Thracian, 
 
 The crowder of that barbarous nation, 
 
 Was ballad-singer by vocation," 
 
 whose strains brought gaping crowds from all quarters. 
 
FLUTE AND LUTE. i 77 
 
 on a flute, which instrument, as he supposed, gave 
 
 them peculiar delight, — an instrument, by the way, 
 
 objected to by Apollonius, on the score of its 
 
 incompetence to enrich and beautify; and that 
 
 objection, also by the way, Mrs. Browning, who 
 
 cites it from Philostratus, considers sufficiently 
 
 confuted by the history of music in our day ; and 
 
 the poetess herself, in one of the Casa Guidi poems, 
 
 has this pertinent passage of panegyric : 
 
 '"Even Apollonius might commend this flute, 
 The music, winding through the stops, upsprings 
 To make the player very rich." 
 
 " From hence came all those monstrous stories, 
 That to his lays wild beasts danced borees ; 
 That after him, where'er he rambled, 
 The lion ramp'd and the bear gamboll'd, 
 And rocks and caves (their houses) ambled : 
 For sure the monster mob includes 
 All beasts, stones, stocks, in solitudes." 
 
 Delightful it must have been to the Dean of St. Patrick's 
 thus to deal a double-handed blow at the monster mob, and 
 at the poetical licence of his brother bards. Small sympathy 
 had be with a Shakspeare's fancy of Orpheus' lute being strung 
 with poets' sinews, 
 
 " Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones, 
 Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans 
 Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands." 
 
 Or with a Thomson's picture of the herds and flocks playing 
 secure under the protection-warrant of prevailing music, by 
 which the "horrid heart " of the "glaring lion," emergent from 
 the gloomy wood, was " meekened," 
 
 " and he joined his sullen joy ; 
 For music held the whole in perfect peace." 
 
 12 
 
178 FLUTE PLAYERS, 
 
 Aristotle affirms that at the close of the Persian 
 war there was scarcely a single free-born Athenian 
 unacquainted with the flute — the use of this instru- 
 ment being afterwards discontinued, and indeed 
 proscribed in the education of freemen, from the 
 notion, says a modern historian of ancient Athens, 
 that it was not capable of music sufficiently ele- 
 vated and intellectual .* But it wants not for en- 
 thusiastic admirers. Sainte-Beuve says, La flute f 
 est un instrument touchant qui va au coeur plus 
 
 * An anecdote in Gellius, lib. xv., c. 17, refers the date ol 
 the disuse of this instrument to the age of Pericles, and 
 during the boyhood of Alcibiades. " It was only succeeded 
 by melodies more effeminate and luxurious," as we read in . 
 Athens : its Rise a?id Fall. 
 
 It was Alcibiades, according to Plutarch, who first gave 
 occasion to the Athenians of the higher rank wholly to 
 abandon the use of flutes — with this reason assigned : " the 
 illiberal air which attended such performers, and the unmanly 
 disfigurement of face and expression which this piping-work 
 produced." 
 
 The Shepherd of the Nodes intimates pretty clearly his 
 estimate of the instrument when he compares the mode of 
 speaking with some people to it. " Their tone is gey an* 
 musical, but wants vareeity, and though sweetish, is wersh, 
 like the tone o' the floot. Then what puffin' an' spittin' o' 
 wind and water ! Mercy on us ! ye canna hear the tune for 
 the splutter, unless ye gang into anither room." But -this 
 refers to a callant learning to play. 
 
 t One of Madame de Remusat's romans is expressly entitled 
 La Flute j for thereby hangs the tale. Here is a snatch, or 
 broken echo of it : " Un jour, des airs languedociens bien 
 
CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC. 179 
 
 quaucun autre. Coleridge's Edmund, in a rather 
 namby-pamby style, 
 
 " Breathes in his flute sad airs, so wild and slow, 
 That his own cheek is wet with quiet tears." 
 
 The venerated author of Memoirs of Port Royal 
 
 choisis arrachent des larmes a Paieule et vont reveiller 
 d'attendrissants souvenirs dans sa memoire affaiblie." In 
 Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia's Day, " the soft complaining 
 flute, in dying notes, discovers the woes of hopeless lovers/ 
 Wordsworth's Ruth, when that oaten pipe of hers is mute, or 
 thrown away, then 
 
 "with a flute 
 . Her loneliness she cheers, : 
 
 This flute, made of a hemlock stalk, 
 At evening in his homeward walk 
 The Quantock woodman hears." 
 
 Nor is the flute of higher workmanship without commenda- 
 tory notice in Wordsworth's miscellaneous sonnets, — one of 
 which thus apostrophizes a clerical Cambridge friend, then 
 visiting the lakes : 
 
 " O friend ! thy flute has breathed a harmony 
 Softly resounded through this rocky glade ; 
 Such strains of rapture as the Genius played 
 In his still haunts on Bagdad's summit high ; 
 He who stood visible to Mirza's eye," — 
 
 referring to the Vision of Mirza, in the Spectator. 
 
 Epaminondas is storied among the most eminent of flute 
 players, who had some expression and execution' to show 
 forth. Nicholas Saunderson, the blind mathematician, was 
 great on this instrument. It is rather piquant to read among 
 the dismal entries of Wolfe Tone's diary, all at sea, and 
 awaiting the projected invasion of Ireland by the Dutch, such 
 interludes as this : "Admiral de Winter and I endeavour to 
 
i8g FREDERICK THE GREAT 
 
 retained a lively remembrance of her first sight of 
 William Priestley, as a long-haired youth, " playing 
 
 pass away the time playing the flute, which he does very 
 well ; we have some good duets." De Winter was soon to sit 
 down on the evening of the hard-fought day of Camperdown, 
 in the cabin of Admiral Duncan, and with him to play, not 
 the flute, but whist, and by him to be beaten, and then and 
 there to remark, with Dutch placidity, but with some graceful 
 humour, that it was rather hard to be beaten twice in one day 
 by the same opponent. 
 
 Frederick the Great is notable among flute-players. The 
 first Earl of Malmesbury credits him with masterly perform- 
 ance on it. " So afraid is he of playing false, that when he 
 is to try some new piece of music, he shuts himself up some 
 hours beforehand in his closet to practise it, and even then 
 when he begins it with the accompaniments he always trem- 
 bles." He had a fine collection of flutes, and was very nice 
 in the keeping of them, employing a man exclusively to look 
 after them, " and preserve them dry or moist, as the season 
 requires." All these instruments, it seems, were made by the 
 same man, who received a hundred ducats for each flute, and 
 who was scrupulously paid in good coin, when false money 
 was distributed to everybody else. Mr. Carlyle affords us 
 more than one glimpse of the Crown Prince retiring into some 
 glade of the thickets, to hold a little " Flute-Hautbois Concert 
 with his musical comrades, while the sows were getting 
 baited." That " excellent Drill-Sergeant" Rentzel, is said to 
 have awaked " the musical faculty in the little boy," by his 
 own "beautiful playing" on the flute. " Fritz is a Querpfeifer 
 unci Poet" not a soldier, would his indignant father growl, 
 impatient of such effeminate ways : Querpfeife, that is (Mr. 
 Carlyle explains) simply " German flute," Cross-pipe, or fife 
 of any kind, for we English have thriftily made two useful 
 
AND OTHER EMINENT HANDS. 181 
 
 on the flute, with a beautiful little goat standing 
 before him, with its fore-feet on his knees." Many 
 
 words out of Deutsch root ; Cross-pipe being held across the 
 mouth, horizontally. Frederick William denied Fritz his very- 
 flute, "most innocent ' Princess' " as he used to call it, from 
 the time he came to Custrin ; but by degrees the Prince pri- 
 vately got his " Princess" back, and consorted much with her ; 
 " wailed forth, in beautiful adagios," emotions for which he 
 then had no other utterance. Frederick was in his prime 
 when Voltaire declared that he played the flute like Telema- 
 chus ; the court on dii was that the King played it to per- 
 fection; which did not prevent Diderot from saying, " Cest 
 grand dommage que l'embouchure de cette belle flute soit 
 gatde par quelques grains de sable de Brandebourg." 
 
 Another kind of stoppage altogether obstructed the ventage 
 of the flute presented as a love-gift to the celebrated Susanna, 
 Countess of Eglintoune — for in her days, though she lived to 
 walk as a peeress at the coronation of George III., the flute 
 would seem to have been a lady's instrument, while as yet the 
 pianoforte was not. On attempting to blow the presentation 
 flute, blooming Susanna Kennedy (six feet high, by the way,) 
 found that something obstructed the sound, and this turned 
 out to be a copy of verses, expressing envy of the happy pipe 
 thus conversant by gentle pressure with the lady's lips. 
 
 In the earlier chapters of Benvenuto Cellini's Life, the flute 
 plays a prominent part ; and great was the lad's detestation 
 of the instrument his father constrained him to learn, and im- 
 portuned him to practise unremittingly. To such a degree, 
 writes the autobiographer, " did I hate that abominable flute, 
 that I thought myself in a sort of paradise during my stay in 
 Pisa, where I never once played upon that instrument." Yet 
 he became a skilled and highly effective performer upon it ; 
 witness the rapture of Pope Clement, who declared that he 
 
1 82 LUTHER AND GOLDSMITH. 
 
 are the after-hours she records in her autobiography 
 as "spent with William Priestley, and my little 
 
 had "never been delighted with more exquisite harmony," 
 and was all curiosity to know how the services of " so great a 
 master of the flute" had been secured for the delectation of 
 his Holiness at dinner-time. 
 
 Luther played the flute as well as the guitar. He was once 
 restored from one of his comatose fits by a monk gently 
 playing on the flute an air that Brother Martin loved. He 
 passed the whole night after his arrival at Worms at his 
 window, " sometimes breathing the air of his hymn upon 
 his flute." (His hostile biographer, Cochkeus, relates of him, 
 in his progress to the Diet, that wherever he passed there 
 was great crowding, and that " Luther, to draw all eyes upon 
 him, played the harp like another Orpheus — a shaved and 
 capuchined Orpheus.") 
 
 It was Oliver Goldsmith's way to blow off excitement 
 through his flute with a kind of desperate "mechanical 
 vehemence." During his tour on the Continent, he " picked 
 up a kind of mendicant livelihood by the German flute," like 
 young Holberg, in fact, and like his own George Primrose 
 in fiction. When an impecunious lodger in Green Arbour 
 Court, he would compromise with the squalid squalling chil- 
 dren of the colony for occasional cessation of their noise, 
 by giving them a turn upon his flute, for which all the court 
 assembled. 
 
 Bolton playing the flute to Miss Sindall's covert listening, 
 in Mackenzie's Man of the World j Edward, taking a great 
 deal of pains with it, in the Wahlverwandschaften of Goethe, 
 only to make the Captain wish he would spare them " that 
 eternal flute of his," as he could make nothing of it ; Dick 
 Fairthorn in What will He Do with It? who, being the 
 cleverest boy at his grammar school, unluckily took to the 
 flute, and unfitted himself for the present century ; these, and 
 
PIPING PASTORALS. 183 
 
 goat ■ Pan,' under the shade of an old tree that 
 grew over a wild bank, when he often played to 
 the goat and to me on the flute, and showed the 
 goat's fondness for music." "As sheep 3 loveth 
 pyping," says a writer of the fourteenth century, 
 " therefore shepherdes useth pypes when they walk 
 wyth their sheepe." " I am verily persuaded," 
 says Dr. John Case, "that the ploughman and 
 carter do not so much please themselves with their 
 whistling as they are delightful to their oxen and 
 horses." 
 
 Sir Walter Scott describes a huge sheep dog in 
 Provence, of a species which is trained to face the 
 wolf, following his piping master with his ears 
 pricked, like the chief critic and prime judge of the 
 performance, at some tones of which he seldom 
 
 many like these, are familiar figures in story. Of the flute- 
 players in Mr. Dickens' books, memory reverts to Richard 
 Swiveller playing "Away with Melancholy," in bed, very 
 slowly, and very imperfectly, repeating one note a great many 
 times before he could find the next, so that the effect was 
 not lively ;— and again, to the so-called " Master," in David 
 Copperfield, who took out his flute and blew at it, until David 
 thought he would gradually blow his whole being into the 
 large hole at the top, and ooze away at the keys. Coaxea 
 by an ancient dame into having " a blow at it," the Master 
 puts his hand underneath the skirts of his coat, and brings 
 out his flute in three pieces, which he screws together, and 
 begins to play — making the most dismal sounds ever heard 
 produced by any means, natural or artificial. 
 
1 84 CANINE CRITICS. 
 
 failed to intimate disapprobation ;* while the flock, 
 like the generality of an audience, followed in 
 
 * The dog-loving author oiRab and his Frie?ids has a story 
 of a dog of his, Wasp, who in a sequestered country house, 
 was set against an organ-grinder, who would push his way 
 in, demanding money of the lone woman in charge. Wasp 
 made short work of the grinder, whom he took by the throat 
 at once, pulling him and his organ down with a heavy crash, 
 — the organ giving a ludicrous sort of cry of musical pain. 
 " Wasp, thinking this was from some creature within, left the 
 ruffian, and set to work tooth and nail on the box," which he 
 disembowelled with a will. Good dog ! 
 
 George Eliot's Stephen Guest charms Lucy by his execu- 
 tion of Raphael's great song in the Creation, for he does the 
 " heavy beasts " to perfection ; but Lucy's pet dog is other- 
 wise minded. "When a singer has an audience of two, 
 there is room for divided sentiments. Minny's mistress was 
 charmed ; but Minny, who had intrenched himself, trembling, 
 in his basket as soon as the music began, found this thunder 
 so little to his taste that he leaped out and scampered under 
 the remotest chiffoniere, as the most eligible place in which 
 a small dog could await the crack of doom." And who that 
 has once read can lightly forget Mr. Charles Reade's account 
 of David Dodd, up in the morning early, trying to soothe his 
 sorrowful heart by playing on his beloved violin, among some 
 trees near the stable-yard ; how he played sadly, sweetly, 
 dreamingly, — bidding the magic shell tell all the world how 
 lonely he was ; but then the magic shell told it so tenderly 
 and so tunefully that David soon ceased to be alone. How 
 the first arrival was on four legs : Pepper, a terrier with a 
 taste for sounds, who arrived cautiously, though in a state 
 of profound curiosity, and being too wise to trust at once to 
 his ears (avenue of sense by which we are so much ofttimes 
 
HOWLING SYMPATHY. 185 
 
 unanimous though silent approbation. In their 
 companionship at Naples, Sir Walter always 
 noticed a favourite dog of Sir William Gell's, which 
 was in the habit of howling when loud music was 
 performing ; and Sir William relates that Scott 
 would laugh till his eyes were full of tears, at the 
 idea of the dog singing, " My mother bids me bind 
 my hair," by the tune of which the animal seemed 
 most excited, and which Sir Walter sometimes 
 asked to have repeated. 
 
 Fairthorn's flute is heard in Lord Lytton's 
 
 deceived), first smelt the musician carefully and minutely all 
 round, and being reassured by this, next took up a position 
 exactly opposite the Orpheus he had thus thoroughly snuffed, 
 sat up high on his tail, cocked his nose well into the air, and 
 accompanied the violin with such vocal powers as nature had 
 bestowed on him. " Nor did the sentiment lose anything, in 
 intensity at all events, by the vocalist. If David's strains 
 were plaintive, Pepper's were lugubrious : and, what may 
 seem extraordinary, so long as David played softly, the Cer- 
 berus of the stable-yard whined musically, and tolerably in 
 tune ; but when he played loud, or fast, poor Pepper got ex- 
 cited, and in his wild endeavours to equal the violin, vented 
 dismal and discordant howls at unpleasantly short intervals." 
 David is further said to have soon found that he could play 
 upon Pepper as well as the fiddle, raising him and subduing 
 him by turns ; only, like the ocean, Pepper was not to be 
 lulled back to his musical ripple quite so quickly as he 
 could be lashed into howling frenzy — showing a fearful 
 broadside of ivory teeth, while flinging up his nose, and sym- 
 pathizing thus loudly. 
 
1 86 A MODERN ORPHEUS. 
 
 Varieties of English Life, and music fills the land- 
 scape as with a living presence : the swans pause 
 upon the still lake — the tame doe steals through 
 the leafless trees — other forms are attracted — the 
 music spells them all * " If I had but a fiddle," 
 
 * On another occasion, in the same story, we have Waife 
 seated on a mossy bank, under a gnarled fantastic thorn-tree, 
 watching a deer as it came to drink, and whistling an old 
 mellow tune — the tune of an old English border song. "The 
 deer lifted its antlers from the water, and turned its large 
 bright eyes towards the opposite bank, whence the note came 
 — listening and wistful. As George's step crushed the wild 
 thyme which the thorn-tree shadowed, — ' Hush,' said Waife, 
 1 and mark how the rudest musical sound can affect the brute 
 creation.' He resumed the whistle — a clearer, louder, wilder 
 tune — that of a lively hunting song. The deer turned quickly 
 round — uneasy, restless, tossed its antlers, and bounded 
 through the fern. Waife again changed the key of his primi- 
 tive music — a melancholy belling note, like the belling itself 
 of a melancholy hart, but more modulated into sweetness. 
 The deer arrested its flight, and, lured by the mimic sound, 
 returned to the waterside." Waife cannot think the story 
 of Orpheus charming the brutes was a fable. Often, says 
 Prior, 
 
 M our seers and prophets have confess'd 
 
 That music's force can tame the furious beast ; 
 
 Can make the wolf or foaming boar restrain 
 
 His rage, the lion drop his crested mane, 
 
 Attentive to the song ; the lynx forget 
 
 His wrath to man, and lick the minstrel's feet " 
 
 In the fact of the influence of music in forming the Grecian 
 character, whether we consider the literature, the refinement, 
 the hilarity, the religious enthusiasm, or the martial energy 
 that were its chief component elements, a critic claims to see 
 
MUSICAL BRUTE-TAMERS. 187 
 
 says Gentleman Waife, " I would undertake to 
 make friends with that reserved and unsocial 
 
 the explanation of the beautiful fables of Orpheus and Am- 
 phion ; the latter, no doubt, warbling his ballads to the ears 
 of the masons who built the Theban walls ; while it is sug- 
 gested as probable that the wild beasts which flocked round 
 the tuneful husband of Euridice, were the rude aborigines 
 of the land, reduced by music to civilization and concord. 
 
 " De la sont nds ces bruits recus dans l'univers, 
 Qu'aux accents dont Orphee emplit les monts de Thrace 
 Les tigres amollis d^pouillaient leur audace : 
 Qu'aux accords d'Amphion les pierres se mouvaient, 
 Et sur les murs th^bains en ordre s'elevaient. 
 L'harmonie en naissant produisit ces miracles." 
 
 Music has charms, not only as Congreve's Almeria says, 
 to soothe a savage breast, but to soften rocks, or bend a 
 knotted oak ; and she has read that things inanimate have 
 moved, and, as with living souls, have been informed by 
 magic numbers and persuasive sound. Waller rationalizes 
 much in the style of the modern critic previously quoted, 
 when he speaks of the tactics 
 
 "wise bards employ'd, to make 
 Unpolish'd men their wild retreats forsake ; 
 Law-giving heroes, famed for taming brutes, 
 And raising cities with their charming lutes ; 
 For rudest minds with harmony were caught, 
 And civil life was by the Muses taught." 
 
 The allusion is a frequent and favourite one with Waller. 
 He sonorously apprises my Lady Carlisle that, of all the 
 sacred Muse inspired, Orpheus alone could with the woods 
 comply, whose rude inhabitants his song admired, as did 
 Nature's self, in those that could not lie. Elsewhere, with a 
 saving clause parenthesized, if all those tales were true the 
 bold Greeks tell, he signalized the wonders wrought by the 
 Thracian, before whose feet lay sheep and lions, fearless and 
 
1 88 ORPHEUS; AMPHIONj ARION. 
 
 water-rat," — on whom Waife's dog, Sir Isaac, had 
 been endeavouring in vain to force his acquaint- 
 
 wrathless as they heard him play. Waller's contemporary, 
 Sir William Temple, gravely asks what is become of the 
 charms of music, by which men and beasts, fishes, fowls, and 
 serpents, were so frequently enchanted, and their very natures 
 changed. Macaulay makes merry at Sir William for putting 
 the story of Orpheus between the Olympic games and the 
 battle of Arbela ; as if we had exactly the same reasons for 
 believing that Orpheus led beasts with his lyre which we 
 have for believing that there were races at Pisa, or that 
 Alexander conquered Darius. For, quite prosaically, and 
 not with the poetic licence of Beaumont and Fletcher's 
 Arcadius, Sir William inclines 
 
 "To think the tale of Orpheus no fable ; 
 'Tis possible he did enchant the rocks, 
 And charm the forest, soften hell itself, 
 With his commanding lute." 
 
 And what says Wordsworth of another old-world worthy 
 
 " The gift to King Amphion 
 That walled a city with its melody, 
 Was for belief no dream : — thy skill, Arion, 
 Could humanize the creatures of the sea, 
 Where men were monsters. A last grace he craves, 
 Leave for one chant ; — the dulcet sound 
 Steals from the deck o'er willing waves, 
 And listening dolphins gather round," 
 
 by one of which his life is saved. " I did once belong," says 
 Marryat's old Tom, "to a small craft called the Arion, and 
 they say as how the story was that that chap could make the 
 fish follow him just when he pleased. I know that when we 
 were in the North Sea, the shoals of seals would follow the 
 ship if you whistled : but those brutes have ears — now fish 
 havn't got none." But the minstrelsy that bids " wake, the 
 
SEAL ENTHUSIASTS. 189 
 
 ance. Ben Jonson, in The Poetaster, speaks of 
 
 rhyming people to death, 
 
 " as they do Irish rats 
 In drumming tunes." 
 
 The Scandinavian seal-hunter takes advantage 
 of the fact that the seal's sense of hearing is so 
 acute, and their love for music so great, that a few 
 notes from a flute will bring scores of them to the 
 surface in a minute or two. Mr. Robert Browning 
 sings of 
 
 " the tune, for which quails on the corn-land will each 
 
 leave his mate 
 To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate, 
 Till for boldness they fight one another ; and then, what has 
 
 weight 
 To set the quick jerboa a-musing, outside his sand house.'' 
 
 Maid of Lome," would have instructed the old salt, though 
 in verses the reverse of didactic in tone or intent, that 
 
 ' ' Earth, Ocean, Air, have nought so shy 
 But owns the power of minstrelsy. 
 In Lettermore the timid deer 
 Will pause, the harp's wild chime to hear ; 
 Rude Heiskar's seal, through surges dark, 
 Will long pursue the minstrel's bark." 
 
 A couplet in Sir Thomas Overbury's poem would only per- 
 haps partially meet old Tom's difficulty, for it treats of fishes 
 as dumb, not deaf. But then does not dumb include and 
 imply deaf? And might not Overbury choose dumb because 
 of the rhyme ? 
 
 "And fishes too, though they themselves be dumbe, 
 To hear Arion's harpe did gladly come." 
 
iqo BONNIE KILMENY. 
 
 In what Mr. Kingsley calls the " grand ballad " 
 of Glasgerion, we hear how the elfin harper could 
 harp fish out of the water, and water out of a 
 stone. The Kilmeny of the Ettrick Shepherd 
 "keeped afar frae the haunts o' men, her holy- 
 hymns unheard to sing," — unheard by men, but 
 not by the brute-world ; for, wherever her peaceful 
 form appeared, and her sweet voice sounded, the 
 wild beasts gathered in peace : 
 
 " The wolf played blithely round the field, 
 The lordly bison lowed and kneeled, 
 The dun deer wooed with manner bland, 
 And cowered aneath her lily hand. 
 And when at eve the woodlands rang, 
 When hymns of other worlds she sang, 
 In ecstasy of sweet devotion, 
 Oh, then the glen was all in motion ; 
 The wild beasts of the forest came, 
 Broke from their bughts and faulds the tame, 
 And goved around, charmed and amazed ; 
 EVn the dull cattle crooned and gazed ; . . . 
 The hind came tripping o'er the dew," etc. 
 
 The Poet's Song of Mr. Tennyson, and the 
 Prelude to the Tales of a Wayside Inn by Professor 
 Longfellow, will supply parallel passages ; not to 
 dwell on a less technical resemblance in Words- 
 worth's narrative poem, the White Doe of Ry Is tone. 
 
i9i 
 
 XL 
 S@in0trel anti »>eer* 
 
 2 Kings iii. 15. 
 
 " TJ RING me a minstrel," said Elisha, when he 
 U would be moved to prophesy. The min- 
 strelsy would serve to attune the faculties of the 
 seer to the faculty of prevision. The prelude of the 
 minstrel was the preparative of the prophet. " But 
 now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass 
 when the minstrel played, that the hand of the 
 Lord came upon him," and he prophesied. 
 
 When Saul met the company of prophets coming 
 down from the high place, it was with a psaltery, 
 and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, before them : 
 and they prophesied ; and the Spirit of the Lord 
 came upon Saul, and he prophesied with them, 
 and was turned into another man ; insomuch that 
 the people said one to another, " Is Saul also 
 among the prophets ?" His exceptional suscepti- 
 bility to music, as manifested in the curative art of 
 
192 SUGGESTIVE MINSTRELSY. 
 
 the harper of Bethlehem, gives a fresh accent of 
 interest to this passage, as betokening here too an 
 elective affinity between minstrel and seer. 
 
 The minstrelsy harmonizes the moral frame, 
 intellectual powers, and aesthetical sensibilities ; 
 composing, and withal exciting, the listener, by the 
 spell of its suggestive* strains. 
 
 Music is defined by De Quincey an intellectual 
 or a sensual pleasure, according to the tempera- 
 ment of him who hears it ; and he refers with 
 admiration to a passage in the Religio Medici of 
 Sir Thomas Browne, which, though chiefly re- 
 markable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic 
 value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of 
 musical effects. The mistake of most people, 
 argued the English Opium-eater, is to suppose 
 
 * The effect of music upon the faculty of invention is a 
 subject on which Mr. Disraeli professes to have long curiously 
 observed and deeply meditated. He considers it a finer pre- 
 lude to creation than to execution ; saying that one does well 
 to meditate upon a subject under the influence of music, but 
 that to execute we should be alone, and supported by our 
 essential and internal strength. He goes on to say that 
 the greatest advantage a writer can derive from music is 
 that it teaches most exquisitely the art of development : " It 
 is in remarking the varying recurrence of a great composer 
 to the same theme, that a poet may learn how to dwell upon 
 the phases of a passion, how to exhibit a mood of mind under 
 all its alternations, and gradully to pour forth the full tide 
 of feeling." — Contarini Fleming, part iii., chap. viii. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF MUSICAL FEELING. 193 
 
 that it is by the ear they communicate with music, 
 and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its 
 effects. " But this is not so ; it is by the reaction 
 of the mind upon the notices of the ear (the matter 
 coming from the senses, the form from the mind), 
 that the pleasure is constructed ; and therefore it is 
 that people of equally good ear differ so much in 
 this point from one another." The passage from 
 Sir Thomas Brown is presumably that in which, 
 after affirming that whatsoever is harmonically 
 composed delights in harmony, " which makes me 
 much distrust the symmetry of those heads which 
 declaim against all church-music," the eloquent 
 Medicus avows that, " For myself, not only for my 
 [catholic] obedience but my particular genius I do 
 embrace it ; for even that vulgar and tavern-music, 
 which makes one man merry, and another mad, 
 strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound 
 contemplation of the first composer." Coleridge 
 who pronounces music the most entirely human 
 of the fine arts, and having the fewest analoga in 
 nature, while he traces its first delightfulness to 
 simple accordance with the ear, goes on to describe 
 it as nevertheless an " associated " thing, which 
 recalls the deep emotions of the past with an 
 intellectual sense of proportion. "Every human 
 feeling is greater and larger than the exciting 
 cause, — a proof, I think, that man is designed for 
 
 13 
 
194 SENSE OF HARMONY. 
 
 a higher state of existence ; and this is deeply 
 implied in music, in which there is always some- 
 thing more and beyond the immediate expression." 
 In how many, exclaims Professor Maurice, has it 
 awakened the sense of an order and harmony in 
 the heart of things which, outwardly, were most 
 turbulent and confused ; of a spirit in themselves 
 capable of communicating with other spirits ; of a 
 union intended for us upon some other ground 
 than that mere formal and visible association, yet 
 justifying, explaining, sustaining that. " For these 
 reasons, and others which I am ill able to under- 
 stand, but which I do not the less think to be 
 solid, sages have spoken of Music as the most 
 important instrument in forming men and in 
 building up societies." The disclaimer of technical 
 knowledge often accompanies a like assertion of 
 positive interest in the art ; as where Dr. Channing, 
 in a letter to Blanco White, adverts to his recent 
 perusal of Goethe's correspondence with Bettina, 
 the musical sections of which contained much that 
 he could not understand, and much that to him 
 sounded like extravagance ; but he felt that there 
 was a truth at bottom, and he wanted to under- 
 stand more. " I am no musician, and want a good 
 ear, and yet I am conscious of a power in music 
 which I want words to describe. It touches chords, 
 reaches depths in the soul, which lie beyond all 
 
DE QJJINCEY OX MUSICAL l IDEAS? 195 
 
 other influences, — it extends my consciousness, 
 and has sometimes given me a pleasure which I 
 may have found in nothing else. Nothing in mv 
 experience is more mysterious, more inexplicable* 
 An instinct has always led men to transfer it to 
 heaven; and I suspect the Christian, under its 
 power, has often attained to a singular conscious- 
 ness of his immortality." Facts of this nature 
 made the writer feel and affirm what an infinite 
 mystery our nature is, and how little our books of 
 science reveal it to us. 
 
 To a friend who, hypothetically, objects that to 
 him a succession of musical sounds is like a collec- 
 tion of Arabic characters,* — he can attach no ideas 
 to them, — "Ideas!" is Mr. de Quincey's excla- 
 matory reply, — " there is no occasion for them ; all 
 that class of ideas which can be available in such 
 a case has a language of representative feelings." 
 Speaking for himself, he states that a chorus of 
 elaborate harmony sufficed to display before him, 
 
 * Apply what a philosophic dissertator on imitative music 
 has said of that little piece of Sir Sterndale Bennett's called 
 The Lake, which very cleverly describes a calm sheet of 
 water, presently ruffled by a creeping current of wind. If it 
 were not, says the critic, for the verbal announcement of the 
 subject, one sees no reason why the same strain should not 
 do duty as the description, of a calm moonlit scene, broken 
 by some envious clouds, and by-and-by relapsing into serene 
 light 
 
196 POETRY, PAINTING, MUSIC. 
 
 as in a piece of arras- work, the whole of his past 
 life — not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as 
 if present and incarnated in the music ; no longer 
 painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents 
 removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, and 
 its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. 
 The late author of a disquisition on the philosophy 
 of poetical description, pronounces the imitative 
 quality of poetry to differ altogether from that of 
 painting, and to bear a strong analogy to that of 
 music, her consorted sister in days of old. Paint- 
 ing, he affirmed to represent co-existence in space ; 
 while music is symbolical of succession in time, and 
 poetry is subject to the same law of progression. 
 Painting, he said, acts immediately upon the eye, 
 and only mediately upon the intellect ; while 
 music and poetry pay their first addresses to the 
 ear, and both are capable of suggesting infinitely 
 more than words can say* Mr. G. H. Lewes 
 defines Italian music to be the expression of feel- 
 ing, — German, of both feeling and thought ;f there 
 
 * "Painting provides ready-made images. Poetry, like 
 music, disposes the soul to be imaginative, by exciting sym- 
 pathy. Painting can show a facsimile of the beautiful that 
 is seen. Music, wedded to poetry, can fill the heart with the 
 joy and power of beauty." — What is Poetical Description ? 
 (Blackwood, 1839.) 
 
 t The essential characteristics of Italian music he explains 
 
GERMAN AND ITALIAN MUSIC. 197 
 
 is emotion in the one, but in the other imagination 
 and reverie have equal share. He appeals to the 
 effect of each, to corroborate this description ; the 
 Italian exciting a sensuous musical delight, and 
 often a touching emotion ; while the German, " de- 
 ficient perhaps in that sensuous beauty, compen- 
 sates by its reverie. Beethoven's music, though 
 trembling with feeling, and piercing the heart with 
 plaints of melody more tender and intense than 
 ever burst from any other muse, has yet a con- 
 stant presence of Titanic thought which lifts the 
 spirit upwards on the soaring wings of imagina- 
 tion. It does more ; it lights up the dim recesses of 
 the mind, and recalls those indefinite, intense half- 
 
 to be continuity, simplicity, melody : it is full of " linked 
 sweetness long drawn out" He refers to the works of 
 Paisiello, Cimarosa, Rossini, and Bellini, out of a hundred 
 names that throng upon the memory, as displaying the cha- 
 racteristics of uniform simplicity in the structure, which con- 
 sists of a few large outlines, and the sensuous or passionate 
 expression. " If we then compare the works of Bach, 
 Beethoven, Schubert, or Spohr, we shall at once perceive the 
 opposite characteristics of complexity in structure, rapidity of 
 transitions, and the greater importance of the harmonies ; 
 moreover, the harmonies in German music have a meaning of 
 their own. If an Italian air be played and the accompaniment 
 omitted, the expression of the feeling will nevertheless be 
 preserved ; but to omit the harmonies of a German air is to 
 destroy it altogether." — G. H. Lewes, The Spanish Drama, 
 chap iv. (1846.) 
 
198 DE PRO FUNDI S, IN EXCELSIS. 
 
 feelings and half-ideas (if I may use the word) which 
 are garnered in the storehouse of imaginative ex- 
 perience." For, as this congenial expositor — whom, 
 personally, to note as a rapt listener, while Beet- 
 hoven is being interpreted by Halle, or Joachim, 
 or, better still (and what else can be better than 
 that ?) by both together, has been found a pleasant 
 incentive to yet keener listening on the observer's 
 part, — as this not superficial though most versatile 
 critic goes on to say, we have all a vast amount of 
 emotions and ideas, to which we can give no defi- 
 nite form ; links that connect us with former states ; 
 half-remembrances of joyful or painful emotions, 
 which have so far faded in memory as to become 
 mdistinguishably shadowed into a thousand others. 
 These, in fine, are what " music of the highest 
 class excites in us, by mingling with the recon- 
 dite springs of imagination, and awakening long 
 dormant feelings." Lady Eastlake is eloquent 
 on the subject of those pure musical ideas which 
 give no account of their meaning and origin, 
 and need not to do it — of what she terms that 
 delicious "German Ocean" of the symphony 
 and the sonata — of those songs without words* 
 
 * Piteously Charles Lamb protests his utter incompetence 
 to apprehend, comprehend, or even tolerate " those insufferable 
 concertos," and elaborations of wordless instrumental music 
 generally. Words are something, he says ; but to be exposed 
 
JVORDLESS MUSIC. 199 
 
 which we find in every adagio and andante 
 of Mozart and Beethoven — far more, to her think- 
 to an endless battery of mere sounds ; to fill up sound with 
 feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it ; to gaze on 
 empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for your- 
 self ; to read a book, "all stops," and be obliged to supply 
 the verbal matter ; to invent extempore tragedies to answer 
 to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime — 
 these are faint shadows, on Elia's own showing, of what he 
 had undergone from a series of the most ably executed pieces 
 of " this empty instrumental music." But then Elia wrote 
 avowedly, and of gentle malice aforethought, as a man who 
 had no ear. 
 
 A recent essayist on the subject of the dearth of new poets 
 speculates on the progress of music as possibly one of the 
 causes that must be taken into account in explaining that 
 dearth. When Music, heavenly maid, was young, Poetry, we 
 are reminded, was grown up. The pair are taken to have 
 insensibly changed places ; Music having developed into a 
 popular and intellectual science ; great artists appearing one 
 after another, whose productions will live perhaps as long as 
 the productions of ^Eschylusor Sophocles; and sentimen- 
 tality and genius being no longer driven to find expression 
 for their thoughts in -words. " Beethoven and Mendelssohn 
 have taken the place of poets in the nineteenth century." 
 
 Music, says Dr. O. W. Holmes, has an absolute sensuous 
 significance ; but for human beings it does not cause a mere 
 sensation, nor an emotion, nor a definable intellectual state, 
 though it may excite many varied emotions and trains of 
 worded or pictured thought. But words cannot, he con- 
 tends, truly define it : we might as well give a man a fiddle, 
 and tell him to play the Ten Commandments, as give him a 
 dictionary, and tell him to describe the music of Don Giovanni. 
 — Mr. Joseph Goddard, in his Philosophy of Music, claims for 
 
LIEDER OHNE WORTE. 
 
 ing, than in " those dreamy creations, beautiful 
 as they are, expressly composed as such by Men- 
 music this distinction — that while the other arts convey cir- 
 cumstances first and the emotions afterwards, music alone im- 
 parts the emotion in the first place, and then the circumstances. 
 " It forcibly rouses emotion, that is, as its first and direct 
 function ; and, by a series of suggestive combinations, it 
 assists the associative faculties of the hearer to fill in the cir- 
 cumstances according to his capacity." It is notorious, as an 
 eloquent dissertator on the subject has observed, that some 
 of the most exquisite music of modern composition has taken 
 the form of " songs without words ; " and he expresses a 
 doubt whether the most perfect specimens of this class would 
 be improved by attaching to them even ideally beautiful and 
 suitable language. Songs without words he defines to be, in 
 truth, songs with an indefinite variety of sets of words which 
 may be sung to them in the mind's ear, and one or other of 
 which is so sung, every time they are played, to the ear of 
 each genuine listener. The temperament, or the particular 
 humour for the moment, he says, of the individual listener 
 will colour slightly the details of the imaginary words of the 
 song in accordance with its own taste, subject to the general 
 guidance given by the emphasis and harmony of the musical 
 score : enough is left to be filled out by everybody's private 
 imagination, to ensure the absence of any jarring of the feel- 
 ings of the audience through the utterance of a chord ot 
 thought which might please one and displease another. 
 " There is a pleasure that flows from the combination of a 
 most definite tenderness, joyousness, or plaintiveness of feel- 
 ing in the music, with an actual vagueness of expression as 
 regards the vocal utterance of the feeling, which would be lost 
 if the air were tied down to one set of words only." A crowd 
 of persons, it is added, may sit all alike rapt in positive delight 
 through a performance of one of Mendelssohn's Licckr ohne 
 
BEETHOVEN'S ART OF CONVERSATION. 201 
 
 delssohn." These are recognized as the true inde- 
 pendent forms of music, which adhere to no given 
 subject, and require us to approach them in no 
 particular frame of feeling, but rather show the 
 essential capacities of the muse by having no 
 object but her and her alone. The critic does not 
 want to know what a composer thought of when 
 he conceived a symphony ; that would be pinning 
 us down to one train of pleasure ; whereas, if the 
 composer is allowed the free range of our fancy 
 without any preconceived idea which he must 
 satisfy, he gives us a hundred. Great is the plea- 
 sure this interpreter experiences in merely watch- 
 ing Beethoven's art of conversation, — how he 
 wanders and strays, Coleridge-like, from the path, 
 
 Worte, while every member of it is unconsciously agreeing 
 to differ harmoniously with his next neighbour as to the exact 
 shade of meaning expressed by each passage of the song. 
 Mendelssohn is thus well said to have left every one of his 
 million hearers to be, in regard of those songs, his own poet 
 for ever. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle explains a musical thought to be one spoken 
 by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the 
 thing ; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely, the melody 
 that lies hidden in it. " All inmost things, we may say, are 
 melodious ; naturally utter themselves in song. The meaning 
 of song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can 
 express the effect music has on us ? A kind of inarticulate 
 unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the 
 Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that ! " 
 
202 STUDYING BEETHOVEN'S SYMPHONIES. 
 
 loses himself apparently in strange subjects and 
 irrelevant ideas, till you wonder how he will ever 
 find his way back to the original argument " There 
 is a peculiar delight in letting the scenery of one of 
 his symphonies merely pass before us, studying the 
 dim Turner-like landscape from which objects and 
 landmarks gradually emerge, feeling a strange 
 modulation passing over the scene like a heavy 
 cloud, the distant sunlight melodies still keeping 
 their places, and showing the breadth of the ground 
 by the slow pace at which they shift towards us." 
 Infinite is the interest with which the same ac- 
 complished student follows the mere wayward 
 mechanism of Beethoven's ideas — how they dart up 
 a flight of steps, like children on forbidden ground, 
 each time gaining a step higher, and each time 
 flung back — how they run the gauntlet of the whole 
 orchestra, chased farther and farther by each in- 
 strument in turn ; are jostled, entangled, separated, 
 and dispersed, and at length flung pitilessly beyond 
 the confines of the musical scene. But we have 
 only to wait; and anon, "one soft bassoon-link 
 holds the cable, a timid clarionet fastens on, 
 other voices beckon, more hands are held out, 
 and in a moment the whole fleet of melody 
 is brought back in triumph and received with 
 huzzas." Presently, again, the writer is an amused 
 watcher of the great symphonist's manner of 
 
THE C MINOR SYMPHONY. 203 
 
 treating his instruments ; how at first he gives 
 them all fair play, then alternately seizes, tor- 
 ments, and disappoints them, till they wax im- 
 patient, and one peeps in here and another tries to 
 get a footing there, and at first they are timid and 
 then bold, and some grow fretful and others co- 
 quettish, and at length all deafen you with the 
 clamour of their rival claims. Varied pleasure is 
 avowed in these and many other fantastic ideas 
 which he conjures up — "but there is quite as much 
 in sitting a passing recipient and giving yourself 
 no account of your enjoyment at all. 
 
 " It is very interesting to know that in that 
 magical symphony of C minor, where those three 
 mysterious notes compose the ever-recurring theme, 
 Beethoven was possessed by the idea of ' Fate 
 knocking at the door,' but we are not sure that we 
 should wish to have that black figure with its 
 skeleton-hand always filling up the foreground of 
 our thoughts. We never enjoyed that symphony 
 more, than once under the impression that it re- 
 presented a military subject, and those inquiring 
 notes seemed the outposts reconnoitring. The 
 mere leading idea of the composer is often utterly 
 incommensurate with the beauty of the compo- 
 sition. If, like the Frenchman, we ask Beethoven's 
 Sonata in G, ' Sonate, que veux-tu V it does not 
 satisfy us to hear that it means a quarrel between 
 
204 BOUNDLESS RANGE OF WORDLESS MUSIC. 
 
 husband and wife; that the plaintive, coquettish 
 repartee of the passages is all recrimination and 
 retort, and those naive three notes which end the 
 last bar, the last word ! No, pure wordless music 
 has too mysterious and unlimited a range for us to 
 know precisely what it means. The actual idea 
 from which it may have sprung is like the single 
 seed at the root of a luxuriant many-headed flower, 
 curious when found, but worthless. The ideas of 
 the composer, like himself, often disappoint us. 
 Rameau declared that he could set a Dutch news- 
 paper to music. Haydn cared not how common- 
 place the idea might be which was given him to 
 compose to. It matters not whether the depths 
 of musical inspiration be stirred by a common 
 pebble or a precious jewel ; at most, we can but 
 judge of the gloom or sunshine that is reflected on. 
 their surface." 
 
 To recur for a moment to the comparison insti- 
 tuted by Mr. Lewes between the modern Italian 
 and German schools. A learned French Professor, 
 in his Etudes sur VAniiquitc, speaks of Germany 
 opening a new sphere of art, by dint of applying 
 her erudition and sensibility combined, to music. 
 He describes the formation and growth of a double 
 school of music, while ) r et the cannon of Bonaparte 
 thundered from city to city — the school of Rossini, 
 and that of Beethoven ; the former, graceful, lively, 
 
BEETHOVEN'S SCHRECKENSXOTE. 205 
 
 prolific, voluptuous, careless ; the latter, prodigal of 
 science, and whimsically bold in its unlooked-for 
 combinations. To apply the lines of the old dra- 
 matist, there is in Beethoven a teeming wealth of 
 
 " curiosity and cunning, 
 Concord in discord,* lines of diff' ring method 
 Meeting in one full centre of delight." 
 
 The Rossini school carried to the highest attainable 
 pitch "l'eclat, la rapidite, la fougue, l'elan;" the 
 
 * M. Lenz calls the Schrecke?isnote, or note of horror, that 
 note so familiar to amateurs, the C sharp which, in the midst 
 of a simple and melodious passage in F major, in the finale 
 of Beethoven's eighth symphony, and having no perceptible 
 relation to the key, is suddenly sounded fortissimo by the 
 whole strength of the orchestra for the length of a bar, after 
 which the melody continues quietly as before. M. Lenz finds 
 in this Schreckensnote the expression of the feelings with 
 which a person taking a pleasant walk should suddenly find 
 himself on the edge of a tremendous precipice. Concerning 
 this one note, he says, a whole book might be written {Satur- 
 day Review, iv. 112). M. Alexandre Oublicheff, on the other 
 hand, in his disquisition on Beethoven, ses Critiques etses Glos- 
 sateurs, compares the effect to that a friend might produce if 
 he jumped up suddenly amid a tranquil and cheerful party, 
 gave a shriek, made a grimace at you, and then sat down 
 again and continued the conversation where it left off. The 
 imagination of different hearers would probably suggest other 
 comparisons, his Saturday Reviewer surmises, who takes this 
 note to illustrate admirably well Beethoven's real peculiarity 
 as a humorist, and of the highest order, uniting the perception 
 of the beautiful and sublime with the love of the grotesque 
 and commingling them. The Jean Paul of crotchets. 
 
206 BEETHOVEN'S GIFT OF MELODY. 
 
 Beethoven school sounded the depths of mystical 
 expression. "On peut reprocher a Tun l'exces de 
 la verve ; a l'autre, l'obscurite et la complication." 
 
 . The reproach may be called very French. Mr. 
 
 ' Hogarth, again, admits the German music of the 
 seventeenth century to have been distinguished by 
 learning and profundity, rather than facility and 
 grace; by intricate combinations of harmony, rather 
 than flowing and expressive air ; and this he fur- 
 ther admits to be in a considerable degree the 
 character of the German music to this day, when 
 compared with that of Italy; but he shows the 
 more recent German composers to have drawn, 
 from the fountain of Italian melody, draughts 
 which awakened their imagination and refined their 
 taste — their music gaining beauty and simplicity, 
 without losing the richness of its harmony. This 
 remark is applied to those parts of all the 
 greatest works of Beethoven, where the most en- 
 chanting strains of melody come upon the ear, 
 through his wild and gloomy masses of sound, 
 " like gleams of sunshine through the clouds and 
 darkness of an April sky." Lovell Beddoes speaks 
 in one of his poems of 
 
 " A pang of music dropping round delight, 
 As if sweet music's honiest heart did break." 
 
 And such a commingled sense of honied sweetness, 
 and pang, and delight, and heartbreak, characterizes- 
 
HIS STORM AND SUNSHIXK. 207 
 
 many a sustained wail of Beethoven's. If in his 
 harmonies the masses of sound are rightly said to 
 have a depth of gloom peculiar to themselves, 
 — swelling on the ear, growing darker and darker, 
 " like the lowering storm-cloud on which we gaze 
 till we are startled by the flash, and appalled by 
 the thunder which bursts from its bosom," — strains 
 of melody, too, abound, of melody "inexpressibly 
 impassioned and ravishing ; strains which do not 
 merely please, but dissolve in pleasure ; which do 
 not merely move, but overpower with emotion." 
 As his slow and tranquil movements are described 
 as having neither the placid composure of Haydn 
 nor the abiding tenderness of Mozart, but a gravity 
 all their own, replete with deep and melancholy 
 thought ; so, when rapid, his music is "not brisk or 
 lively, but agitated and changeful," stored with 
 " sweet and bitter fancies " — full of storm and sun- 
 shine, of bursts of passion sinking into the subdued 
 accents of grief, or relieved by transient gleams of 
 hope or joy. His scherzoso, or playful mood, the 
 Surveyor- General of Music declares to be as unlike 
 as possible to the constitutional jocularity to which 
 Haydn loved to give vent in the finales of his sym- 
 phonies and quartets. " If, in a movement of this 
 kind, Beethoven sets out in a tone of gaiety, his 
 mood changes involuntarily, — the smile fades away, 
 as it were, from his features, — and he falls into a 
 
208 SYMPHONIES OF BEETHOVEN. 
 
 train of sombre ideas, from which he ever and anon 
 recovers himself, as if with an effort, and from a 
 recollection of the nature of his subject." M. Gus- 
 tave Planche is treating of an entirely different 
 subject when he casually refers to a mode of com- 
 position familicr an x grands symphonistcs de VAlle- 
 mag?ie, of whom Beethoven is chief: " On dirait 
 qu'il promene au hasard ses doigts sur le clavier ; 
 mais peu a peu il s'exalte, il s'enivre de sa pensee, 
 le son grandit et monte jusqu'au faite ; le murmure 
 qui tout a l'heure chuchotait a nos oreilles s'enfle 
 jusqu'a la menace ; nous etions dans une prairie 
 au bord d'un limpide ruisseau et voici que nous 
 sommes transported sur la crete d'un rocher au bord 
 d'un fleuve. ecumant." But surely quite as often the 
 effect is 
 
 " As when a melody that floated round, 
 Bearing delight to thousand ravish'd ears, 
 Is lost awhile beneath a storm of sound, 
 Then through the lessening tumult reappears, 
 And trebly potent for the sweet surprise, 
 Unlocks the long-closed gates of Paradise, 
 And bids the soul dissolve in silent tears." 
 
 Confessedly it is in his symphonies that the 
 powers of Beethoven's genius are most fully dis- 
 played ; and Mr. Hogarth, who pronounces the 
 symphony in C minor to stand alone and un- 
 rivalled, not only claims for the Sinfo7iia Pastorale 
 the distinction of being the finest piece of de- 
 
MIMETIC MUSIC. 209 
 
 scriptive music in existence, but goes so far as to 
 assert that it requires no key, no explanation, but 
 places every image before the mind with a distinct- 
 ness which neither poetry nor painting could sur- 
 pass, and with a beauty which neither of them 
 could equal * Of another of Beethoven's sympho- 
 
 * The Edinburgh Reviewer of the General Survey of 
 Music (1835) ridiculed this assertion, in making which the 
 enthusiasm of the author, said his critic, had carried him off 
 his feet ; and as a parallel passage there was suggested one 
 of the pleasing exaggerations of a certain captain known to 
 all readers of Marryat, who described his mother as being so 
 splendid a pianoforte player, that upon one occasion, when 
 she was delighting her friends with her performance, she 
 introduced an imitation of thunder so exquisite, that the 
 cream for tea became sour, besides three casks of beer in the 
 cellar. This the reviewer alleged to be scarcely more laugh- 
 able than it is to say that the descriptive powers of the Pas- 
 toral Symphony, undoubtedly great as they are, or of any 
 instrumental music unaccompanied by words, ever can place 
 imagery before the mind with a distinctness equal to poetry 
 or painting. Beethoven himself, it is added, seems to have 
 been of a different opinion, as he has here furnished us with 
 an explanation, in words, of the different scenes intended to 
 be delineated ; " knowing that the graphic power of his 
 pencil, without such explanation, could never be made to 
 convey any definite idea of visual objects, or to give anything 
 more than the general character of certain emotions, or to 
 excite certain trains of association." 
 
 Addison, in one of the advanced numbers of the Spectator 
 makes some remarks on the "strange" attempt to repre- 
 sent visible objects by sounds that have no ideas annexed 
 to them, and to make something like description in music. 
 
210 IMITATIVE ART. 
 
 nies, that in D, and to another effect, M. Planche 
 observes — with a passing protest against the 
 iollowers of Beethoven who, in their own compo- 
 sitions, take such slight account of the characteristic 
 qualities of their master, in la lutte engagce, 
 aujourd 1 hui i cntre la musique et la pofcie — that the 
 author of the admirable work in question never once 
 mistook the limites infrancJiissables of his art,* 
 
 Yet it is certain, he admits, there may be confused, im- 
 perfect notions of this kind raised in the imagination by an 
 artificial composition of notes ; "and we find that great 
 masters in the art are able sometimes to set their hearers 
 in the heat and hurry of a battle, to overcast their minds 
 with melancholy scenes and apprehensions of deaths and 
 funerals, or to lull them into pleasing dreams of groves and 
 Ely slums." 
 
 * Mr. Joseph Goddard, in his series of essays on the 
 relationship of music to the other fine arts, enunciates this 
 proposition — that whereas other forms of art, like painting 
 and sculpture, endeavour to reproduce that phase of beauty 
 which created them by means o f mitation, music depends 
 upon the more subtle principle of abstract expression. The 
 painter, he argues, conceives beauty, and immediately imi- 
 tates upon canvas some form or some general effect, of 
 which the original already exists in what we call external 
 nature. The poet, again, conceives beauty, and imitates 
 some already existing form by description, as the painter had 
 done by representation. Music, on the other hand, renders 
 emotion by a medium of expression peculiar to itself— namely, 
 melody and rhythm or phrase. See The Philosophy of Music 
 (1862), and a discriminative notice of it in the Saturday 
 Review^ xiv. 350. 
 
IGNOBLE MIMICRY. 211 
 
 nor ever attempted to transfer to the orchestra 
 that analysis and portrayal of the passions which 
 belongs to language only. He was satisfied if he 
 excited in his audience emotions alternately calm 
 and tumultuous, and his efforts were crowned with 
 legitimate success. He attempted not the im- 
 possible, but he realized all he desired ; and the 
 whole of his symphonies, without a single ex- 
 ception, are hailed by M. Planche as the best and 
 most solid protest the most enlightened friends of 
 music could wish for, against the aggressiveness, 
 les clival lis sements, of the philosophico-picturesque 
 school. " II n'y a pas une de ces ceuvres qui 
 n'emeuve profondement ; mais * il n'y en a pas une 
 
 * Apply a versicle from the Two Voices : 
 
 " Like an >£olian harp that wakes 
 No certain air, but overtakes 
 Far thought with music that it makes." 
 
 To what base use a nobler instrument may be degraded, 
 is to be seen in the alleged prostitution of the cathedral organ 
 at Malaga on Christmas Eve, when, after midnight mass has 
 been celebrated, " the organ peals forth, and successively 
 imitates the sounds in the manger — an infant's cry, the cock's 
 crow, the donkey's bray, and the ox's low." Compared with 
 this, Paganini's violin trickery in the way of musical mimetics 
 was high art, when, as an enraptured admirer describes the 
 effect, 
 
 " His instrument became a tree far off, 
 A nest of birds and sunbeams, sparkling both, 
 
212 THEORY OF IMITATION. 
 
 qui n'offre a Interpretation un champ indefini." 
 In listening to his inspired accents, mobile imagina- 
 
 A cottage-bower ; or he would condescend, 
 
 In playful wisdom which knows no contempt, 
 
 To bring to laughing memory, plain as sight, 
 
 A farmyard with its inmates, ox and lamb, 
 
 The whistle and the whip, with feeding hens 
 
 In household fidget muttering evermore, 
 
 And, rising as in scorn, crown' d Chanticleer, 
 
 Ordaining silence with his sovereign crow. 
 
 Then from one chord of his amazing shell 
 
 Would he fetch out the voice of quires, and weight 
 
 Of the built organ ; or some twofold strain 
 
 Moving before him in sweet-going yoke, 
 
 Ride like an Eastern conqueror, round whose state 
 
 Some light Morisco leaps with his guitar ; 
 
 And ever and anon o'er these he'd throw 
 
 Jets of small notes like pearl, or like the pelt 
 
 Of lovers' sweetmeats en Italian lutes 
 
 From windows on a feast-day, or the leaps 
 
 Of pebbled water, sprinkled in the sun, 
 
 One chord effecting all." 
 
 If Beethoven, in the most popular of his symphonies, ob- 
 serves Mr. E. S. Dallas, tries to give us the song the cuckoo, 
 the lowing of herds, and the roar of the storm, he condescends 
 to imitations which are beyond his art, and are confessedly- 
 foreign to it. Yet Coleridge says distinctly that imitation is 
 the universal principle of the fine arts, and that it would be 
 easy to apply it not merely to painting, but even to music. 
 The theory of imitation came to be accepted in the last cen- 
 tury as if (see chap. iv. of The Gay Science) it were one of 
 the prime truths of religion, or one of the axioms of reason, 
 worthy of all acceptation, always, and by all men ; and 
 though it wore itself out gradually, it died hard, and held its 
 ground so lustily that even some of the ablest heads of Ger- 
 many gave their adhesion to it — Jean Paul Richter adopting 
 it vaguely as the first principle of his introduction to /Esthetic. 
 
LIMITS OF MUSICAL EXPRESSION. 213 
 
 tions pass from tenderness to reverie, from reverie 
 to bewildered awe ; but who shall ever translate 
 
 The theory, Mr. Dallas contends, is as false as any can be 
 which puts the part for the whole, and a small part for a very 
 large whole. 
 
 There are many ardent musicians, another distinguished 
 critic has remarked, who claim for music a versatility and 
 delicacy of delineation equal, if not superior, to the produc - 
 tions of poetry and painting. The question then is, ob- 
 viously, as he puts it, how comes it that no sooner does a 
 musical passage approach actual and pronounced description 
 than we are sensible of a violation of taste ? " The magnifi- 
 cent oratorio of Israel in Egypt, and the works of Handel 
 generally, supply plenty of instances." The writer cites for 
 his purpose that favourite canto of In Memoriam i of which 
 the opening stanza runs thus, — 
 
 " Calm is the morn, without a sound, ' 
 Calm as to suit a calmer grief, 
 And only through the faded leaf 
 The chesnut pattering to the ground ;" 
 
 and he submits that it would be hard to meet with a poetical 
 passage more capable than this is of being rendered, in its broad 
 outlines and general tone, by musical sounds. More than one 
 strain from the Lieder ohne Worte might, he suggests, be used 
 for the purpose almost without alteration : the conceptions of 
 unbroken peace in earth and sky, of clearness and far-reach- 
 ing prospect, of the gentle swaying of waves, felt, not seen, 
 to underlie the silver sleep on the sea — all these might be ex- 
 pressed with great power and beauty, either by the pianoforte or 
 by concerted music. But it is another thing when, leaving the 
 poet's broad outlines, we come to the details. " Observe, not 
 only the echo from the stillness magically drawn out to mingle 
 with his own suspirium de profu ndis, but the consummate art 
 
214 DESCRIPTIVE POWER OF MUSIC. 
 
 these eloquent notes into the vulgar tongue ? In 
 the opinion of the author of Etudes sur les Arts, 
 
 which has, in fewest words, conveyed that harmony to other 
 ears in tones of absolute clearness. What sonate pathctique 
 has done, or could be made to do, the same ? Not that music 
 would be unable to dash the calm with melancholy, to infuse an 
 element of passion into the wide tranquillity ; but, compared 
 with the surpassing delicacy of this poem, the effect would be 
 wavering and indistinct. There would be just this result, and 
 no more, from the musical sounds. Passion would be under- 
 stood to be entering into the calm — the hearers would be left 
 to complete the union ad libitum;' Very ably this essayist 
 works out his argument that music draws vaguely — that its 
 descriptive power is feeble compared with the capabilities of 
 other arts. It falls short of poetry, he maintains, in this — 
 that unless aided from without, it is able only to enhance 
 existing modes of feeling ; it having no power of close de- 
 marcation, analysis, or illustration — at any rate none that 
 can hold the field for a moment against the articulate powers 
 of language. It is when the framework of passionate ex- 
 pression has been at least begun, if not completed, from alien 
 sources, that the real triumphs of music are allowed to be- 
 come apparent in a gorgeous decoration or superstructure. 
 u Music will not dig the channels of emotion with the pre- 
 cision of language, of painting, or of sculpture ; but, these 
 being once indicated, it will widen and fill them to overflow- 
 ing. It will prove fuller of meaning than the very words 
 without whose aid its own meaning would have been doubtful 
 and hard to interpret." Referring again to In Memoriam, 
 the writer says that any lover of Beethoven's music will feel 
 how well he would have set the canto (xv.) beginning, u To- 
 night the winds begin to rise ;" or the single verse (exxix. , 
 u Thy voice is on the rolling air ; ? ' — whereas, if, impressed by 
 the very same emotions as the laureate, Beethoven had sat 
 
DEFINING THE INDEFINITE. 215 
 
 this indefinite freedom of interpretation is one of 
 the fundamental character-marks of music. To 
 seek to restrain and limit that which by the nature 
 of it is illimitable — to aim at giving one precisely 
 ascertained and exactly determined meaning to 
 notes capable of offering a thousand floating mean- 
 ings — is to misconceive the end and the resources 
 of music ; and Beethoven's French critic, here 
 quoted, appeals to his symphonies as sufficing, if 
 attentively studied, to demonstrate this truth, had 
 it not long ago been established on evidence 
 beyond gainsaying. 
 
 Hartley Coleridge assumes all but those who 
 have no music in their souls, to be well aware that 
 music is capable of expressing and evoking any 
 simple emotion ; it may, he says, imitate the rapid 
 succession or dazzling alternation of feeling, or, 
 dying away to silence, may symbolize the fading of 
 passion into pensiveness. It may also, to a certain 
 degree, he grants, express action, as action consists 
 in motion ; but beyond this he denies that it can 
 go. "It cannot narrate, describe, or reason. It is 
 of little assistance to the understanding, and though 
 it may stimulate, it cannot inform the imagination. 
 
 down to give them utterance with his own art as the sole 
 vehicle, he would never have equalled the distinct delineation 
 of the poet. 
 
2i6 FALLACIES AND FUTILITIES 
 
 True, words may supply all these deficiencies, and 
 true, there is no narrative, description, reasoning, 
 or imagination, that is truly poetical, but what in- 
 volves or engenders a pleasurable feeling, nor any 
 feeling of which some modification of numerous 
 sounds is not a conductor." Nevertheless, by the 
 argument, safe and sound, of the author of Bio- 
 graphia Borea/is, whom no one but himself had the 
 right to designate Ignoramus (on the Fine Arts), 
 those compositions will be found best accommo- 
 dated to musical expression, for which music sup- 
 plies a natural and universal language, and such 
 are love, grief, and devotion ; because in all these 
 the feeling suggests the thought, and not the 
 thought or imagery the feeling. In the course of 
 some observations on mimetic verse — as Homer's 
 line imitative (by critical assumption) of the roll- 
 ing, thundering, leaping motion of a stone ; or in 
 Virgil's dactylic suggestion of the gallop or the 
 caracoling of a horse, — Mr. de Quincey shows that 
 picturesqueness, like any other effect, must be 
 subordinated to a higher law of beauty ; and he 
 adverts to the limits of imitation that arise for 
 every art, sculpture, painting, etc., indicating what 
 it ought to imitate, and what not to imitate. And 
 unless regard is had to such higher restraints, 
 metrical effects become "as silly and childish as 
 the musical effects in Kotzwarra's Battle of Prague t 
 
OF MIMETIC MUSIC. 217 
 
 with its ridiculous attempts to mimic the firing of 
 cannon; groans of the wounded, etc., instead of in- 
 volving the passion of a battle in the agitation of 
 the music." An Edinburgh Reviewer comments 
 on that search after novelty by which a composer 
 is led to venture into the field where music is the 
 weakest, — that of direct imitation of natural sounds 
 by musical notes, — a species of rivalry, the hope- 
 lessness of which makes us feel the good sense of 
 Agesilaus' answer, when requested to hear a man 
 sing who could imitate the nightingale, — "I have 
 heard the nightingale herself." A fortiori this 
 critic disdains the futile attempts of musicians to 
 represent motion, to describe the seasons, to pic- 
 ture sunrise or sunset, to convey the impressions 
 of colour, and to narrate the incidents of a battle 
 or a campaign ; for the ingenious organist of Fer- 
 dinand III., Froberger, is said to have composed 
 a very striking musical representation of Count 
 Thurn's passage over the Rhine, and the dangers 
 of the transit, " in twenty-six cataracts or falls of 
 notes."* Indeed, when a taste for this sort of 
 mimetic music, f adds the reviewer, is once intro- 
 
 * Sir J. Hawkins' Hist. Mus., i. 3. 
 
 + Dr. Beattie, in one of his letters to Dr. Laing, speaks of 
 sending his correspondent a little treatise on the art of music 
 by a writer, unnamed, who " thinks music an imitative art ; 
 and that a tune, which he calls the Cameronian Rant, is an 
 
2iS BURLESQUE IMITATION. 
 
 duced (the proper sphere of which would be the 
 comic opera), it is wonderful how even the greatest 
 
 exact resemblance of two women scolding. Mr. Glennie 
 plays the tune, which seems to me to be nothing but con- 
 fusion and barbarism, and to bear no resemblance to any- 
 thing in art or nature. Lord Monboddo, another adherent to 
 the imitative notion, says the only true music he ever heard 
 is the thing called the Hen's March, which no man who 
 deserves to have ears in his head would allow to be music at 
 all."' Into the second of his miscellaneous essays Beattie 
 introduces a discussion of the query, Is music an imitative 
 art ? and his negative is a clearly pronounced one. 
 
 One of Geoffrey Crayon's earliest skits was at the expense 
 of musical mimetics in their most exaggerated development. 
 Military overtures, for instance, were then in vogue, from 
 which a tolerable idea was to be gathered of martial tactics ; 
 the Battle of Prague and Battle of Marengo displays, from 
 which you might become very well experienced in the fire of 
 musketry, the roaring of cannon, the rattling of drums, whis- 
 tling of fifes, braying of trumpets, groans of the dying, and 
 trampling of cavalry, without ever going to the wars. u But 
 it is more especially in the art of imitating inimitable things, 
 and giving the language of even- passion and sentiment of 
 the human mind, so as entirely to do away with the necessity 
 of speech," that a Salmagundi correspondent claims to have 
 particularly excelled the most celebrated musicians of ancient 
 and modern times. He can imitate ever}- single sound, he 
 avers, in the whole compass of nature, and even improve 
 upon it Especially he plumes himself on having discovered 
 a method of expressing, in the most striking manner, u that 
 undefinable, indescribable silence which accompanies the 
 falling of snow." Both in Germany and Italy, in the seven- 
 teenth century, there was a great deal of burlesque imitative 
 music : the cackling of hens all on one note, and ending with 
 
MIMETIC MUSIC. 210. 
 
 genius gives way to the contagion, and follows the 
 herd, — for has not Handel now and then ventured 
 
 ,i fifth above, the mewing of rival cats in nice chromatic 
 order, with a staccato of course by way of a spit — the descrip- 
 tion is from the oft-quoted Quarterly essay — were favourite 
 pastimes of the severest German contrapuntists ; and even 
 Marcello, the Pindar of Music, as he was called, has left two 
 elaborate choruses, one for soprani, the other for contr'alti, 
 which baa like sheep and mou like oxen. These, however, 
 were the " avowed absurdities of men who liked occasionally 
 to drop their robes of dignity." Mendelssohn declined to 
 compose for such a descriptive poem as the Nachtliclie Heer- 
 sc/iau, because he held it to be simply impossible to do so 
 with success. He could, indeed, he tells Frau von Pereira by- 
 letter, have composed music for it in the same descriptive 
 style as Neukomm and Fischof ; he might have introduced a 
 very novel rolling of drums in the bass, and blasts of trumpets 
 in the treble, and have brought in all sorts of hobgoblins. 
 " But I love my serious elements of sound too well to do any- 
 thing of the sort ; for this kind of thing always appears to 
 me a joke" — and he compares it to the paintings in juvenile 
 spelling-books, where the roofs are coloured bright red, to 
 make the children aware they are intended for roofs. 
 
 It is not, maintains the foremost cf feminine authorities on 
 the philosophy of music, — it is not from any walk of imitative 
 music, however enchanting, that the highest musical pleasure 
 can be derived ; — it is not in the likeness of anything in the 
 heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the 
 earth, that the highest musical capacity can be tried. " It is 
 not the dipping passage like a crested wave in ' The floods 
 stood upright as an heap/ or the wandering of the notes in 
 'All we like sheep have gone astray,' in which Handel's 
 intensest musical instinct is displayed ; for beautiful as are 
 these passages, and full of imagery to eye and ear, they 
 
220 HANDEL'S TRICKS OF SOUND. 
 
 upon similar tricks of sound ? In the " Messiah," 
 at the passage, " I will shake the heavens and the 
 earth," he has introduced a sort of musical pun, by 
 repeating the word several times on a centre of 
 musical shakes, " as if," says a critic, " the quaver- 
 ing of the voice could represent the commotions of 
 the world." And in his " Israel in Egypt," he has 
 undertaken to represent, by musical notes, two of 
 the plagues, namely, the buzzing of flies and the 
 hopping of frogs. Well says the accomplished 
 writer of Letters fror?i the Baltic that our hearts 
 sink as we hear how " the children of Israel sighed ! 
 — sighed ! — sighed ! — by reason of the bondage ;" 
 but we care not for the closest imitation of a sob 
 given in the duet of the Gazza Ladra. " Delusion 
 in music, as in painting, is only the delight of the 
 vulgar." But at all times, as we are reminded, the 
 close power of imitation which music affords has 
 been a dangerous rock for the musician. " Haydn 
 in his finest music did not steer clear of it ; one 
 
 smack of a certain mechanical contrivance ; but it is in the 
 simple soothing power of the first four bars of the first song 
 in the ' Messiah/ which descend like heavenly dew upon the 
 heart, telling us that those divine words, ' Comfort ye/ are at 
 hand." This is pronounced to be the indefinable province 
 of " expression," in which the composer has to draw solely 
 upon his own intense sympathies for the outward likeness 
 of a thing which is felt and judged of only in the innermost 
 depths of every heart. 
 
THE HAILSTONE CHORUS. 221 
 
 feels that the servile representations of the tiger's 
 leaps, of the stag's branching horns, of the patter- 
 ing hail, .... are so many blots on his glorious 
 ' Creation.' " Handel's Hailstone Chorus the same 
 writer accounts the grandest example in the world 
 of the higher order, suggestive, not servile, of 
 mimetic music — beginning as it does with the 
 closest imitation, for there are the " single decided 
 ominous notes, like the first heavy lumps of ice 
 striking the earth in separate shots :" they fall 
 faster, yet still detached, when from a battery which 
 we have felt hanging suspended above our heads, 
 " down comes the deluge of sonorous hail," shatter- 
 ing everything before it ; and having thus raised 
 the idea, Handel is admired for his art in sustain- 
 ing it with such wonderful simplicity of means 
 — the electric shouting of the choruses " Fire ! 
 Hailstones !" only in strict unison — the burst of 
 the storm changing only from quavers into semi- 
 quavers — the awful crashing of the elements only 
 the common chord of the key, and that the natural 
 key — till we "feel astonished how the mere repre- 
 sentation of the rage of the elements should have 
 given occasion for one of the grandest themes that 
 musician ever composed."* In his apostrophe to 
 
 * Another example often cited of Handel's imitative powers 
 in music occurs in the accompaniment to "He spake the 
 
222 STORM MUSIC. 
 
 Music, as mighty in her threefold power, Mr. Disraeli 
 begins with " First, thou canst call up all elemental 
 sounds, and scenes, and subjects, with the definite- 
 ness of reality. Strike the lyre ! Lo ! the voice of 
 the winds — the flash of the lightning — the swell of 
 the wave — the solitude of the valley !" And Lady 
 Eastlake recognizes the conveyance by storms and 
 tempests of a sense of sublimity which, however 
 frequently vulgarized by the mere tricks of per- 
 formers, must ever make them favourite subjects 
 for audiences and composers. In Beethoven's tem- 
 pest in the Pastoral Symphony she hails the grand- 
 est and most fearful of all storms ; but she owns 
 to a lingering fondness for Steibelt's Storm, in spite 
 
 word," plainly meant to suggest the buzzing and swarming of 
 flies. 
 
 Again, it has been noticed that in his Deborah, not once is 
 an ascending scale given to the words " To swift perdition," 
 — always are we carried down from the upper note on which 
 the phrase commences. 
 
 Mr. Dallas shrewdly says that when Haydn stole the 
 melody to which he set the eighth commandment, the force 
 of musical imitation could no further go. If, adds the critic, 
 the same composer attempts to reflect in sound the creation 
 of light, and to indicate by cadence the movements of the 
 flexible tiger ; and if Handel in descanting on the plagues of 
 Egypt gives us the buzz of insect life, and indicates by the 
 depth of his notes the depths of the sea, in which the hosts 
 of Pharaoh were drowned ; these imitations are alien to the 
 province of art, and, artistically speaking, are art-failures. 
 
IMITATION LIMITATION. 223 
 
 of strumming schoolroom associations, as having a 
 moral as well as a dramatic meaning ; and she 
 utters a wish that every great musician would 
 leave to the world his definition of a storm. 
 
 In one of his moral philosophy lectures, " On the Beau- 
 tiful," Sydney Smith follows Beattie and Alison in showing 
 that music can express only classes of feeling, — melancholy, 
 for example, — but not any particular instance or action of 
 melancholy. Thus the tune of " Lochaber no more" ex- 
 presses the pathetic in general ; language only can tell us 
 that it is that particular instance of the pathetic, where a poor 
 soldier takes leave of his native land, etc. Hearing an air to 
 which we know no words, can inspire only general emotion. 
 What if the Pastorale of Corelli may have been intended to 
 imitate the song of angels hovering above the fields of 
 Bethlehem, and gradually soaring up to heaven ? It is im- 
 possible, the lecturer maintained, that the music itself can 
 convey any such impression — it can convey only the feelings 
 of solemnity, of rapture, of enthusiasm ; imagination must do 
 the rest. 
 
224 
 
 XII. 
 
 Uncertainty of ~>otmtu 
 
 I Cor. xiv. 7, 8. 
 
 EXCEPT there be given, argues the apostle, a 
 distinction in the sounds of a musical instru- 
 ment, whether pipe or harp, how shall it be known 
 what is piped or harped ? " For if the trumpet 
 give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself 
 to the battle ? " There is almost an infinity of 
 tones in the world, and none of them is without 
 signification ; but they may be so presented that 
 the very object of music is misrepresented. As 
 God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, in 
 all churches of the saints ; so neither is He the 
 author of discord, but of harmony, in that divine 
 art. Let, then, all things be done decently and in 
 order, — a precept of large, comprehensive, and 
 stringent application, aesthetical as well as theo- 
 logical. As St. Paul remonstrated with the Corin- 
 thians, " How is it, then, brethren ? when ye come 
 
SEPARATIST SONGSTERS. 225 
 
 together, every one of you hath a psalm " of his 
 own, a tongue of his own, a will and a way of his 
 own ; and if the whole church so come together, 
 and all set up each his own psalm, and use his own 
 tongue, after his own will and his own way, — will 
 not profane outsiders say they are mad ? so will 
 and do profane outsiders say of the discordant 
 outcome of noises emitted by separatist songsters, 
 who are part-singing with a vengeance, for it is to 
 all effect singing apart. A crackbrained crew or 
 choir they will call them ; at any rate a choir 
 whose unruly din cracks the brain of him that 
 hears them, if not their own. The late clerical 
 author of a dissertation on Church Music asked 
 what could possibly be worse, at the time he wrote, 
 than the music in our rural parishes, and what more 
 difficult to remedy, and yet preserve " harmony " ? 
 for singers were ever notorious for loving to have 
 things their own way : omnibus hoc vitium est can- 
 toribus ; and religious singers he pronounced to be 
 of all the most given to sudden discords* The 
 
 * " They imagined the whole congregation assembled but 
 to hear them : one of them told me with pride, that it was 
 the only part of the service during which nobody was asleep. 
 Warming upon the subject, he added, that he had authority 
 for saying, the singers in the Jewish Church had precedence 
 of all other officials, and performed the most essential part of 
 the service, as was clear from the Psalms, ' The singers go 
 
 15 
 
226 EAR-ACHE IN CHURCH. 
 
 conceit of country musicians was to him intoler- 
 able ; but what he chiefly complained of was their 
 anthems. " Every bumpkin has his favourite solo, 
 and oh, the murder, the profanation ! If there be 
 ears devout in the congregation, how must they 
 ache ! " Those anthems, he urged, should posi- 
 tively be forbidden by authority. Very telling is 
 the description by the author of Letters to Etisebius 
 of half a dozen ignorant, conceited fellows standing 
 up, who begin with a falsehood by professing to 
 sing " to the praise and glory of God " what so 
 manifestly is sung to the honour and glory of John 
 Jones, Peter Hussey, Philip White, John Stobes, 
 Timothy Prim, and John Pride. Then, when they 
 are unanimous, as Sheridan has it, their unanimity 
 is wonderful, as all may know who remember in 
 
 before, and the minstrels [which he took to mean ministers] 
 follow after.' " — Essays by the Rev. JoJui Eagles. 
 
 If the clergyman happens not to be musical, the whole 
 choir hold him in contempt ; but, adds the same temper-tried 
 but ever good-tempered parson, " if he make attempts occa- 
 sionally to join and do his best, pleased with the compliment, 
 they will spare him ; as thus : — one wishing to put the choir 
 in good-humour, had the hypocrisy to applaud their efforts 
 to the principal singer, who replied, pulling up his waistband, 
 and looking satisfaction, ' Pretty well for that, sir ; but we 
 didn't quite pat off the stephany' [symphony]. — ' Does your 
 parson sing ?' — ' A do mumbly a bit.' Now this was meant 
 to let him down easy ; it was neither praise nor quite con- 
 t, but one qualified with the other." — Ibid. 
 
CHORISTERS' BABEL. 227 
 
 full choir clarionet, bass viol, and bassoon assisting, 
 "Some put their trust in Charrots, and some in 
 Orses, but we will remember," etc. In the gallery at 
 this clerical critic's parish church there was a tenor 
 voice that was particularly disagreeable, — having a 
 perpetual yap yap in it, a hooh as if it went round 
 a corner ; he had a very odd way too, of which 
 certainly he did not "keep the noiseless tenor" 
 Then again, not only every one sang as loud as 
 he could bawl, but cheeks and elbows used their 
 utmost efforts, the bassoon vying with the clarionet, 
 the goose-stop of the clarionet with the bassoon — 
 it was Babel with the addition of the beasts. John 
 Locke, in one of his letters from abroad in 1664, 
 describes a choir at Cleve with " strong voices, but 
 so ill-tuned, so ill-managed, that it was their mis- 
 fortune, as well as ours, that they could be heard. 
 He that could not, though he had a cold, make 
 better music with a chevy chase over a pot of 
 smooth ale, deserved well to pay the reckoning, 
 and go away athirst" However, Locke is free to 
 call these the honestest singing men he had ever 
 seen, for they endeavoured to earn their money, 
 and earned it certainly with pains enough ; what 
 they wanted in skill they made up in loudness and 
 variety : " every one had his own tune, and the 
 result of all was like the noise of choosing Parlia- 
 ment-men, where every one endeavours to cry 
 
228 INCONTINENT GABBLE. 
 
 loudest."* It only needed that all who were not 
 singing at or against each other should be talking 
 at or against each other, to make the confusion 
 worse confounded. The talking of the audience — 
 by courtesy so called, though courtesy has neither 
 part nor lot in the matter — during the performance 
 of music, is a standing grievance in standard litera- 
 ture and daily life. It is not every lover of music 
 even who can say with Mr. Browning's glib listener 
 to a Toccata of Galuppi's, 
 
 " I can always leave off talking, when I hear a master play." 
 Incontinence of gabble at such times is an offence 
 restricted to no class or country.f The author of 
 
 * Henry Nelson Coleridge, writing from the West Indies, 
 is once and again sore on the subject of native screeching in 
 public worship. At a Methodist chapel in Anguilla, "the 
 serenity of the neighbourhood was disturbed in the evening " 
 by the screaming out by rote some hymns and songs " with 
 an asperity and discordance of tone which seemed to make 
 Nature angry." Again, at the meeting-house in St John's, 
 Antigua, they "made such a disagreeable noise, that I am 
 persuaded an indictment would lie in England against them 
 for causing a public nuisance. Surely these good people 
 might be a little sotto voce in their canticles ; the introduction 
 of a minor key would be a grateful relief to even- ear. . . . 
 What would Charles Wesley have said at their outraging the 
 spheres after such a sort? " — Six Months in the West I?idics y 
 3rd edit., pp. 216, 249. 
 
 t A degree, and to some sensitive ears only a degree, or 
 hardly that, less intolerable, is the vulgar trick of beating time 
 
BEATING AND KICKING TIME. 229 
 
 Residence in the Marquesas tells us how, while the 
 chanters chanted and the drums beat, at the Feast 
 
 d discretion (and most indiscreetly), or of humming an 
 obbligato accompaniment, distressingly audible and unwel- 
 come. Like the susceptible leg-goer for whom there is no 
 foot-rest, in another of Mr. Robert Browning's poems — 
 
 ' ' Bang, whang, whang, goes the drum ; tootle-te-tootle the fife : 
 No keeping one's haunches still : it's the greatest pleasure in life." 
 
 It is said of the audiences in Lulli's time that they could 
 not resist spontaneously joining the performers in singing the 
 choruses. It is of Lulli's music, and of our Merry Monarch's 
 love for it, that Lady Eastlake is speaking when she says that 
 Charles "wanted something to which he could beat time." So 
 again she says of Matthew Lock's Macbeth music, which is 
 an excellent apology for that same royal patron of his, the 
 " airy prince," that it will still set every grey head or elderly 
 bonnet in a hall wagging with pleasure. Wag away, and 
 welcome. 'Tis merry in hall when beards wag all. But 
 when it comes to heel-tattooing, and time-beating by dint of 
 fist on the chair-rail, or of stick on the floor, and to the 
 uncultured improvisation of vocal accompaniments, ranging 
 from grunt to groan, from a hiss to a hum, — the grievance is 
 dire. One of the characters of Theophrastus is the fellow 
 who "at a concert of music breaks in upon the perform- 
 ance, and hums the tune over to himself." Anstey's Jack 
 Dilettante 
 
 " Is often so kind as to thrust in a note 
 While old Lady Cuckoo is straining her throat, 
 Or little Miss Wren, who's an excellent finger." 
 
 Almost amusingly common in society are such experiences 
 as that recorded by Patrick Fraser Tytler in his letters, o 
 an evening at ^Eneas Macintosh's, where that fine old salt, 
 of a bygone generation, Admiral Sir James Hillyer, was pre- 
 
230 HEARING WITH ONE'S TOES. 
 
 of Calabashes, the crowd paid no attention to the 
 music, such as it was, but chatted and laughed 
 
 sent with his wife and daughter — the latter playing the harp 
 " as finely as any professional performer, besides having a 
 rich full voice, without any airs or trumpery. Her taste was 
 admirable ; but the old Admiral insisted on joining, and sung 
 out as if he had been hailing a French man-of-war, till his 
 wife stopped him, and sent him away from the piano. It 
 was a very funny scene, but the veteran bore it with perfect 
 good humour." 
 
 Leigh Hunt has a laugh (not however without sympathy 
 in it) at unmusical Lord Castlereagh's love for the music in 
 the Beggar's Opera, which he " would get ladies to play to 
 him on the pianoforte, — humming over the airs himself with 
 an exquisite superiority to his incompetency." 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer comments on the tendency of all 
 pleasurable (as well as painful) emotions to produce active 
 demontrations in proportion to their intensity. " People are 
 apt to beat time with head or feet to music which particularly 
 pleases them," he remarks in his Inquiry into the Origin and 
 Function of Music. When the demonstration is confined to 
 the head, instead of breaking out at the lower extremities, 
 happy are the next neighbours of the demonstrant. Dryden 
 is treating of France and the French, proverbially a demon- 
 strative folk, when he says that at their opera, the assiduous 
 opera-goers make 
 
 " foot, hand, head, keep time with every song." 
 
 Archdeacon Hare makes a home complaint on the subject, 
 observing that there is something odd in the disposition of 
 an Englishman's senses ; for he sees with his fingers, and 
 hears with his toes. Enter a gallery of pictures, for instance, 
 and you find all the spectators longing to become handlers. 
 " Go to hear an opera of Mozart's; your next neighbour keeps 
 
CHATTER AND TITTER. 231 
 
 together with entire abandon. M. Henri Taine, 
 only three or four years ago, told us how disgusting 
 to him, as a musical connoisseur, was the frivolity 
 of "high-bred" Parisiennes* at the opera; how, 
 for instance, at the performance of Alceste, during 
 the terrible air of the sacrifice, he heard young 
 ladies chattering to one another, with suppressed 
 laughing : — " Why, that is something to eat they 
 are putting on the altar ; open your glass, quick ; 
 oh, mon Dieu, some real cutlets ! " f Vanbrugh's 
 
 all the while kicking time . . as if he could not kill it without.'' 
 Dr. Holmes's village poet, Gifted Hopkins, had shown an ear 
 for rhythm, and for the simpler forms of music, from his 
 earliest childhood. He is said to have begun beating with 
 his heels the accents of the psalm-tunes sung at meeting 
 at a very tender age — a habit, indeed, of which he had after- 
 wards to correct himself, as, though it shows a sensibility 
 to rhythmical impulses, yet, as the author of The Guardian 
 Angel submits, it is apt to be too expressive when a large 
 number of boots join in the performance. 
 
 * Addison, in his day, was severe (for him) on French 
 female fantastics, and their followers this side the Channel, 
 who made a point of chattering at the play ; and he records 
 his particular annoyance in the case of " a woman of quality, 
 who, as I found by the noise she made, was newly returned 
 from France," during a performance of Macbeth. Landor 
 makes Epicurus say, "There are even in Greece a few re- 
 maining still so barbarous, that I have heard them whisper 
 in the midst of the finest scenes of our greatest poets." 
 "Acorn-fed Chaonians !" is Leontion's exclamatory note of 
 indignation. 
 
 t The mention of cutlets reminds us of a passage in one 
 
TATTLE AND GIGGLE. 
 
 Lord Foppington likes the Opera, "passionately," 
 at least on Tuesdays and Saturdays, because then 
 there is always the best company, and one is not 
 expected to undergo the fatigue of listening. 
 " There is my Lady Tattle, my Lady Prate, my 
 Lady Titter, my Lady Sneer, my Lady Giggle, 
 and my Lady Grin — they have boxes in the front, 
 and while any favourite air is singing, are the 
 prettiest company in the world." He urges Amanda 
 to come and judge for herself. " Alas, my lord," 
 
 of the letters of the late Mrs. Richard Trench. " Think of 
 my having given a breakfast to-day. My company were the 
 
 F 's, who expressed a wish to hear Tarchi [in Paris, Feb. 
 
 1806], and who, according to the custom of the world, attended 
 more to their veal cutlets and their chat, than to us, to Tarchi's 
 evident displeasure." So, but with the difference of a very 
 different hostess, at Mrs. MacClaverhouse's evening party, in a 
 recent fiction, where the leading barrister of the day " talked 
 with more animation than was pleasant to the German basso 
 during that gentleman's great song ; but Mrs. MacClaver- 
 house was one of those people who make a point of chat- 
 tering throughout the progress of a musical performance, 
 and praising it loudly when it is concluded." In a later 
 chapter we have another gathering under another roof, where 
 the guests are perpetually being surprised, and delighted, 
 and unspeakably obliged by instrumental and vocal displays, 
 during the course of which they had appeared to be agreeably 
 occupied in brisk tittle-tattle. Again, in Never Forgotten, 
 we read of the Campbells that drawing-room music was 
 welcome to them in a certain sense : they found it like the 
 music in a melodrama effective for " talking through." 
 
BGN-TON BABBLE. 233 
 
 replies Amanda, " I am the worst company in the 
 world at a concert, I'm so apt to attend to the 
 music." "Why, madam," his lordship rejoins, 
 "that is very pardonable in the country or at 
 church, but a monstrous inattention in a polite 
 assembly." So with the fashionables of the New 
 Bath Gicide, who 
 
 " come to the pump, as before I was saying, 
 And talk all the while the music is playing, 
 'Your servant, Miss Fitchet.' 'Good morning, Miss 
 
 Stote.' 
 1 My dear Lady Riggledum, how is your throat ?'" etc. 
 
 Theodore Hook touches on the perfect uncon- 
 cern with which a party presumably representative 
 of bon ton continued talking at the Opera in the 
 ordinary pitch of their voices, while a duet was 
 going on, upon the stage, to the annoyed surprise 
 of an unsophisticated visitor, who was ignorant 
 enough to suppose that people frequented the 
 place to see and hear, instead of being seen and 
 heard 
 
 One of Mendelssohn's biographers, describing 
 the Gewandhaus concerts at Leipzig in his time, 
 relates that once, during a sudden pause in a 
 Beethoven Symphony, the words "bacon paste," 
 the subject of confidential talk between two 
 ladies, resounded shrilly through that hall, the 
 motto of which is Res severa est veram gaudium — 
 
234 PROTEST AGAINST PRATE. 
 
 a motto as significant as the familiar Italian one 
 which heads Mr. Ella's programmes for the Musical 
 Union. It was after one of Beethoven's Sym- 
 phonies, as performed at the Academy of Music at 
 Boston, U.S., that Margaret Fuller, all whose en- 
 joyment and that of a company of friends had been 
 destroyed by the incessant buzzing of a young lady 
 and two gentlemen, seated just behind her — a buzz- 
 ing kept up in spite of the bitter looks cast on the 
 buzzers by the would-be listeners around, — leaned 
 across the seat, and catching the eye of the girl, 
 who was pretty and well dressed, said, in her bland- 
 est, gentlest voice, "May I speak with you one 
 moment ?" " Certainly," said the young lady, with 
 a fluttered, pleased look, leaning forward to hear. 
 " I only wish to say," rejoined Margaret Fuller, 
 " that I trust that, in the whole course of your life, 
 you will never suffer so great a degree of annoyance 
 as you have inflicted on a large party of lovers of 
 music this evening." 
 
 Mrs. Gore tells us that Liszt left off playing at 
 the royal concert at Brohl, because the Queen of 
 England was seen (not heard) to whisper. One of 
 the entries in Moore's Diary (Dec. 30, 181S) runs 
 thus : " Music in the evening [at Bowood] ; all but 
 Mackintosh and the elder Macdonald attentive. 
 They talked the whole time. ... I said, when I 
 got up from singing, ' I see those two gentlemen 
 
PIANO-PROTECTED PRATTLE. 235 
 
 like to talk to accompaniment,'* which brought 
 the rest of the company upon them, and they were 
 put to the blush." One of our best social essayists 
 incidentally remarks that English people scarcely 
 ever seem to converse with anything like freedom 
 unless under cover of the piano. " The ladies are 
 all collected, like a group of Egyptian idols, in a 
 solemn circle, behind which the men stand, until at 
 last a victim is selected to give that signal for con- 
 versation which is called 'a little music.'" And 
 another flings out at that goodly number of persons, 
 inevitable at all " musical evenings at home," who 
 are burning to discourse instead of being discoursed 
 to, — human geysers of small-talk, that bubble forth 
 unrestrained to the accompaniment of sonata or 
 song. 
 
 * " IVe been looking so anxious to catch your eye," says 
 Mrs. Brown to Mr. Vincent, at the musical party in one of 
 Mrs. Oliphant's Carlingford Chronicles; "do sit down, now 
 there's a chance, and let me talk to you a minnit. . . . 
 There's Miss Polly Pigeon going to play, and everybody 
 can use their freedom in talking. For my part, that's v/hy 
 I like instrumental music best. When a girl sings, why, 
 to be sure, it's only civil to listen ; but nobody expects it 
 of you, don't you see, when she . only plays." — Salem Chapel, 
 chap. i. 
 
236 
 
 XIII. 
 S£tt0ic anfc borate* 
 
 Amos vi. 5. 
 
 HTHE text of "Woe unto them who chant 
 ■*- to the sound of the viol, and invent unto 
 themselves instruments of music, as David did," 
 was taken by Adam Clarke to be decisive against 
 dancing, because the Hebrew word rendered chant, 
 signifies, on his showing, to quaver, to divide, to 
 articulate, and may be as well applied to the man- 
 agement of the feet as to the modulations of the 
 voice ; an interpretation backed by the authority of 
 the Septuagint, and of the Arabic version. Sup- 
 posing it however to be disputed, Dr. Clarke is not 
 to be despoiled of a sufficiently stringent and com- 
 prehensive improvement of the text : " Yet this 
 much will not be denied, that the text is pointedly 
 enough against that without which dancing cannot 
 well be carried on, I mean, instrumental music." 
 Southey asks if the doctor had forgotten an injunc- 
 
PURITY OF WORDLESS MUSIC. 237 
 
 tion in the Psalms to praise the J^ord with tabret 
 and harp and lute, the strings and the pipe, and 
 the trumpet and the loud cymbals. The vocal 
 part of psalmody would perhaps redeem the 
 instrumental. Yet, on the other hand, of music in 
 general may it not be held, that when debased, 
 when prostituted to immoral ends, when so used as 
 to be essentially and most banefully abused, it is 
 the vocal associations — all questions of dancing set 
 apart — to which the debasement is owing ? In- 
 strumental* music alone, — what wrong can it per- 
 petrate, what mischief suggest ? Madame de Stael 
 declares music to be " happily powerless to ex- 
 plain any base or artful sentiment." And Lady 
 Eastlake calls music the most innocent companion 
 of the loves and graces ; " for real romance is 
 always innocent. Music is not pure to the pure 
 only, she is pure to all. We can only make her a 
 means of harm when we add speech to sound. It 
 is only by a marriage with words that she can be- 
 
 * Not but that even in instrumental music alone there are 
 widely differing degrees of moral character, or ethical sug- 
 gestiveness, so to speak. How incomparably more innocent 
 and pure to the ear is the music, for instance, of Gliick than 
 that of Verdi, — to say nothing of their relative powers of 
 melody ; or Haydn's than Weber's, Mendelssohn's than 
 Meyerbeer's, — or, to take a more salient and perhaps whim- 
 sical contrast than either of these, Dr. Arne's than Offen- 
 bach's. 
 
238 MUSIC PURE AND SIMPLE. 
 
 come a minister of evil. An instrument which is 
 music, and music alone, enjoys the glorious dis- 
 ability of expressing a single vicious idea, or of 
 inspiring a single corrupt thought." This eloquent 
 writer accounts it therefore an anomaly in human 
 history how any form of religion can condemn an 
 organ, for it could not say an impious thing if it 
 would* 
 
 Owen Feltham, of the Resolves, pronounces music 
 to be good, or bad, according to the effect it pro- 
 duces. For example, as the Spartans used it, it 
 was an incitement to valour and to honourable 
 deeds : " but then, they were so careful of the 
 manner of it, as to fine Terpander, and nail his 
 harp to a post, for being too inventive, by adding a 
 string to it more than usual." Sometimes, Feltham 
 goes on to say, light notes are useful, as in times of 
 general joy, and when the mind is depressed by 
 sadness ; but certainly those are the best which in- 
 flame zeal, incite courage, or induce gravity." In 
 fine, he believes music to be a helper both to good 
 
 * " Every police director," as Hoffmann says in his Phan- 
 tasie Stiicke, " may safely give his testimony to the utter 
 innocuousness of a newly invented musical instrument, in 
 all matters touching religion, the state, and public morals ; 
 and every music-master may unhesitatingly pledge his word 
 to the parents of his pupils that his new sonata does not 
 contain one reprehensible idea." 
 
A SENSUAL ART? 239 
 
 and ill ; and he therefore — here comes in the 
 Resolve — " will honour it when it moves to virtue, 
 and beware of it when it leads to vice." For to 
 him it evidently seemed capable of being described, 
 by application, and with a difference, in the lines of 
 his great contemporary : 
 
 " Such object hath the power to soften and tame 
 Severest temper, smooth the rugged'st brow, 
 Enerve, and with voluptuous hope dissolve, 
 Draw out with credulous desire, and lead 
 At will the manliest, re$olutest breast, 
 As the magnetic hardest iron draws/' — 
 
 unless that superlative resolutest be as of one who 
 makes, and keeps, and prints, and publishes Re- 
 solves. 
 
 M. Victor Laprade, in his treatise Du Sentiment 
 de la Nature chez les Modernes, calls our age " the 
 age of music ; " and he declares music to be " the 
 sensual art par excellence!' If this be a paradox, it 
 must at least be admitted, says one of his critics, 
 that philosophers who do not generally labour 
 under the suspicion of spiritualism — M. Henri 
 Taine, to quote only one — unhesitatingly endorse 
 it * Mr. Disraeli in one of his novels describes a 
 
 * On the other hand, compare such remarks as this of 
 Merle d'Aubigne' in his discourse on painting, which, of all the 
 fine arts, he asserts to be that the ethical or religious influence 
 of which is liable to the best-founded and the most urgent 
 
240 VOLUPTUOUSLY SEDUCTIVE. 
 
 course of festal music, soft and subdued, but con- 
 stant and thrilling, which winds up the listeners by 
 exquisite gradations to that pitch of refined excite- 
 ment which is so strange a conjunction of delicacy 
 and voluptuousness, when the soul, as it were, be- 
 comes sensual, and the body, as it were, dissolves 
 into spirit. 
 
 " These sweet tones, these melting voices, 
 With seductive power are fraught ; 
 They dissolve, in gentle longing, 
 Every feeling, every thought." 
 
 Music never makes men think, says its elegant 
 expositor in the Quarterly, — and that way lies the 
 mischief. Query after query is posed by that pen, 
 all to be answered in the negative : Does music en- 
 lighten our views, or enlarge our understandings ? 
 Can it make us more intelligent, or more prudent, 
 or more practical, or more moral ? " No, but she 
 can make us more romantic ; and that is what we 
 want nowadays more than anything else," — or did 
 want, at any rate, when the dissertation was penned, 
 more than a quarter of a century ago. Music can 
 give us, we are then instructed, pleasures we cannot 
 account for, and raise feelings we cannot reason 
 
 objections. " Poetry and music came down from heaven, and 
 will be found there again ; but painting is continually seen 
 associated with heinous violations of morality, or with fatal 
 errors," etc. — Hist. Reform., III., ix. 
 
BOUNDS TO THE PROVINCE OF MUSIC. 241 
 
 upon ; * can transport us into a sphere where selfish- 
 ness and worldliness have no part to play ; her 
 whole domain, in short, is held to lie in that much- 
 abused land of romance — the only objection to 
 which in real life is that mankind are too weak and 
 too wicked to be trusted in it. But if music cannot 
 captivate us by means of these appeals to the feel- 
 ings and the fancy, in every form of spiritual and 
 earthly emotion, of fair or fantastic vision, " she 
 tries no other. She appeals neither to our reason, 
 our principles, nor our honour, f She cannot 
 reason, and she cannot preach ; but also she can- 
 not wound, and she cannot defile The very 
 
 Fall seems to have spared her department, j It is 
 
 * " I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could 
 always have plenty of music," Maggie Tulliver says. " It 
 seems to infuse strength into my linbs, and ideas into my 
 brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled 
 with music. At other times one is conscious of carrying a 
 weight." — The Mill on the Floss, book vi., chap. iii. 
 
 t " She can neither be witty, satirical, nor personal. 
 There is no Hogarth in music. Punch can give her no place 
 on his staff." — Essay on Music, reprinted from the Quarterly 
 Review. 
 
 X Apply what is said by a north-country divine in a dis- 
 course on the Expectancy of Creation, — wherein he describes 
 this world, this inanimate creation, as involved in man's fall, 
 " according to its nature ; " by which is meant that the world 
 is fallen, in the way and the sense in which, by the make of 
 things, it is possible that it should be fallen. Of course there 
 is no guilt, we are reminded ; it cannot sin ; but there is 
 
 16 
 
242 INTRINSIC INNOCENCE OF MUSIC. 
 
 as if she had taken possession of the heart before 
 it became desperately wicked, and had ever since 
 kept her portion of it free from the curse, making 
 it her glorious vocation upon earth to teach us 
 nothing but the ever higher and higher enjoyment 
 of an innocent pleasure." Sancho Panza assures the 
 Duchess, " Where there is music, madam, there can 
 be no mischief." But that is rather too absolute 
 a proposition, unconditionally stated. Dr. John 
 Brown mediates between those who assert the 
 omnipotence of Art to refine men, and those who 
 declare it to be a sign of the decline and fall of the 
 nobler part of us. Neither is and both are true, he 
 contends : Art does, as our Laureate says, make 
 nobler in us what is higher than the senses through 
 which it passes ; but it can only make nobler what 
 is already noble ; it cannot regenerate, neither can 
 it of itself debase and emasculate * and bedevil 
 
 perversion, degradation. Noble means and instruments are 
 perverted to base and sinful ends. " The atmosphere is con- 
 strained unwillingly to carry from the speaker's lip to the 
 listener's ear, words which are false, impure, profane. Surely 
 that beautiful, liquid ether was never made for that ! " So 
 with music. It is of songs sung in wantonness, and of the 
 melody of viols attuned to purposes of dissipation and riot, 
 that the divine voice is heard to say, with a minor prophet 
 for spokesman, — " Take thou away from me the noise of thy 
 songs ; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." 
 
 * "Is it any weakness, pray," George Eliot asks, "to be 
 
DEBASEMENT OF THE ART. 243 
 
 mankind ; but it is a symptom, and a fatal one, 
 when Art ministers to a nation's vice. " The truth 
 is, Art, unless quickened from above and from with- 
 in, has in it nothing beyond itself, which is visible 
 [or audible] beauty — the ministration to the lust, 
 the desire of the eye," if not of the ear. Just after 
 coming from Italy, Mendelssohn writes to a friend 
 that music no longer (183 1) exists there among the 
 people — a fact he could not have believed in the 
 case of any nation, and least of all of Italy, with 
 such rich and luxuriant nature, and such glorious, 
 
 wrought on by exquisite music? — to feel its wondrous har- 
 monies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the 
 delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and 
 binding together your whole being, past and present, in one 
 unspeakable vibration ; melting you in one moment with all 
 the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through 
 the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic 
 courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self- 
 renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past 
 sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy ?" — 
 Adam Bede, book iv., chap, xxiii. 
 
 The author of the main part of the series of Little Books 
 on Great Subjects, in a letter warning a young lady-friend 
 against allowing amusement to become the business of life, 
 assures her that ere long the want of something to fill the 
 mind would become wearisome, and that she would feel un- 
 satisfied after a day of such sort of pleasure ; but adds, " not 
 however, when music is concerned, for that hangs in the ear 
 of memory with pleasure for a long time, and help s to form 
 a pure taste." — Letters of C. F. Cornwallis, p. 263. 
 
244 MENDELSSOHN'S EARNESTNESS. 
 
 inspiriting antecedents. " But," he adds, " it would 
 indeed be marvellous if any music could exist 
 where there is no solid principle." In a later 
 epistle he denounces the immoral tendency of the 
 libretti favoured at that period by Meyerbeer, 
 Auber, and others, and assures his good father, " / 
 have no music for such things. I consider it 
 ignoble ; so if the present epoch exacts this style, 
 and considers it indispensable, then I will write 
 oratorios," and forswear operatic composition alto- 
 gether. In another letter he says : " I take music 
 in a very serious light, and I consider it quite in- 
 admissible to compose anything that I do not 
 thoroughly feel. It is just as if I were to utter a 
 falsehood ; for notes have as distinct a meaning as 
 words, perhaps even a more definite sense." 
 
 There is a paper of Addison's in the Spectator 
 which treats of Music as having been among those 
 who were styled the chosen people, a religious art, 
 — the songs of Zion being nothing else but psalms 
 and pieces of poetry that adored or celebrated the 
 Supreme Being. And he proceeds to cite Homer 
 and Hesiod as intimating to us how this art should 
 be applied, when they represent the Muses* as 
 
 * Shaftesbury in the Characteristics says of " the Thalias, 
 the Polyhymnias, the Euterpes," that " being alike interested 
 in the cause of numbers," they are " with regret employed in 
 another way, in favour of disorder. Instead of being made 
 
PURIFYING POWER OF MUSIC. 245 
 
 surrounding Jupiter, and warbling their hymns 
 about his throne ; while innumerable passages in 
 the ancient writers are hinted at which show their 
 most favourite diversions to have been filled with 
 songs and hymns to their respective deities. " Had 
 we frequent entertainments of this nature among 
 us, they would not a little purify and exalt our 
 passions, give our thoughts a proper turn, and 
 cherish those divine impulses in the soul, which 
 every one feels that has not stifled them by sensual 
 and immoderate pleasures." For, as Addison af- 
 firms, music, when thus applied, raises noble hints 
 in the mind of the hearer, and fills it with great 
 conceptions; strengthening devotion, and advancing 
 praise into rapture. 
 
 " Ye devotees to your adored employ, 
 Enthusiasts, drunk with an unreal joy, 
 Love makes the music of the blest above, 
 Heaven's harmony is universal love ; 
 And earthly sounds, tho' sweet and well combined, 
 And lenient as soft opiates to the mind, 
 Leave vice and folly unsubdued behind." 
 
 Delitzch asserts the existence in all Music, of 
 not only an unspiritualized principle still remaining, 
 
 sirens to serve the purposes of vice, they would with more 
 delight accompany their elder sisters, and add their grace- 
 and attractive charms to what is most harmonious, muses 
 like, and divine in human life." . 
 
246 MUSIC AND MORALS. 
 
 of material natural origin, but also what he calls a 
 Cainite element, of impure sensual origin, which 
 makes it at once the most seemingly innocent and 
 the most dangerously seductive of the Arts. 
 11 What pity base his song who so divinely sings ! " 
 exclaims the poet of the too fascinating minstrel in 
 his Castle of Indolence. So Keble recognizes the 
 liability to profanation of the sacred soul-enthral- 
 ling strain — 
 
 " As in this bad world below 
 Noblest things find vilest using." 
 
 And that is a truly pregnant passage in Shakspeare 
 where the most philosophical of his dukes (for he 
 has more than one ducal philosopher) declares 
 that 
 
 " Music oft hath such a charm, 
 To make bad, good,* and good provoke to harm." 
 
 A latter-day dramatist makes his Agolanti de- 
 nounce the frivolous antechamber tinkling, that 
 
 " Attunes the pulse to levity ; puts folly 
 In mind of vice, as though the hint were needed." 
 
 * As a preservative, or conservative influence, Homer pays 
 it a compliment more or less direct, when he ascribes to the 
 bard devoted to Menelaus the immunity, for a time, of frail 
 Helen from the dishonour which too soon overtook her : 
 
 " Atrides, parting for the Trojan war, 
 Consign' d his youthful consort to his care. 
 True to his charge, the bard preserved her long 
 In honour's limits ; such the power of song." 
 
CHARACTER OF CHIEF MUSICIANS. 247 
 
 Mr. Landor's Panenos, the painter, with some- 
 thing of one-sided professional disparagement of a 
 rival art, declares every clever composer he ever 
 met with, or indeed ever heard of, to have been a 
 child in levity and dissipation. " But, Panenos," 
 urges his interlocutor, " surely we may be fond of 
 music, and yet stand a little on this side of idiocy." 
 The painter's reply, warming to his work, is, that 
 he who loves not music is a beast of one species ; 
 he who overloves it is a beast of another, whose 
 brain is smaller than a nightingale's, and his heart 
 than a lizard's. " Record me one memorable say- 
 ing, one witticism, one just remark, of any great 
 musician, and I consent to undergo the punishment 
 of Marsyas. Some among them are innocent and 
 worthy men ; not many, nor the first. Dissipation, 
 and, what is strange, selfishness, and disregard to 
 punctuality in engagements, are common and 
 nearly general in the more distinguished of them. 
 — O Music ! how it grieves me, that imprudence, 
 intemperance, gluttony, should open their channels 
 into thy sacred stream ! " * Again, in one of the 
 
 * Pericles and Aspasia, cviii. — In the best known of his 
 poems, Landor makes the hero exclaim, 
 
 " O that I ne'er had learnt the tuneful art ! 
 It always brings us enemies or love." 
 
 As to its faculty of making enemies, compare what one of 
 our best essayists on social subjects has said of the odium 
 
248 PERFERVIDUM ODIUM MUSIC CM. 
 
 Imaginary Dialogues, that between Alfieri and 
 Salomon the Florentine Jew, Walter Savage Landor 
 is evidently propounding his own view of the 
 matter, when he makes the former say of music, 
 that it is both sunshine and irrigation to the mind ; 
 but that when occupying and covering it too long, 
 music debilitates and corrupts it. " Sometimes," 
 the Italian poet proceeds to remark, " I have 
 absorbed music so totally, that nothing was left of 
 it in its own form : my ear detained none of the 
 
 musicum, that there is no hatred like that. Whereas nothing 
 is held to excite so many uncharitable feelings among its pro- 
 moters as a charity bazaar, he maintains that a charity con- 
 cert excites them in far greater intensity. Even when there 
 is no philanthropic object to be, as he says, a pungent satire 
 on the proceedings, it is a rare thing, we are assured, to find 
 much unanimity or mutual forbearance among amateur 
 musicians. What, he asks, are the Christian graces to ladies 
 whose voices compass two octaves, and gentlemen who can 
 boast of an ut de fioitrine ? The preliminaries to an amateur 
 concert are described as one series of tiffs and huffs and 
 sulks. And, the concert well over, the giver of it is pictured 
 to our mind's eye resting his head upon his well-earned 
 pillow, and dreamily speculating on the effect of music on the 
 human character. " Does it do mankind more good or evil ? 
 Why are those who devote themselves to the art so little- 
 minded and self-seeking? For one whom it refines and 
 elevates, are there not twenty to whom it is morally injuri- 
 ous ?" And here, vaguely groping for the true answer to 
 such suggestions — namely, that a thing is not bad because it 
 is capable of abuse — the speculator is supposed to close his 
 weary eyelids, and fall asleep. 
 
NERVE-DISSOLVING MELODY. 249 
 
 notes, none of the melody ; they went into the 
 heart immediately, mingled with the spirit, and 
 lost themselves among the operations of the fancy, 
 whose finest and most recondite springs they put 
 simultaneously and vigorously in motion." 
 
 Odysseus, forewarned, was forearmed against the 
 Sirens, " whose song is death, and makes destruc- 
 tion please. Unblest the man whom music wins 
 to stay nigh the cursed shore, and listen to the lay." 
 Sing sirens only ? do not angels sing? asks Young ; 
 but he is strenuous in his warnings against the 
 strains of those who are more than a little lower 
 than the angels, and whose degrading art can 
 find for their hapless victims below the lowest 
 depth a lower still. It is in the laureate's Vision of 
 Sin that we hear " low voluptuous music winding 
 tremble, woven in circles " — anon to storm in orbs 
 of song, a growing gale, "as 'twere a hundred- 
 throated nightingale." The strong tempestuous 
 treble throbs, and palpitates ; and we are lost in a 
 giddy whirl of sound — 
 
 " Till, kill'd with some luxurious agony, 
 The nerve-dissolving melody 
 Flutter'd headlong from the sky." 
 
 Nerve-dissolving — there the ofTence lies, there the 
 peril, there the penalty. Such the music of the 
 " enchanter false " of the Castle of Indolence, with 
 
2 ;o ENERVATING STRAINS. 
 
 whose siren melody its doomed denizens were 
 u ymolten," while o'er the enfeebling lute his hand 
 he flung. 
 
 " Each sound too here to languishment inclined, 
 Lulled the weak bosom and induced ease ; 
 
 .... such soul-dissolving airs 
 As did, alas ! with soft perdition please : 
 • Entangled deep in these enchanting snares, 
 The listening heart forgot all duties and all cares." 
 
 Plato's banishment of poets from his Republic, 
 because they enervate the soul by pictures of im- 
 moderate desire, and overstep the limits of that 
 moderation which alone can balance the soul, — is 
 logically enough extended to musicians also ; to 
 those, at least, who are plaintive and harmonious ; 
 only the Dorian and the Phrygian * music being 
 
 * No tolerance in the Platonic Atlantis or Utopia for the 
 soft music that Lydia taught, or that Ionia perfected ; such 
 as Arbaces the Egyptian cultivated at Pompeii, and which 
 came like a stream of sound, bathing the senses unawares ; 
 enervating, subduing with delight. Modern echoes of which, 
 with a difference, Pope's imitation of Horace may be taken to 
 repeat, when he tells how 
 
 "The willing muses were debauched at Court : 
 On each enervate string they taught the note 
 To pant, or tremble through an eunuch's throat" 
 
 Pope wrote, however, at a time during which, and for long 
 after which, music in general, and " fiddling " in particular, 
 were voted effeminate and unmanly in England ; and when 
 Britons were, as Mr. Thackeray says in The Virginians, 
 
CHANGED ESTIMATE OF MUSIC. 251 
 
 admissible — the one impetuous and warlike, the 
 other calm. If the Spartans cultivated music and 
 dancing, not without skill and success, it was always 
 music or dancing of one kind ; on Plutarch's show- 
 ing, it was a crime to vary an air or invent a 
 measure. Adam Smith is treating of the republics 
 
 called upon by the patriotic prints to sneer at the frivolous 
 accomplishments of your Squallinis, Monsieurs, and the like. 
 Great the contrast between that time and ours, when you so 
 rarely meet with a man who likes to own that he is destitute 
 of musical sensibility ; for nowadays, a Saturday Reviewer 
 has remarked, persons who are incapable of being touched 
 by the " concord of sweet sounds " are regarded as lacking 
 something necessary to the completeness of their nature. 
 " There is no more common source of lamentation among 
 gentlemen than their want of technical and mechanical skill 
 as performers. The old notions that a love of music indicates 
 effeminacy, or leads to gross vice, are long since exploded in 
 cultivated society." The salt of the sneer at fiddling has lost 
 its savour. 
 
 It was in the last year of his life that Dr. Channing began 
 to see what a large amount of pleasure in life he had lost by 
 neglecting music. He describes himself as — now that he was 
 beginning to grow old, and his ears losing their sensibility — 
 " waking up more to the mysteries of harmony." But he is 
 mindful to add to this record the memento : " There is one 
 discouraging thought, that, in countries where music is most 
 cultivated, force and freedom of soul seem wanting, and men 
 acquiesce in servitude." This thought avails not, however, to 
 prevent his rejoicing at the manifest breaking out of a musical 
 spirit among his countrymen ; for, to a people so much " in- 
 clined to the positive and precise," good must come, he felt 
 assured, from an infusion of this more ethereal influence. 
 
MUSIC AND MORALS. 
 
 of ancient Greece generally, when he states that 
 every free citizen was instructed, under the direc- 
 tion of the public magistrate, in music as well as in 
 gymnastic exercises, — the musical education being 
 designed to humanize the intellect, to soften the 
 temper, and to dispose it for performing all the 
 social and moral duties of life. He takes note of 
 there being nothing among the Romans to corre- 
 spond to the musical education of the Greeks, — 
 connecting this fact with that of the superiority of 
 the public morals of the former. " It seems pro- 
 bable that the musical education of the Greeks had 
 no great effect in mending their morals, since, 
 without any such education, those of the Romans 
 were upon the whole superior." Sidonius, in his 
 celebrated account of the character and habits of 
 Theodoric, includes this notice of the royal Visi- 
 goth's supper parties : " But female singers, and 
 the soft effeminate modes of music, are severely 
 banished, and such martial tunes as animate the 
 soul to deeds of valour are alone grateful to the 
 ear of Theodoric." * 
 
 * Since the foregoing section, on Music AND MORALS, 
 was in type, I have seen advertized a forthcoming work, with 
 the same title, by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, whose previous 
 contributions to musical literature warrant the assurance of 
 his treating the subject with an application of method, 
 ethical and aesthetic, to which these piebald pages, on and 
 off at a tangent, make not the slightest pretence. 
 
253 
 
 XIV. 
 
 310 an? 90nxj? ? 
 
 Psalm lxxxi. I ; James v. 13. 
 
 IS any merry ? let him sing psalms, — the pre- 
 scription is apostolical. " Sing we merrily 
 unto God our strength," is the Psalmist's appeal ; 
 "make a cheerful noise unto the God of Jacob. 
 Take the psalm, bring hither the tabret : the merry 
 harp with the lute." 
 
 " I am never merry, when I hear sweet music," 
 
 quoth Shakspeare's Jessica. His Jaques confesses 
 to a like constitutional bias. When that moody 
 man of the woods prays for " more, more, I 
 pr'ythee, more," of such songs as Amiens* can 
 
 * The particular song in question, or rather in request, is 
 Under the greenwood tree. Could Shakspeare have known 
 how sweetly and spiritedly Dr. Arne would one day set to 
 music that lyric of his, — and with what depth of sympathy the 
 Come away, death, — not to cite other instances, he might 
 well have pleaded, like his own Jaques, for " more, more, I 
 
254 MUSIC AXD MELANCHOLY. 
 
 warble, under the shade of melancholy boughs (for 
 now are we in Arden), the singer demurs, with the 
 plea, or argumentum ad homincm, " It will make 
 you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques," — who at once 
 disposes of the demur, with an " I thank it. More, 
 I pr'ythee, more. I can suck melancholy out of a 
 song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More, I pr'ythee, 
 more." Even that common tavern-music which 
 made the commonalty merry, made Sir Thomas 
 Browne devout and u deep-contemplative." All 
 music, asserts Madame de Stael,* even if its occa- 
 
 prVthee, more." And these songs are nowadays practically- 
 shelved — clean forgotten, like a dead man out of mind ; all 
 alive though they be, every word of them, even- note of them 
 — while flabby stuff, " composed" for this or that vocalist, in 
 the pay of this or that publisher, is presumably (judging by 
 expenditure in advertisements) all the rage. But oh, the pity 
 of it, ye Musical Worldlings, — but oh, the pity of it ! 
 
 * See Corinne, 1. vi. ch. i. In a later book, of the same 
 work, occurs this passage : " Oswald, since his misfortunes, 
 had never regained sufficient courage voluntarily to hear 
 music. He dreaded those ravishing sounds, so agreeable to 
 melancholy, but which prove so truly injurious while we are 
 weighed down by real calamities. Music revives the recol- 
 lections it would appease." — Again : " Music is so volatile a 
 pleasure, — we are so sensible that it escapes from us even as 
 we enjoy it, — that it always leaves a tender impression on the 
 mind ; yet when expressive of grief, it sheds gentleness even 
 over despair." (1. ix., ch. ii.) 
 
 Oswald's shrinking from what would too deeply move him, 
 has its parallel in Mr. Coventry Patmore's Frederick, lament- 
 ing a loss : 
 
OVER-WROUGHT SENSIBILITY. 255 
 
 sion be a gay one, renders us pensive. Olimpia, in 
 the Legend of Florence, has noted oft, — 
 
 " That eyes, that have kept dry their cups of tears, 
 The moment they were touch' d by music's fingers, 
 Trembled, brimful." 
 
 And her companion expounds to her the philosophy 
 of the problem, much as Shakspeare's Lorenzo does 
 with Jessica's : " It is the meeting, love, of beauty 
 so divine with earth so weak." 
 
 Archdeacon Hare has even declared that, after 
 listening to very fine music, it appears one of the 
 hardest of problems, how the delights of heaven 
 can be so attempered to our perceptions, as to be- 
 come endurable for their pain.* 
 
 " And thus I dread the impatient spur 
 Of aught that speaks too plain of Her. 
 There's little here that story tells ; 
 But music talks of nothing else. 
 Therefore, when music breathes, I say, 
 (And busier urge my task, ) Away ! 
 Thou art the voice of one I knew, 
 But what thou say'st is not yet true ; 
 Thou art the voice of her I loved, 
 And I would not be vainly moved." 
 
 * Here again Madame de Stael's words may be cited, — that 
 the exquisite union of two voices perfectly in tune produces 
 an ecstasy that cannot be prolonged without pain : she calls 
 it a blessing too great for humanity, which vibrates like an 
 instrument broken beneath too perfect a harmony. 
 
 The German transcendentalist in Gait's Ojnen, asserts that 
 such persons as particularly delight in the delicacies of 
 chromatic melodies, modulated in a flat key, whether they 
 
256 WHY SWEET MUSIC SADDENS. 
 
 But the author of the Legend of Florence had, 
 long before, written a prose essay on the inquiry- 
 Why sweet music produces sadness ; and he takes 
 exception to that "young and most elegant logi- 
 cian," Lorenzo's, explanation of it, as not sufficient ; 
 for how does it account for our being moved, even 
 to tears, by music which is not otherwise melan- 
 choly ? All attention, the essayist grants, may be 
 said to imply a certain degree of earnestness, and 
 all earnestness has a mixture of seriousness ; yet 
 seriousness is not the prevailing character of atten- 
 tion in all instances, for we are attentive to fine 
 music, whatever its character ; and sometimes it 
 makes us cheerful, and even mirthful. " The gid- 
 dier portions of Rossini's music do not make us 
 sad ; Figaro does not make us sad ; nor is sadness 
 the general consequence of hearing dances, or even 
 marches." And yet, again, on the other hand, in 
 the midst of any of this music, even of the most 
 light and joyous, our eyes shall sometimes fill 
 with tears. How is this ? 
 
 The reason surely is, as Leontius, not Lorenzo, 
 takes it, that we have an instinctive sense of the 
 
 be composers, performers, or listeners, are seldom long-lived. 
 For the most part, he maintains, they die before their forty- 
 second year ; though a few, by reason of more strength, do 
 sometimes reach to forty-nine. And here he professes to 
 speak as an inductive philosopher. 
 
IN THE MINOR KEY. 257 
 
 fugitive and perishing nature of all sweet things, — 
 of beauty, of youth, of life, — of all those fair shows 
 of the world, of which music seems to be the voice, 
 and of whose transitory nature it reminds us most 
 when it is most beautiful, because it is then that 
 we most regret our mortality.* Behind every 
 scale in music, as one of New England's foremost 
 writers pens it, — be that music the gayest and 
 cheeriest, or the grandest, the most triumphant, — 
 lies its dark relative minor ; the notes are the 
 same, but the change of a semitone changes all to 
 gloom ; " all our gayest hours are tunes that have 
 a modulation into these dreary keys ever possible ; 
 at any moment the key-note may be struck." All 
 sweet moods, to apply a line of Mr. Swinburne's, — 
 
 u Throw out such little shadows of themselves," 
 
 leave such regrets behind. 
 
 It was with the music of the Miserere resound- 
 ing in her ears, during the Holy Week in Rome, 
 that Mrs. Shelley called it strange that grief, and 
 laments, and the humble petition of repentance 
 should fill us with delight — a delight that awakens 
 
 * " We do not, it is true, say this to ourselves. We are 
 not conscious of the reason ; that is to say, we do not feel it 
 with knowingness j but we do feel it, for the tears are moved." 
 — See the forty-sixth essay in the second series of The Seer. 
 (A sibilant reference.) 
 
 17 
 
258 SUGGESTIVE OF SADNESS. 
 
 those very emotions in the heart — and calls tears 
 into the eyes, and yet which is dearer than any 
 pleasure. It is, she considers, one of the mysteries 
 of our nature, that the feelings which most torture 
 and subdue, do yet, if idealized, elevated by the 
 imagination, married harmoniously to sound or 
 colour, turn those pains to happiness ; inspiring 
 agitation, and a tremulous but ardent aspiration 
 after immortality.* Miss Yonge's Violet, in 
 Heartsease, has often wondered why fine produc- 
 tions of art " should make one feel half sad and 
 half thoughtful" when one bestows real attention 
 on them. She is answered, " Perhaps because it is 
 a straining after the only true beauty." Lamar- 
 tine's description of the music of the sunny South, 
 of Neapolitan dance music for instance, comprises 
 the remark that gay though the instruments may 
 be, and the attitudes those of joy, the airs are sad, 
 the slow and long-drawn notes causing the hidden 
 chords of the heart to vibrate to their depths. It 
 is ever thus with music, he alleges, whenever it is 
 not an empty amusement for the ear, but a har- 
 monious vibration of the passions, which find an 
 utterance in the voice. " All its accents are sighs, 
 
 * " Such seems the sentient link between our heavenly and 
 terrestrial nature ; and thus in Paradise, as Dante tells, glory 
 beatifies the sight, and seraphic v harmony wraps [sic] the 
 saints in bliss." — Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840-43. 
 
SUSPIRIOSsE COGTTATIONES. 259 
 
 all its notes blend tears with their sound. They 
 can never strike forcibly upon the heart of man 
 without his yielding them tears ; so full is nature, 
 to her depths, of sadness, and so invariably does 
 whatever moves her, raise the cup of bitterness to 
 our lips, and veil our eyes with a robe of mourning." 
 Prior avails himself of a like doctrine in his exposi- 
 tion of the experiences of King Solomon, — vanity 
 of vanities, sorrow of heart and vexation of spirit. 
 The monarch in his systematic pursuit of pleasure 
 enlists the aid of the cheerful choir ; the lyre softens 
 the timbrel's noise ; trumpet and Dorian flute com- 
 mingle their notes, "both sweeter found when 
 mixed ;" the fife refines the effect of the viol ; and 
 for Solomon the symphony is repeated, or varied, 
 at the opening and the closing of every day : 
 
 " Yet still in vain ; for music gathered thought ; 
 But how unequal the effects it brought ! 
 The soft ideas of the cheerful note, 
 Lightly received, were easily forgot : 
 The solemn violence of the graver sound 
 Knew to strike deep, and leave a lasting wound." 
 
 Byron writes to Moore in 181 3 that he has just 
 heard one of his Irish Melodies * so well sung, that, 
 " but for the appearance of affectation, I could 
 
 * In the Life of Byro?i, Moore incidentally remarks that 
 he had known few persons more alive to the charms of simple 
 music ; and that frequently had he seen the tears in Byron's 
 eyes while listening to the Irish Melodies. 
 
260 TEAR-COMPELLING IRISH MELODIST. 
 
 have cried." A few months later he tells him how 
 his own singing of Moore's songs has caused so 
 many tears, that a protest has been entered by one 
 in authority, against his continuing the strain. 
 Moore's own Diary is rife with examples to the 
 purpose. He exults, at Lord Lansdowne's, in 1818, 
 at making "the tears frequently stand in the 
 eyes" of Dugald Stewart, his fellow-guest. "I 
 never saw any man that seemed to feel my singing 
 more deeply." " Miss Edgeworth, too, was much 
 affected. This is a delightful triumph to touch 
 these higher spirits ! " In 1820 we have this entry: 
 " Dined with the Fieldings : sung in the evening 
 to him, her, Montgomery, and the governess, — all 
 four weeping. This is the true tribute to my sing- 
 ing." In 1824 Moore has been dining at Lord 
 Belhaven's, and writes : " Lady Tullamore so 
 affected at 'Poor broken heart/ that she was 
 obliged to leave the room, sobbing violently." 
 Again, in 1828, at Colonel Bailey's: "Was in good 
 voice, and with the 'Song of the Olden Time' 
 drew tears from the young beauties around me." 
 The next refers to Byron's once beloved Miss 
 Chaworth, afterwards (and too soon for his peace) 
 Mrs. Musters: "Sung a few songs, at some of 
 which Mrs. M. cried." Another entry records how, 
 at Mr. Hodgson's, Moore's singing of " And doth 
 not a meeting like this " brought tears from both 
 
SONGS OF THE OLDEN TIME. 261 
 
 singer and hearers. And once more, " more than 
 once" the singer can speak to having "seen 
 Jeffrey (though he professes rather to dislike music) 
 with tears in his eyes " at the Song of the Olden 
 Time. 
 
 Washington Irving loved to recall in his old age 
 the emotions he felt as a child at his sister's sing- 
 ing of the old pathetic ballad, "The moon had 
 climbed the highest hill that rises o'er the source 
 of Dee." How it used to make him weep ! he 
 would exclaim ; and yet how constantly he was 
 begging her to sing it ! So too would M. de 
 Tocqueville recall the evenings at his father's 
 chateau, when the servants were gone, and the 
 family sat round the fire, and his mother, " whose 
 voice was sweet and touching," would sing a 
 royalist song on the death of Lewis XVI., "and 
 when she ended, we were all in tears." 
 
 When at Alexander's Feast the sweet musician 
 Timotheus, placed on high amid the tuneful choir, 
 turned from the praise of Bacchus, and choosing 
 " a mournful muse, soft pity to infuse," sang the 
 fall of Darius, and that dismal end of his, exposed 
 on the bare ground, with not a friend to close his 
 eyes, with downcast looks sat and listened Philip's 
 warlike son, "and now and then a sigh he stole, 
 and tears began to flow." 
 
 Gibbon's account of Attila's royal feast omits 
 
262 POWER OF SOUND. 
 
 not due mention of the "vocal harmony" which 
 moved the elder of the guests to tears. The dull 
 idiot even, is, on Wordsworth's showing, suscep- 
 tible to strangely stirred emotions by the same 
 power. The Power of Sound is the name this poet 
 has given to one of his poems, (a name by popular 
 usage erroneously assigned to Spohr's great sym- 
 phony, which professes to treat of, not the Power, 
 but the Consecration of Sound ;) in which poem 
 the simile occurs, that as conscience smites, with 
 irresistible pain, to the centre of being, 
 
 " So shall a solemn cadence, if it enter 
 The mouldy vaults of the dull idiot's brain, 
 Transmute him to a wretch from quiet hurled — 
 Convulsed as by a jarring din ; 
 And then aghast, as at the world 
 Of reason partially let in 
 By concords winding with a sway 
 Terrible for sense and soul ! 
 Or, awed he weeps, struggling to quell dismay. 
 Point not these mysteries to an Art 
 Lodged above the starry pole ; 
 Pure modulations flowing from the heart 
 Of divine love, where wisdom, beauty, truth, 
 With order dwell, in endless youth ?" 
 
 Chaucer tells us how, " when that Arcite to Thebes 
 comen was, full many a day he swell'd, and said, 
 Alas ! for see his lady shall he never mo ; " and 
 how, bereft of appetite, and unrelieved by sleep, he 
 wasted to a shadow ; 
 
"FLATTERED TO TEARS? 263 
 
 " And if he hcarde song or instrument, 
 Then would he weep ; he mighte not be stent." 
 
 Critics of taste have admired the touch about the 
 music as exquisite ; and have favourably compared 
 Chaucer with Dryden, who, in his modernization 
 of the Knight's Tale, dare not let Arcite weep, 
 when he hears music, but restricts him to a gentle- 
 manly sigh. Praised by such a critical pen is the 
 phrase John Keats uses, of " flattered to tears," in 
 the case of one whose was harsh penance on St. 
 Agnes' Eve, but whom the spell of church melody 
 moved to weeping : 
 
 " Northward he turneth through a little door, 
 And scarce three steps ere music's golden tongue 
 Flattered to tears this aged man and poor." * 
 
 And just as Leigh Hunt , relishes as a bonne boucke, 
 or dainty bit, the quaint phrase "flattered," in 
 Keats, so does Sainte-Beuve smack his lips over an 
 equally quaint phrase in Madame de Sevigne ; who, 
 describing the tears shed by the quality at Lulli's 
 Cadmus, continues, in her very own style, that she 
 was not alone in her weeping a de certains endroits; 
 for "lame de Mdme. de la Fayette en est toute 
 
 * Yes, comments the most genial, most congenial of Keats's 
 contemporary critics, — " the poor old man was moved by the 
 sweet music to think that so sweet a thing was intended for 
 him as well as for others." — See Leigh Hunt's review, among 
 his collected essays, of The Eve of St. Agnes. 
 
264 SCHUBERT AND JEAN PAUL. 
 
 alarmee." The terminal word is the text for the 
 master-critic's note of admiration : " Comme cette 
 ame alarmee est bien la delicatesse meme ! " Jean 
 Paul Richter bears record of himself that nothing 
 so touched and exhausted him as fantasien on the 
 pianoforte, himself the player, improvising im- 
 promptu after impromptu that Schubert might 
 have loved to study, in that mood of dreamy 
 reverie dear to them both ; for between Schubert* 
 
 * Gradually this exquisite genius is becoming better known 
 and valued in this country ; and his chamber music, his sym- 
 phonies, his overtures, are now and then to be heard, as well 
 as his sonatas. For a while he was recognized amongst us 
 as a song-writer only. But even in that capacity he was 
 known by the general as the composer of only some half- 
 dozen out of the centuries of songs he has left us. The Wan- 
 derer, and the Erl-king, an Ave Maria, and a Hark, hark, 
 the Lark! — these, and some two or three others, made up the 
 British repertory of his effects. Even now, though various 
 lieder of the Winterreise and of Die schbne Miilleri?i series 
 are becoming more or less familiar, besides such gems of 
 purest ray and perfect setting as Die junge Nonne, yet there 
 remains all but intact the bulk of Schubert's voluminous 
 effects in vocal music. Few have made acquaintance with 
 his singularly grand and expressive compositions on subjects 
 from classical mythology and the like — often so impassioned, 
 always so impressive — rich in imaginative power, infinitely 
 varied in character, and many of them models of constructive 
 art, fragmentary though they be. Noble examples of this 
 kind are the Orest auf Tauris and Der entsiihnte Orest; 
 the agitated Philoctet, the fine Fragment aus dc?n ^Eschylus, 
 the tuneful Orpheus, the forcible Atys, those highly dramatic 
 
SC HUBERTS WEALTH OF SONG. 265 
 
 and Jean Paul there are clearly pronounced elective 
 affinities ; and perhaps to appreciate the vague yet 
 intense longings of some of Schubert's strains, there 
 needs a sympathetic, familiarity with Germany's 
 prose-poet dcr Einzig. " I could thus kill myself," 
 Richter says, of his fantasy-playing : " All buried 
 feelings and spirits rise again. My hand and heart 
 and eye know no limits. At last I close with an 
 eternally recurrent but too powerful tone. One 
 
 scenas Hektors Abschied and Antigone und CEdip; the im- 
 petuous course of Die ziirnende Diana, the energetic power 
 of An Schwager Kronos and of Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, the 
 melodious flow of Aus Heliopolis and of Ganymed, and the 
 devout majesty of the Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren. 
 Then, again, what wealth of romantic invention and what 
 felicity of narrative art in such pieces as the Ritter Toggen- 
 burg, and as Ein Fraulein schaut voni he hen Thurm; what 
 resources of picturesque art in the Ossian series, — now of 
 martial enthusiasm, now of stormy excitement, now of almost 
 inexpressible pathos (as in that loveliest of Hebridean laments, 
 welling over with tenderness, Kolmas Klage) ; what depth of 
 feeling in the Mignon songs ; what a weird beauty in the wail 
 of Thekla's ; what spirit in the hunting chansons ; what 
 unsurpassable utterance of yearning desire, or of sombre 
 solicitude, or of conflicting emotions, in such characteristic 
 morceaux as Drang in die Feme, and Dass sie hier gewesen, 
 and Du bist die Ruh, and Abendrbthe / But it seems 
 invidious to particularize, when so many compositions equal 
 in charm must be left unmentioned. The handy and mode- 
 rately priced edition of Litolf, in some dozen volumes, will 
 be a veritable treasure-trove to whoso would learn Schubert's 
 wealth of song. 
 
266 JEAN PAUL AND SCHUBERT. 
 
 may be satisfied with hearing, but never can be 
 with making* music; and every true musician 
 could, like the nightingales, trill himself to death. 
 When I have fantasied long, I break out into 
 violent weeping, without thinking of anything 
 decidedly melancholy. The tones cut deeper and 
 clearer into ear and heart. Tears are my strongest, 
 but most weakening intoxication." And in almost 
 every song of that sweet singer, Schubert, we seem 
 to detect les larmes dans la voix. 
 
 * How naturally would this assertion come from Schubert 
 — as any one will probably agree who has studied the 
 lingering linked sweetness, so long-drawn out, of his sonatas, 
 and has marked his seeming reluctance to take leave of a 
 beloved theme. 
 
267 
 
 XV. 
 feongg of JMlgrimaffe* 
 
 Psalm cxix. 54. 
 
 TO the Psalmist the divine statutes were his 
 songs in the house of his pilgrimage. The 
 Pilgrim's Progress abounds with the voice of melody 
 thus conceived, thus inspired, and thus expressed. 
 Christian is cheered by the Interpreter, and goes 
 on his way singing. . Singing he goes up the hill 
 Difficulty, after he has drank of the brook by the 
 way; therefor he lifts up his voice. In the pil- 
 grim's chamber called Peace, in the House Beau- 
 tiful, he sleeps till break of day, and then he 
 awakes and sings. After the dread duel with Apol- 
 lyon, he gives, thanks for victory in a paean of 
 praise. When he has safely passed the cave of the 
 two giants, Pope and Pagan, he sings a song of de- 
 liverance. Faithful, as soon as he has shaken off 
 that "bold villain" Shame, begins to sing. Im- 
 mediately after Faithful's martyrdom, Christian 
 goes on his way singing in mcmoriam fratris and 
 
268 PILGRIMS MAKING PROGRESS. 
 
 ad laadem Dei. When By-ends and his com- 
 panions go over to Demas, Christian commemo- 
 rates in song his own escape. In the pleasant 
 meadow, beside the river of life, the pilgrims sing 
 with one consent — 
 
 " Behold ye how these crystal streams do glide, 
 To comfort pilgrims by the highway side," etc. 
 
 Such of them as escape Doubting Castle and Giant 
 Despair, hymn forth a song of deliverance on their 
 way to the Delectable Mountains. Through the 
 glass of the Shepherds they see something like 
 the gate of the Celestial City, and some even of the 
 glory of the place ; and as they go away, they sing. 
 A Shining One chastises them sorely when He 
 finds them astray, but they thank Him for all His 
 kindness, and go softly along the right way, singing. 
 In the Enchanted Ground Christian sings to Hope- 
 ful ere he will converse with him. And so again it 
 is in the second part of the Progress. Mercy sings 
 before coming to the Slough of Despond, and 
 Christiana sings a blessing on the day that she 
 " begun a pilgrim for to be." At the Interpreter's 
 house "there was also one that did sing, and a 
 very fine voice he had. His song was this : ' The 
 Lord is only my support, and He that doth me 
 feed,' " etc. Leaving the Interpreter's house, the 
 family of pilgrims " went on their way, and sang." 
 
SONGS OF PILGRIMAGE. 269 
 
 Almost every incident of travel and adventure 
 Mercy turns into a song. Prudence plays on " a 
 pair of excellent virginals," and turns what she 
 has showed the pilgrims into " an excellent song." 
 When they are gone from the Shepherds they 
 break forth into song, for that they, though pil- 
 grims, joyful lives may live. Gladdened to the 
 heart they are by overhearing in the grove " a most 
 curious melodious note," with words of devout 
 praise, while another answers it, hymning the good- 
 ness of God, whose mercy is for ever sure ; glad- 
 dened, too, by overhearing in the fields the song of 
 the shepherd boy in very mean clothes, but of a 
 fresh and well-favoured countenance, who is tending 
 his father's sheep ; " and as he sat by himself he 
 sang, ... * He that is down, need fear no fall, he 
 that is low, no pride ; he that is humble, ever shall 
 have God to be his guide.' " Then again we have 
 the song of Valiant, " Who would true valour see, 
 let him come hither," with its refrain, " to be a pil- 
 grim." And once more, and last of all, at Mr. 
 Greatheart's discourse with Standfast there is a 
 mixture of joy and trembling among the pilgrims ; 
 " but at length they broke out and sang," and after 
 that they came into the land of Beulah, where the 
 sun shineth night and day. 
 
 But a later poet, not wanting (as Bunyan did) the 
 accomplishment of verse, has taught us that 
 
270 SOFT MUSIC IN CITY DIN. 
 
 " Light flashes in the gloomiest sky, 
 
 And Music in the dullest plain, 
 For there the lark is soaring high 
 
 Over her flat and leafless reign, 
 And chanting in so blithe a tone, 
 It shames the weary heart to feel itself alone." 
 
 And elsewhere he reminds us, wayfarers through 
 city streets and slums, that 
 
 " There are in this loud stunning tide 
 
 Of human care and crime, 
 With whom the melodies abide 
 
 Of th' everlasting chime ; 
 Who carry music in their heart 
 
 Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 
 Plying their daily task with busier feet, 
 Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat" 
 
 In one stage of the Pilgrim's Progress, where 
 
 Christian sings, after he and Faithful have made a 
 
 good riddance of Talkative, we are told of their 
 
 colloquies, including the frequent snatches of song, 
 
 that these ''made the way easy, which would 
 
 otherwise no doubt have been tedious to them, for 
 
 now they went through a wilderness." To apply 
 
 the lines of a very different author, 
 
 " Voila les pelerins en route : 
 A pied nous chantons * en marchant." 
 
 * That is better than the resource adopted by La Fontaine's 
 two pilgrims, le Chat et le Renard, who, when they " s'en 
 allaient en pelerinage," betook themselves to controversy, to 
 beguile the way : 
 
SONGS TO SHORTEN THE WAY. 271 
 
 Cantantcs ut camus, says Virgil's shepherd, 
 " Cantantes licet usque (minus via Icedef) eamus." 
 The aid and appliance is made available in Evan- 
 geline : 
 
 " Even as pilgrims, who journey afar from their home and 
 their country, 
 Sing as they go, and in singing forget they are weary and 
 wayworn." 
 
 Says the Saracen to the Knight in Scott's Talis- 
 man, as together they traverse the desert, — " I 
 cheer, to the best of my power, a gloomy road with 
 a cheerful verse. What saith the poet, — ' Song is 
 like the dews of Heaven on the bosom of the 
 desert ; it cools the path of the traveller.' " Wamba 
 and the Black Knight in Ivanhoe shorten the sense 
 of their long journey through the forest by part- 
 singing, — the clown bearing a mellow burden to 
 the better instructed cavalier. Mendelssohn de- 
 scribes himself, in one of his letters of travel, toil- 
 ing his way quite alone through the Bavarian 
 
 " Le chemin £tant long, et partant ennuyeux, 
 Pour l'accourcir ils disputerent. 
 La dispute est d'un grand secours : 
 Sans elle on dormirait toujours." 
 
 Dante opens the twenty-fourth canto of his Purgatory with 
 the pregnant lines, — 
 
 " Our journey was not slacken' d by our talk, 
 Nor yet our talk by journeying, still we spake, 
 And urged our travel stoutly." 
 
272 WAYFARERS IN FULL VOICE. 
 
 mountains, with Switzerland in view, unable to 
 procure a guide, but gladdening himself with song : 
 " I am now quite perfect in the Swiss jodcln and 
 crowing, so I shouted lustily, and jodclled several 
 airs at the pitch of my voice, and arrived at Tour- 
 gen in capital spirits." Many a less light-hearted, 
 and infinitely less musical a wayfarer has found 
 the like vocalization a capital resource for ensuring 
 an effect the flat opposite of that announced by the 
 ayytXog in Sophocles : 
 
 X' ovtojs 656s fipaxeta, ylyverca /xaKpd. 
 
 Milton makes even his fallen angels 
 
 " Move on in silence to soft pipes, that charm' d 
 Their painful steps o'er the burnt soil." 
 
 Dr. John Case is quoted in Mr. Chappell's Popu- 
 lar Music of the Olden Time as saying that every 
 troublesome and laborious occupation useth music 
 for a solace and recreation ; " and hence it is that 
 wayfaring men solace themselves with songs, and 
 ease the wearisomeness of their journey, consider- 
 ing that music, as a pleasant companion, is unto 
 them instead of a waggon on the way." * 
 
 * And hence it is, he goes on to say, that manual labourers, 
 and mechanical artificers of all sorts, keep such a chanting 
 and singing in their shops : " the tailor on his bulk, the 
 shoemaker at his last, the mason at his wall, the shipboy at 
 his oar, the tinker at his pan, and the tiler on the housetop." 
 
SINGIXG AT WORK. 171 
 
 " While many a merry lay and many a song 
 Cheer'd the rough road, we wish'd the rough road 
 long,»- 
 
 is the testimony of the wayfarers in Johnson's 
 
 poem. 
 
 M. Simonin, in his account of the miners in the mountains of 
 the Tuscan Maremna singing at their work, and singing well, 
 cannot resist, as one of his reviewers in this country said at 
 the time, the temptation of a playful hit at our dull islanders. 
 "In England," he says, referring to the mining population, 
 "the women and girls either do not sing, or, if they do, sing out 
 of tune." Good authority assures us that the Cornish people 
 are, like all their allied races, strongly imbued with a taste 
 for music/ and that the women when engaged in similar tasks 
 to those of the Italians, breaking up metallic ore at the surface, 
 etc., are noted for singing choruses in parts with a correctness 
 rarely exceeded, unless perhaps in Germany. Mr. Charles 
 Reade tells us of the dredging-song of the fisherman of the 
 Firth of Forth, that this old song is money to them. And thus 
 he demonstrates his proposition : — dredging is practically very 
 stiff rowing for ten hours ; and the fishermen are agreed, 
 alike those of Newhaven and their rivals, that this song lifts 
 them through more work than untuned fishermen can manage. 
 Mr. Reade, having heard the song, and seen the work done 
 to it, inclines to think it helps the oar, not only by keeping 
 the time true, and the spirit alive, but also by its favourable 
 action on the lungs. " It is sung in a peculiar way : the 
 sound is, as it were, expelled from the chest in a sort of 
 musical ejaculations ; and the like, we know, was done by 
 the ancient gymnasts ; and is done by French bakers, in lift- 
 ing their enormous dough, and by our paviors." Readers of 
 Great Expectations will remember the song Joe Gargery used 
 to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the burden was 
 Old Clem, whom Mr. Dickens takes to have stood in the 
 
 18 
 
274 SINGING AT WORK. 
 
 During the military passage of St. Bernard in 
 1800, the ascent from the village of St. Pierre to 
 
 relation of a patron saint towards smiths ; the song imitated 
 the measure of beating upon iron ; but Old Clem seems to 
 have been in no sense identical with Handel's Harmonious 
 Blacksmith. Readers of Goethe may recall Jetter the tailor, 
 \r\ Egmofit, sitting at his work, humming a French psalm, 
 thinking nothing about it, neither good nor bad, but singing 
 it just because it is in his throat ; yet forthwith pounced upon 
 as a heretic, and clapped into prison. Readers of La Fon- 
 taine will bethink them of the cobbler who sang from morning 
 to night, while his rich neighbour had no heart for singing, 
 and negotiated with him on the subject. Readers of the old 
 dramatists may hold in lively remembrance the chatter of the 
 citizen's wife in Beaumont and Fletcher, who so delights in 
 old Merryth ought's maxim, " Never trust a tailor that does 
 not sing at his work ! his mind is on nothing but filching." 
 " Mark this, George," the good woman bids her husband ; 
 'tis worth noting : Godfrey, my tailor, you know, never 
 sings ; and he had fourteen yards to make this gown ; 
 and I'll be sworn Mistress Penistone, the draper's wife, had 
 one made with twelve." To quite another category as well as 
 another age belongs the sweet Puritan girl of The Ministers 
 Wooing, who, as she moves about at her household work, 
 sings snatches of old psalm tunes, making the Doctor, as he 
 listens, think about angels and the Millennium. " Solemnly 
 and tenderly there floated in at his open study window, 
 through the breezy lilacs, mixed with low of kine, and bleat 
 of sheep, and hum of early wakening life, the little silvery 
 ripples of that singing, somewhat mournful in its cadence, as 
 if a gentle soul were striving to hush itself to rest." As 
 charmed the Doctor is as we find Felix Mendelssohn to have 
 been when he was extemporizing one day in his lodgings in 
 Rome, and heard suddenly a splendid contralto voice repeat 
 
SINGING IN HARNESS. 275 
 
 the summit being painful and laborious in the ex- 
 treme, the soldiers — a hundred of them harnessed 
 to each gun, and relieved by their comrades every 
 half mile — were inspirited to the toil by the music 
 of each regiment playing at its head ; and they 
 animated each other by warlike songs, the solitudes 
 of the Alps resounding with their strains. "I'll 
 sing to thee," says one footsore exile to another, in 
 a dramatic fragment of Mr. Procter's,: — 
 
 " I'll sing to thee, 
 And cheer thee on our melancholy march. 
 Tis said men fight the better when they hear 
 
 a theme out of his Fantasia. His friends too listened : it was 
 a voice that had often entranced them ; the young maid in the 
 landlady's service was in the habit of singing popular Italian 
 airs while at her work. On that day, however, his biographer 
 relates, Mendelssohn started up in surprise. Through the 
 opened window the songstress was to be seen, packing all 
 sorts of fruit into a large basket. " Oh, if I could only once 
 hear her sing near ! " exclaimed the maestro. " Call her in, 
 then," his companions urged. " But will she come ? " The 
 painters were bolder than the musician, and persuaded her 
 to come in ; and she sang, and Mendelssohn accompanied 
 her extempore as she sang. But he may, after all, and in 
 the long run, have liked best to hear her singing in her own 
 way, and that was at work. Be that as it may, however, he 
 provided for the musical education of this girl in the most 
 self-sacrificing manner ; and by the testimony of one of his 
 most distinguished pupils, the simple maid of the Piazza 
 d'Espagna became an excellent singer, renowned for the 
 culture of her rare contralto voice. 
 
276 SONGS OF PILGRIMAGE. 
 
 Sweet music ; ay, endure fatigue and thirst, 
 Hunger and such poor wants." 
 
 Sorrowful is the speaker ; and sorrowing Cowper 
 would have said, not after a godly sort, but rather 
 one of those he describes as ignorant 
 
 " That Scripture is the only cure of woe. 
 That field of promise, how it flings abroad 
 Its odour o'er the Christian's thorny road ! 
 The soul, reposing on assured belief, 
 Feels herself happy amidst all her grief, 
 Forgets her labour as she toils along, 
 Weeps tears of joy, and bursts into a song." 
 
277 
 
 XVI. 
 feongtf of (Cjrile, 
 
 Psalm cxxxvii. 3, 4* 
 
 BY the waters of Babylon, there the Hebrew 
 exiles sat down ; and there they wept, when 
 they remembered Zion. Their harps they hanged 
 upon the willows in the midst thereof. Weeping, 
 they were required by their captors to sing ; those 
 who wasted them required of them mirth : " Sing 
 us one of the songs of Zion." " How shall we sing 
 the Lord's song in a strange land ? " 
 
 The Hebrew Melodies bid weep for those that 
 wept by Babel's stream, whose shrines are desolate, 
 whose land a dream ; weep for the harp of Judah's 
 broken spell ; for, 
 
 " When shall Sion's songs again seem sweet? 
 And Judah's melody once more rejoice 
 The hearts that leap'd before its heavenly voice ? n 
 
 They sat down and wept by the waters of Babel, 
 and thought of the day when their foe, in the hue 
 
278 SONGS OF EXILE. 
 
 of his slaughters, made Salem's high places his 
 prey. The stranger demanded the song, while 
 sadly they gazed on the river which rolled on in 
 freedom below ; but there was no singing the old 
 songs to strangers, in a strange land. Least of 
 all a song of mirth. 
 
 " Twas hard to sing by Babel's stream — 
 More hard in Babel's street," 
 
 is Mrs. Browning's testimony. And, for one at 
 least, the Leatherstocking of romance (to whose 
 worth, by the way, she has paid printed homage) 
 would heartily have echoed her assertion * Hard 
 enough, whether by stream or in street, to any one 
 that realizes, in Schlegel's sense, the alienation of 
 human nature from its true home. "When the 
 soul," writes the elder Schlegel, " resting as it were 
 under the willows of exile,f breathes out its 
 
 * Summoned by the convivial German major to pay his 
 table-dues of song, — " Letter-stockint, vilt sing? say, olt 
 poy, vilt sing ter song, as upout ter woots?"the hunter's 
 reply, with a melancholy shake of the head, is, " No, no, 
 Major ; I have lived to see what I thought eyes could never 
 behold in these hills, and I have no heart left for singing." — 
 The Pioneers, ch. xiv. 
 
 t Trauerweiden der Verbannen, literally, the weeping 
 willows of banishment ; the Salices BabyloniccE, as Linnaeus 
 termed them, by way of express reference to the 137th 
 Psalm. Schlegel is defining melancholy to be the essence 
 of northern poetry, and explaining why. 
 
THE MURMUR OF THE SHELL. 279 
 
 longing for its distant home, what else but melan- 
 choly can be the key-note of its songs ? " The 
 strains thus inspired may be likened to the murmur 
 of the shell, which 
 
 " remembers its august abodes, 
 And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there." * 
 
 * The famous lines from Landor^s Gebir. A parallel 
 passage in Wordsworth bred contention about priority and 
 plagiarism of imagery. In The Excursion the Rydal poet 
 speaks of having seen a child, who dwelt upon a tract of 
 inland ground, applying to his ear 
 
 "The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell ; 
 To which, in silence hushed, his very soul 
 Listened intensely ; — for from within were heard 
 M itr m urings "whereby the monitor expressed 
 Mysterious union with its native sea." 
 
 Byron, in The Island, speaks of Ocean's mimic murmurer 
 in the shell, " as, far divided from his parent deep, the sea- 
 born infant cries and will not sleep, raising his little plaint in 
 vain, to rave for the broad bosom of his nursing wave." So 
 a later poet tells of the wide shore's hollow shells, vocal with 
 music of the spirits of the foam, 
 
 "Which murmur, in the language of the deep, 
 Though haply far away, to one who keeps 
 Such ocean wealth to grace an inland home." 
 
 Dr. Holmes, describing that longing for the ocean breeze 
 which those who have once breathed and salted their blood 
 with it, never get over, and which makes the sweetest inland 
 airs seem to them at last tame and tasteless, goes on to pic- 
 ture young Myrtle Hazard holding a tiger-shell to her ear, 
 and listening to that low, sleepy murmur, whether in the 
 sense or in the soul we hardly know, like that which had 
 so often been her lullaby— a memory of the sea, as Lando* 
 
28o SEA-SHELLS MESSAGE FROM THE SEA. 
 
 For, as a greater poet, in his great ode on Inti- 
 mations of Immortality, has it, the soul cometh 
 
 and Wordsworth have sung. Of Lando^s lines an enthu- 
 siastic critic (if enthusiasm and criticism be compatible) 
 has said, that never, in remotest time, shall any one who 
 has once heard or read them gaze into the white depth of 
 the child of ocean, or apply his ear to its polished coolness, 
 and hear, or seem to hear, the faint and far-off murmur of 
 the main, without imagining these to be the words which the 
 gentle oracle is uttering, and this the meaning of the spiritual 
 and mysterious music. 
 
 The author of the Chronicles of Clovernook was fond of 
 turning to didactic uses the sea-shell's message from the sea. 
 His Hermit, of that ilk, waxes eloquent about the pinky shells 
 upon the shore, " voiced with wondrous singing. Place one 
 of them to your ear, and its voice will call up in your breast 
 all the long mute music of your early days, when life dreamt 
 not of hope, the present was so full of happiness. The shell 
 will sing to you sweet familiar sounds of the past, blended 
 with tones that harmonize, and yet are richer, deeper, sweeter 
 than the air departed ; as though some higher spirit caught 
 the dying strain, continuing it in more melodious volume." 
 So in the parable of the Sick Giant and the Doctor 
 Dwarf, when Zim made the Giant place a shell to his ear, 
 he listened and listened, and smiles crept over his face ; 
 and his eyes softened at the sound ; and then he placed 
 the shell at his heart, as though it spoke to that. " Why," 
 says Lieutenant Tackle, in Retired from Biisiness, "I can 
 take one of those shells, clap it to my ear, and dream I am 
 eighteen again — eighteen, and once more in Banana Bay." 
 Hartley Coleridge brings us a freight of crimson shells, that 
 mock the things of earth with semblance quaint, 
 
 " Imperial cradles of purpureal sheen, 
 And wreathed trumpets, curiously convolved, 
 
SONGS OF THE SAD-HEARTED. 281 
 
 from afar — from God, who is our home ; and in a 
 season of calm weather, though inland far we be, 
 our souls catch echoes of the immortal sea, 
 
 " And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 
 A trite experience in human life is the sadness 
 of the player, or singer, who, outwardly smiling, 
 with a smile lip-deep only, and expressive of 
 nothing deeper, unless it be depth of sorrow, is 
 constrained to play or sing. As with the glee- 
 maiden in Scott's tale of Perth, whose gaiety was 
 assumed, as a quality essentially necessary to her 
 trade, of which it was one of the miseries that the 
 professors were obliged frequently to cover an 
 aching heart with a compelled smile. 
 
 Wherein the ocean's mighty harmonies 
 Serenely murmur in a humming slumber." 
 
 And W. E. Aytoun, in his Blind Old Milton, has a simile 
 
 about 
 
 "the low murmurs of the Indian shell 
 Taken from its coral bed beneath the wave, 
 
 Which, unforgetful of the ocean's swell, 
 Retains within its mystic urn, the hum 
 Heard in the sea-grots, where the Nereids dwell." 
 
 The Sighing of tJie Shell is the subject of a little poem 
 of Mr. George Macdonald's, with diverse interpretations ot 
 the burden of its undersong, all however suggestive and 
 sweet. And the Delta of ancient Maga, David Macbeth 
 Moir, has a tender sonnet, beginning, 
 
 "As speaks the sea-shell from the window-sill 
 Of cottage-home, far inland, to the soul 
 Of the bronzed veteran, till he hears the roll 
 Of ocean 'mid its islands charing still." 
 
282 SORROW IN SONG. 
 
 " Then who can ask for notes of pleasure, 
 
 My drooping harp, from chords like thine ? 
 Alas, the lark's gay morning measure 
 As ill would suit the swan's decline." 
 
 The trouble-tried widow Vincent, in Salem 
 Chapel, constrains herself, with the heroism of a 
 martyr, to add her soft voice, touched with age, 
 yet still melodious and true, to the song of praise. 
 The words choke her as she utters them, yet with 
 a kind of desperate courage she keeps on. "Praise! 
 — it happened to be a very effusive hymn that 
 day, an utterance of unmitigated thanksgiving," 
 and wonderful is said to have been the " bitter 
 difference between the thanks she was uttering and 
 the position in which she stood." Mechanically 
 she sang on, "with her white face set in pale 
 steadfastness," — " her hands holding fast to the 
 book ; and over the ache of frightful suspense in 
 her heart came the soft voice of her singing." 
 There is a song of slaves, in the most popular of 
 slave stories, sung (at command) very boisterously, 
 and with a forced attempt at merriment ; but no 
 wail of despair, the author insists, no word of 
 impassioned prayer, could have had such a depth 
 of woe in them as the wild notes of the chorus : 
 " as if the poor, dumb heart, threatened — prisoned 
 — took refuge in that inarticulate sanctuary of 
 music, and found there a language in which to 
 
LES LARMES DANS LA VOIX. 283 
 
 breathe its prayer to God." So, after a sort, with 
 the Caterina in George Eliot's first fiction, to whom, 
 in her heartbreak of misery, it was always a relief 
 to sing : the full deep notes she sent forth seemed 
 to be lifting the pain from her heart, and to be 
 carrying away the madness from her brain. In no 
 sense applicable to her would be the opening 
 couplet of Waller's verses Of my Lady Lsabclla, — 
 
 " Such moving sounds from such a careless touch ! 
 So unconcern'd herself, and we so much ! " 
 
 But in every sense applicable is that expressive 
 fragment of Moore's — 
 
 " Ah, little they think who delight in her strains, 
 How the heart of the minstrel is breaking." 
 
 That old song of his childhood, the air of which 
 was all he remembered, except just a few detached 
 words, Rousseau could never recall without tin 
 charme attendrissatit, never sing without larmes 
 dans la voix as well as in the eyes. " II m'est de 
 toute impossibility de la chanter jusqu'a la fin 
 sans etre arrete par mes larmes." Thus writes 
 Jean Jacques in his Confessions. The English 
 Opium-eater, in kis, avowed that "often when I 
 walk, at this time, in Oxford Street, by dreamy 
 lamplight, and hear those airs played . . . which 
 years ago solaced me and my dear youthful com- 
 panion, I shed tears, and muse with myself at the 
 
284 SINGER CHOKED BY HIS TEARS. 
 
 mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so 
 critically separated us for ever." But the player 
 in tears at his own playing, the singer hysterical 
 over his own singing, is nothing preternatural, 
 whether in books or in real life. Charles Wolfe, 
 the author of the celebrated stanzas on the Burial 
 of Sir John Moore, adapted a pathetic lyric to the 
 Irish air GrammacJirce, after singing the air over 
 and over till he burst into a flood of tears, — in 
 which mood he composed the song in question, " If 
 I had thought thou couldst have died." Thomas 
 Moore writes in his diary, of an evening at Madame 
 de Flahault's, in 1820, when he sang, as usual, but 
 scarcely in his usual spirits : " If I had given way, 
 should have burst out a-crying ; as I remember 
 doing many years ago at a large party at Lady 
 Rothes'. No one believes how much I am some- 
 times affected in singing, partly from being touched 
 myself, and partly from an anxiety to touch others." 
 Elsewhere he tells how Miss Emmett one night 
 burst into tears before she was half-way through 
 singing his "Weep on, your hour is past," and 
 started up from the pianoforte in a passion of sobs. 
 In 1829, soon after the loss of one of his children, 
 Moore records this experience of his at an evening 
 with " the Fieldings. Attempted to sing .... 
 but just at the last line, when I had with difficulty 
 restrained myself throughout, the violent burst 
 
MOORE'S FITS OF SOBBING. 285 
 
 came ; and for near ten minutes (to the great alarm 
 of the girls, who fled out of the room) I continued 
 to sob as if my chest was coming asunder." A few 
 weeks later we light on the following entry again — 
 referring to his being forced to sing at Lord 
 Anglesey's, where, the moment he sat down at the 
 pianoforte, he felt that he should, in his own words, 
 make a fool of himself : " The melancholy sound 
 of my own voice [in ' Keep your tears for me '] 
 quite overpowered me ; and had I not started up 
 instantly, I should have burst into one of my 
 violent sobbing fits, which, before strangers, would 
 have been dreadful. I never was better pleased 
 than to find myself in the street once more." It is 
 of an evening at Bowood, nearly ten years later, 
 that the diarist makes this mention : " I sat down, 
 and began, unluckily, with ■ There's a song of the 
 olden time/ .... and the melancholy, both of 
 the song and of my own voice, affected me so 
 much, that before I had sung the first two lines 
 I broke out into one of those hysterical fits of 
 sobbing which must be as painful to others as 
 they are to myself, and was obliged to hurry away 
 into the next room." 
 
 There is a fantasy-piece of Hawthorne's in which 
 Burns is urged by a fellow-bard to sing his own 
 song to Mary in Heaven; but as soon as the 
 feeling of those verses, " so profoundly true, and 
 
286 WEBER MOVED TO TEARS. 
 
 so simply expressed, "touched him, "the tears 
 immediately gushed into his eyes, and his voice 
 broke into a tremulous cackle." Says dying Cata- 
 rina to Camoens, — anticipating a day when the 
 palace ladies, sitting round his gittern, shall have 
 said, " Poet, sing those verses written for the lady 
 who is dead," — 
 
 " Will you tremble, yet dissemble, — 
 Or sing hoarse, with tears between, 
 'Sweetest eyes were ever seen'?" 
 
 On the occasion of the Klopstock Jubilee — held 
 at Ouedlinburg, in July 1824— Madame Funk sang 
 " I know that my Redeemer liveth," with unusual 
 power and fervour ; insomuch that Weber, who 
 had the direction of the musical festivities, and 
 who had been wont to speak of this air as " an 
 emanation of the greatest artistic inspiration, com- 
 bining the most masterly scientific treatment with 
 the noblest expression of Christian joy and love," 
 was very deeply moved. No man, his biographer 
 assures us, had a greater horror than Weber him- 
 self of any expression of strong emotion before the 
 face of men. But on this occasion, though he 
 struggled long and stoutly with the overpowering 
 feelings, of religious reverence and artistic enthu- 
 siasm conjoined, which agitated him — the more so 
 from the then shattered state of his nervous system 
 
MENDELSSOHN'S EMOTION. 287 
 
 — he struggled in vain. " All on a sudden he let 
 fall his baton, buried his face between his hands 
 on his desk, and burst into a flood of tears." And 
 it was long before he could recover himself from 
 the effect of this emotion. 
 
 The first time that Mendelssohn resumed the 
 direction of the Leipzig concerts, after the death 
 of his mother (in 1842), when the alto sang, piano, 
 "Wie der Hirsch schreit,"* he was so overcome 
 that he was obliged afterwards to go out of the 
 room, to give free vent to his tears. 
 
 At the first performance of his masterpiece, the 
 "Elijah," at Birmingham, in the summer of 1846, 
 " a young English tenor," writes Mendelssohn to 
 his brother, without however naming the singer, 
 (it was that admirable vocalist Mr. Lockey — one 
 whose finely cultivated voice, and pure, unaffected 
 style, were lost too soon for the oratorio in 
 England) — "a young English tenor sang the last 
 air with such wonderful sweetness, that I was 
 obliged to collect all my energies not to be affected, 
 and to continue beating time steadily." 
 
 Madame Polko's Reminiscences of Mendelssohn 
 give us young Felix in his teens playing the E flat 
 major Concerto of Moscheles, to the composer, 
 with such power and spirit as to bring tears into 
 
 * From his own psalm, op. 42. 
 
288 MENDELSSOHN'S MASTERY OF EMOTION. 
 
 the composer's eyes. In a later section we have 
 him one evening at Diisseldorf, when revisiting old 
 friends there, himself now a father, and acquainted 
 with grief, seated after supper at the piano, with 
 his little son Karl on his knee ; playing at first as 
 if in a dream, while the child sat motionless, his 
 eyes fixed on his father's hands. " He then gently 
 put him down, though the handsome boy continued 
 to stand beside him, and Mendelssohn played on 
 and on, every moment more beautifully, more 
 touchingly, until all those around were in tears ; 
 and when he ceased, sighs and low sobs alone 
 betrayed the overwhelming impression he had 
 made."* 
 
 Of his correspondent, the Baroness Dorothea 
 Ertmann, and her relations with Beethoven, a 
 characteristic story is told. Beethoven daily fre- 
 quented her house in Vienna, and taught her his 
 sonatas ; but his severe, gruff manner was pre- 
 dominant, and sometimes he would absent himself 
 
 * Again; at an organ-concert in honour of Bach, Mendels- 
 sohn's own grand finale was an extemporized reverie, so to 
 speak, on what his biographer calls "the most deeply touching 
 choral melody in the world," — O Haupt veil Bhtt und 
 Wunden / — and no musician of the modern time, she assures 
 us, was seated above in the organ-loft. " No ! it was the old 
 and marvellous Sebastian Bach himself playing there. Sacred 
 awe pervaded the souls of the listeners, and tears rushed to 
 eyes that had long since ceased to weep." 
 
CRYING AND MAKING CRY. 
 
 for weeks together, " in a sulky humour, though 
 he always came back, sooner or later." When the 
 Baroness lost the last of her children, Beethoven's 
 sorrow was right earnest ; but his way of express- 
 ing it (and could there be, for him, a more excellent 
 way?) was by coming and extemporizing at the 
 piano as she sat beside him. Tears choked her 
 utterance when he closed his improvisation pathe- 
 tique ; and he at once got up and left the room. 
 Full heart, few words. 
 
 Very many will remember well Mr. Thackeray's 
 mention, in one of his first set of lectures, of a 
 French actor in whose company he dined once 
 (once was presumably enough), and who began, at 
 his own request, to sing French songs of the sort 
 called dcs chansons grivoiscs, which he performed 
 admirably, and to the dissatisfaction of most 
 persons present ; and who, having finished these, 
 commenced a sentimental ballad, and sang it so 
 charmingly that it touched all the company, and 
 especially the singer himself, whose voice trembled, 
 whose eyes filled with emotion, and who "was 
 snivelling and weeping quite genuine tears by the 
 time his own ditty was over." Fresh among the 
 memories of Bleak House is Mr. Harold Skimpole 
 playing snatches of pathetic airs, and sometimes 
 singing to them, with great expression and feeling. 
 His song about a peasant boy, "thrown on the 
 
 19 
 
290 RANZ DES VACHES : 
 
 wide world, doom'd to wander and roam," which 
 he warbled u quite exquisitely," always made, him 
 cry, he said. 
 
 It takes a Swiss ear to absorb the " plenary in- 
 spiration " of the Ranz dcs Vadics : at least others 
 beside Wordsworth have owned themselves unable 
 to detect the motive power * of that famous strain. 
 
 * The elder Disraeli, in his magnum opus, devotes a para- 
 graph to the Ranz des Vaches, founded on Rousseau's article 
 in his Dictionary of Music, and which, though without any- 
 thing striking in the composition, has such a powerful 
 influence over the Swiss, and has before now possessed them 
 with so vehement a longing to return to their own country, 
 that " it is forbidden to be played in the Swiss regiments in 
 the French service on pain of death. There is also a Scotch 
 tune which has the same effect on some of our North Britons." 
 —Cur. of Lit., First Series, § 87. 
 
 Boswell records himself satisfied that much of the effect of 
 music is owing to the association of ideas : " That air which, 
 instantly and irresistibly, excites in the Swiss, when in a 
 foreign land, the maladie du pays, has, I am told, no intrinsic 
 power of sound." — Life of Johnson, sub ano 1777. 
 
 Young Frederick Perthes had not been long in Leipzig 
 when he wrote home letter after letter detailing how many 
 " sweet recollections of Schwartzburg " were nestling in his 
 heart of hearts. For example : " Here, in a neighbouring 
 village called Gohlis, there is a cowherd who blows his horn 
 as skilfully as the Schwartzburg trumpeter of yore. I can 
 hear him in my bed, and you cannot imagine what a strange 
 feeling comes over me, and the peculiar kind of sadness to 
 which it gives rise." — Life of Perthes, ch. i. 
 
 Mrs. Schimmelpenninck expatiates on the delight with which 
 
THE SWISS SONG OF REMEMBRANCE. 2()i 
 
 " I listen," says Wordsworth — and the listening is 
 surely from a favourable standpoint, on the top of 
 the Pass of St. Gothard, — 
 
 " I listen — but no faculty of mine 
 Avails those modulations to detect, 
 Which, heard in foreign lands, the Swiss affect 
 With tenderest passion ; leaving him to pine 
 (So fame reports) and die, — his sweet-breathed kine, 
 Remembering, and green Alpine pastures decked 
 With vernal flowers. Yet may we not reject 
 The tale as fabulous." 
 
 It not merely, as Hazlitt has said, recalls to the 
 Swiss peasantry the image of their country, but 
 has associated with it a thousand nameless ideas, 
 numberless touches of private affection, of early 
 hope, romantic adventure, and national pride, all 
 which rush in (with mingled currents) to swell the 
 tide of fond remembrance, and make them languish 
 or die for home. u What a fine instrument the 
 human heart is ! Who shall touch it ? Who shall 
 
 she used to hear her Swiss governess and Swiss bonne — both 
 of them musical and passionately patriotic — sing in parts 
 the Ranz dcs Vaches. " Never can I forget the deep pathos 
 of that song ; every note thrilled through the soul ; and I 
 think a Swiss could scarcely have felt it more than I ; whilst 
 the mountains, clad in snow, or bright in varied light, the 
 Lake of Geneva, with the Rhone gliding through it, the Jura, 
 Lausanne, the rocks of Meillerie and Yverdun, seemed to 
 rise before my mind almost with the vividness of sight." — 
 Autobiogr.) i. 25. 
 
292 SONGS OF EXILE. 
 
 fathom it ? Who shall ' sound it from its lowest 
 note to the top of its compass ' ? Who shall put 
 his hand among the strings, and explain their way- 
 ward music ?" All the world knows that there is 
 nothing which revives memories like music, says 
 Dr. Croly ; and he pictures effectively in one of 
 his fictions a group of French emigres overcome by 
 the songs of France in a strange land : the airs 
 which they had heard and sung from their infancy; 
 the airs of their early companionships, hopes, and 
 perhaps loves ; sung in their gardens, their palaces, 
 at their parents' knees, by the cradles of their 
 children, at their firesides, — everywhere combining 
 with the heart. " No power of poetry, nor even of 
 the pencil, could have brought the past so deeply, 
 so touchingly, with such living sensibility before 
 them." Some are described as weeping silently 
 and abundantly, while others buried their faces on 
 their knees, and by the heaving of their bosoms 
 alone showed how they felt ; some sat with their 
 large eyes fixed on heaven, and their lips moving 
 as in silent prayer ; others almost knelt, with 
 hands clasped and eyes bent down, in palpable 
 supplication.* 
 
 * See the seventh chapter of Croly's Marston. In an 
 
 earlier one, the very mention among the emigres, by a newly 
 
 arrived exile from France, of Gretry's renowned, historically 
 
 enowned air, O Richard, O mon 7'oi! produces a similar 
 
SCOTCH SONGS IN A STRANGE LAND. 293 
 
 The Abbe Morellet relates of Franklin, from 
 whom he heard the incident, that while travelling 
 beyond the Alleghany Mountains, he chanced 
 upon the sequestered home of a Scotchman, with 
 whom he sojourned for a while, and whose wife, 
 one fine evening, as she sat in front of their door, 
 sang the Scotch air, " Sae merry as we hae a' 
 been," in so soft and touching a manner, that the 
 travelled American melted into tears, and the 
 impression was still vivid in his mind after a lapse 
 of thrice ten summers. If so cool-tempered, not 
 to say cold-blooded, a personage as that most 
 unsentimental Benjamin, could be thus moved to 
 the centre of his being, by a melody not of his 
 own native land, who shall wonder at the effect 
 of Scotch airs on Scotch ears ? Delta (Moir) 
 commemorates the ancient melody of the green 
 " Bush beyond Traquair," that from the steep o'er- 
 hangs the Tweed ; hearing which, mayhap afar, 
 
 " In realms beyond the separating sea, 
 The plaided Exile, 'neath the evening star, 
 Thinking of Scotland, scarce forbears to weep." 
 
 
 effect. " The name was electric. All began that delicious 
 air at the moment. Sobs and sighs stole in between the 
 pauses of the harmony. Their rich and practised voices gave 
 it the sweetness and solemnity of a hymn. Fine eyes were 
 lifted to heaven ; fine faces were buried in their clasped 
 hands ; and the whole finished like the closing of a prayer." 
 (ch. iv.) 
 
294 SONGS OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 So Byron tells us how " Auld lang syne " brought 
 Scotland before him again, — Scotch plaids, Scotch 
 snoods, the blue hills and clear streams — all his 
 boy feelings, all his gentler dreams.* Another 
 stanza of his sounds the praise of 
 
 " the home 
 Heart-ballads of Green Erin or Grey Highlands, 
 
 * Rambling with Scott among the pastoral regions of 
 Tvveedside, Washington Irving felt a thrill of pleasure when 
 first he saw the broom-covered tops of the Cowden Knowes, 
 and gazed on Ettrick Vale, Gala Water, and the Braes of 
 Yarrow ; for at every turn there was brought to his mind some 
 household air — some almost forgotten song of the nursery, 
 by which he had been lulled to sleep in his childhood ; and 
 with these the looks and voices of those who had sung them, 
 and who were now no more. It is, he says, these melodies, 
 chanted in our ears in the days of infancy, and connected 
 with the memory of those we have loved, and who have 
 passed away, that clothe Scottish landscape with such tender 
 associations . 
 
 To the aged maiden aunt in Mr. Alexander Smith's house- 
 hold story, the slow monotonous music played by her niece 
 brings back a melancholy past : the past blooms again as 
 she listens, but blooms with the flowers and herbs of sorrow, 
 — rue, the passion-flower, and love-lies-bleeding. With wist- 
 ful eyes she looks back to the far-off brightness of girlhood, 
 almost sunken now beneath the horizon of memory ; and her 
 whole life seems filled with the sound of falling tears and the 
 sighing of farewells. 
 
 To that charming old Grand'mere in Miss Tytler's Huguenot 
 tale, the old ballads she loves to pipe, " in her sweet, cracked 
 voice," over her lace-weaving, "were like drops of the nation's 
 heart, that . . . now came to her, in green, misty England, 
 
THE SONGS OF OTHER YEARS. 295 
 
 That bring Lochaber back to eyes that roam 
 
 O'er far Atlantic continents or islands, 
 
 The calentures of music which o'ercome 
 
 All mountaineers with dreams that they are nigh lands 
 
 No more to be beheld but in such visions." 
 
 with touches of the varied colours j and wafts of the sweet 
 odours of the south." Play me, she would have said with the 
 Irish Melodist, that well-known air once more, for thoughts 
 of youth still haunt its strain, like dreams of some far, fairy 
 shore we never shall see again. 
 
 " Sweet air, how every note brings back 
 
 Some sunny hope, some day-dream bright, 
 That shining o'er life's early track 
 Fill'd even its tears with light." 
 
 For, as the Melodist elsewhere says or sings, when through 
 life unblest we rove, losing all that made life dear, should 
 some notes we used to love in days of childhood meet our 
 ear, 
 
 " Oh, how welcome breathes the strain ! 
 
 Wakening thoughts that long have slept ; 
 Kindling former smiles again 
 
 In faded eyes that long have wept." 
 
 We recognize then, with a pang, if with a pleasure, the voices 
 of the dead and songs of other years. 
 
 When Mrs. Crawley, in Vanity Fair, sings religious songs 
 of Mozart, which had been early favourites of Lady Steyne, 
 she does so with such sweetness and tenderness that the 
 lady, lingering round the piano, sits down by its side, and 
 listens until the tears roll down her cheeks. She is a child 
 again, and has wandered back through a forty years' wilder- 
 ness to her convent garden. " The chapel organ had pealed 
 the same tunes ; the organist, the sister whom she loved best 
 of the community, had taught them to her in those early 
 happy days. She was a girl once more, and the brief period 
 
296 A SONG OF THE OLDEN TIME. 
 
 Less than a thought, as Lady Eastlake says, the 
 slightest breath of a hint, is sufficient to set the 
 exquisitely sensitive strings of musical memory 
 vibrating. " Pictures, poetry, thoughts, hatreds, 
 loves, promises of course, are all more fleeting 
 than tunes." These, she says, we may let lie buried 
 for years, but they never moulder in the grave ; 
 they come back as fresh as ever, yet showing the 
 depth at which they have lain by the secret asso- 
 ciations of joy or sorrow they bring with them. 
 There is no such pitiless invoker of the ghosts 
 of the past, she adds, as one bar of a melody that 
 has been connected with them ; nor does any such 
 sigh escape from the heart as that which follows 
 in the train of some musical reminiscence. 
 
 There is, in Moore, — and where indeed is there 
 not ? — a song of the olden time, falling sad on the 
 
 of her happiness bloomed out again for an hour." Observe 
 too the effect of Mercy's singing on Mr. Reade's Griffith 
 Gaunt — (though Mercy has nothing of Becky Sharpe about 
 her, but comes of an old Puritan stock, and even her songs 
 are not giddy-paced, but solid, quaint, and tender ; all the 
 more do they reach the soul) : " Griffith beat time with his 
 hand awhile, and his own face softened and beautified as the 
 melody curled about his heart. But soon it was too much 
 for him ; he knew the song ; had sung it to Kate Peyton 
 in their days of courtship. A thousand memories gushed in 
 upon his soul and overpowered him. He burst out sobbing 
 violently, and wept as if his heart must break." 
 
MEMORIAL MELODIES. 297 
 
 ear, like the dream of some village chime, which in 
 youth we loved to hear. 
 
 11 Give me that strain of mournful touch 
 
 We used to love long, long ago, 
 Before our hearts had known so much 
 
 As now, alas ! they bleed to know. 
 Sweet notes ! they tell ©f former peace, 
 
 Of all that look'd so smiling then, 
 Now vanish'd, lost — oh, pray thee, : cease, 
 
 I cannot bear those sounds again." 
 
 As the Prince de Ligne used to say of les souve- 
 nirs, though so constantly called.. doux. et tendres. 
 there is a harsh bitter too often in the bitter-sweet, 
 " On se trouve si loin, si loin de ces beaux moments 
 qui ont passe si vite, et qu'une chanson qu'on a 
 entendue alors . . . rappelle en faisant fondre en 
 larmes." So again is Madame de Stael pathetic 
 on " ces derniers jours qui repetent d'une voix si 
 rauques les airs brillants des premiers." 
 
 Gustav Freytag declares of German emigrants, 
 so many of whom lose the love for their fatherland, 
 and even the power of speaking their mother-tongue 
 fluently, that the melodies of home live with them 
 longer than anything else ; and that many a fool 
 who in a foreign country prides himself on being 
 a naturalized foreigner, feels himself on a sudden 
 a German again, on hearing a few measures sung 
 that he had heard in his childhood. 
 
298 
 
 XVII. 
 feongg in tljc $h'g$t; 
 
 Job xxxv. 10. 
 
 THE songs in the night of which Elihu speaks 
 are by him said to be the gift of God. " In 
 the night His song shall be with me," the Psalmist 
 says ; and elsewhere he calls to remembrance his 
 song in the night. " Ye shall have a song as in 
 the night/' is part of the evangel of the prophet by 
 distinction designated evangelic. 
 
 " Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move 
 Harmonious numbers ; as the wakeful bird 
 Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, 
 Tunes her nocturnal note." 
 
 Bishop Hall indites this among his Occasional 
 Meditations : " How sweetly doth this music sound 
 in this dead season ! In the daytime it would not, 
 it could not, so much affect the ear.* All har- 
 
 * In the Autobiography of the English Opium-eater, mention 
 is made of a little incident that befell him in an obscure 
 
MUSIC AFTER MIDNIGHT. 299 
 
 monious sounds are advanced by a silent dark- 
 ness. . . . O God, whose praise it is to give songs 
 
 Welsh inn, where, besides a smoky chimney and other incon- 
 veniences, the tourist had to put up with the noise of a public 
 dance held there that night. The noise and uproar were 
 almost insupportable, and sleep he could get none. But at 
 three o'clock all became silent, the company having departed 
 in a body. " Suddenly from the little parlour separated from 
 my bedroom overhead by the slightest and most pervious of 
 ceilings, arose with the rising dawn the very sweetest of 
 female voices that ever I had heard, although for many years 
 an habitud of the opera. She was a stranger ; a visitor from 
 some distance.; and (I was told in the morning) a Methodist. 
 What she sang, or at least sang last, were the beautiful verses 
 of Shirley, ending — 
 
 ' Only the actions of the just 
 Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.' " 
 
 This incident caused him to forgive the detrimental c6- 
 incidents of the little inn ; so sweet was the strain thus heard, 
 at such a season, and with such a sense of relief by contrast. 
 Even the Waits o' Christmas nights, if at all tolerable, and 
 not too near, are more than tolerable, are welcome, in their 
 way, and once in a way, to waking listeners who might 
 denounce the same players by daylight. The associations of 
 memory tend to idealize the too probably coarse realism of 
 these performers ; and the listener perhaps essays to echo 
 the poet's experience — 
 
 "At night the Waits mix'd with our dream 
 
 Their music sweet and low : 
 We children knew not, as we heard, 
 Each, listening, nestled like a bird, 
 Whether from Heaven the music came, 
 
 Or only over the snow." 
 
 Supernatural singing, the singing under the mill-house 
 
300 SONGS IN THE NIGHT. 
 
 in the night, make my prosperity conscionable, 
 and my crosses cheerful." Mendelssohn, in one of 
 his letters from Italy, which describes an in every 
 respect happy evening with Horace Vernet, and 
 the close of it, when together they ascended the 
 hill towards the " large dark villa," and all was so 
 still and peaceful, adds this memento (and all his 
 memories of Italy were memorabilia) : " Frag- 
 ments of music floated on the air, and its echoes 
 in the dark night, mingled with the murmuring 
 of fountains, were sweeter than I can describe." 
 Corinne, the night before she quits Rome, unable 
 to sleep, hears a troop of Romans singing in the 
 moonlight, and is impelled to follow them in their 
 rovings, singing as they go "to the silent night, 
 when the happy ought to sleep ;" "their pure and 
 gentle melodies seemed designed to solace wakeful 
 suffering." Drawn onwards by this resistless spell, 
 
 windows of Christmas carols, Maggie Tulliver always felt 
 it to be, in spite of Tom's contemptuous insistence that the 
 singers were old Patch, the parish, clerk, and the rest of the 
 church choir ; she trembled with awe when the carolling 
 broke in upon her dreams,, and the image of men in fustian 
 clothes was always thrust away by the "vision of angels 
 resting on the parted cloud." Wordsworth is treating of the 
 Christmas Waits in the Lake district, when he exclaims — 
 
 " How touching, when, at midnight, sweep 
 Snow-muffled winds, when all is dark, 
 To hear — and sink again to sleep !" 
 
SEDATIVE FOR THE SLEEPLESS. 301 
 
 Corinne, insensible to fatigue, seems winging her 
 way along ; and pauses to listen, now before the 
 pillar of Antoninus, now at Trajan's column, and 
 anon beside the obelisk of St. John Lateran. " The 
 ideal language of music worthily mates the ideal 
 expression of works like these : enthusiasm reigns 
 alone, while vulgar interests slumber." If thou 
 wouldst view fair Melrose right, go visit it by the 
 pale moonlight ; and if good music be obtainable 
 to grace the vision, and lap another sense in 
 Elysian dreams, ta,7it mieux, on Madame de StaeTs 
 showing. 
 
 In Thomson's Castle of Indolence, 
 
 " When sleep was coy, the bard, in waiting there, 
 Cheer'd the lone midnight with the muse's lore ; 
 Composing music bade his dreams be fair, 
 And music lent new gladness to the morning air." 
 
 It was, and may be still, a rule with the Herrn- 
 huters for two men to keep watch nightly in the 
 street of their chief settlement, their mission being to 
 pray for those who slept, and to sing hymns which 
 might excite feelings of devotion in those who were 
 awake. A more likely means than good Bishop 
 Burgess's resort to a musical box ; for that pious 
 prelate habitually kept one of those rather finical 
 instruments by his bedside ; nor, says his very con- 
 genial biographer, Dr. Harford, "were his Songs in 
 the Night exclusively the Songs of Zion." From 
 
302 PRISON SONGS IN THE NIGHT. 
 
 David's harp of solemn sound, to the tinklings, 
 however dulcet, of a musical box, the musical in- 
 terval seems rather too abrupt. And yet the 
 proverb measures for us, to a nicety, the exact 
 interspace that separates the sublime from the 
 ridiculous. 
 
 At midnight, in the prison at Philippi, Paul and 
 Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God ; and the 
 prisoners heard them — heard the hymns, if not the 
 prayers. Heard, and probably wondered ; for, was 
 midnight the season for song ? were bonds and 
 imprisonment provocative of praise ? 
 
 Mankind has ever listened with a sensation of 
 surprise to songs at midnight, warbled by " spirits 
 in prison ;" above all when the darkness is the 
 forecast shadow of the grave, and when the night 
 gloom is the very shadow of death. 
 
 Celebrated in Northern literature is the Kraka- 
 mal y the death-song of the pirate Ragnar Lodbrok, 
 said to have been sung by him when, being taken 
 prisoner by Ella, king of Northumberland, he was 
 shut up in a barrel with snakes. It ends with the 
 famous line, " Laughing will I die." If tliat reminds 
 us, on the one hand, of Romeo's query, 
 
 "How oft when men are at the point of death 
 Have they been merry ?" 
 
 on the other, it reminds us of Prince Henry's words, 
 
SWAN SONGS. 303 
 
 when Pembroke reports of the dying king that, in 
 extremis, in articulo mortis, " even now he sung," 
 
 " 'Tis strange that death should sing.— 
 I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,* 
 Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death ; 
 And, from the organ-pipe of frailty, sings 
 His soul and body to their lasting rest." 
 
 * The swan-song simile has ever been a favourite one with 
 the poets. Shakspeare uses it of his Lucrece, employing too 
 the same epithet, pale : 
 
 " And now this pale swan in her watery nest 
 Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending." 
 
 His dying Emilia, recalling Desdemona's Willow song, 
 exclaims, 
 
 " What did thy song bode, lady? 
 Hark, canst thou hear me ? I will play the swan, 
 And die in music ; — Willow, willow, willow." 
 
 There duly figures amid Chaucer's Assembly of Foules, 
 
 "The jelous swan, ayenst his deth that singeth." 
 
 Olorum tnorte narratur fiebilis cantus, writes Pliny ; but he 
 takes occasion to a.&&, fatso ut arbitror aliquot exfierimentis. 
 Sir Thomas Browne enters this fallacy among his Vulgar 
 Errors. And thus he sums up his view of the matter : "When, 
 therefore, we consider the dissension of authors, the falsity of 
 relations, the indisposition of the organs, and the immusical 
 note of all we ever beheld or heard of, if generally taken, and 
 comprehending all swans, or of all places, we cannot assent 
 thereto. Surely he that is bit with a tarantula, shall never 
 be cured by this music ; and with the same hopes we expect 
 to hear the harmony of the spheres." His previous remarks 
 recognize the great antiquity of the belief— the musical note 
 of swans having found yet earlier commendation than the 
 
304 SWAN SONGS. 
 
 Tenderly Desdemona, herself death-doomed, re- 
 calls the maid Barbara's moribund snatches of 
 
 " she had a song of — willow, 
 An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune, 
 And she died singing it. That song, to-night, 
 
 melody of Sirens. Orpheus became a swan after death. But 
 here we are rather concerned with the moderns. 
 
 La Fontaine's cuisinier, in his cups, is about to make 
 savour)' meat of le cygjie, when 
 
 "L'oiseau, pr£t a mourir, se plaint en son ramage," — 
 
 and the man intent on slaughter is overcome by the strain : 
 a throat that sang like that ought to have other destiny than 
 the stew-pan : 
 
 "Quoi ! je mettrais, dit-il, un tel chanteur en soupe ! 
 Non, non, ne plaise aux dieux que jamais ma main coupe 
 La gorge a qui s'en sert si bien ! " 
 
 Keats begins his notes of sweet music that has been heard 
 in many places with " Some has been upstirred from out its 
 crystal dwelling in a lake, by a swan's ebon bill ; " but he is 
 not thinking, with Ovid, of 
 
 " The swans that on Cayster often tried 
 Their tuneful songs, now sung their last, and died." 
 
 Suggested by the Phtzdon of Plato is that sonnet of Words- 
 worth's which tells how the poet heard (alas, 'twas only in a 
 dream) strains — which, as sage Antiquity believed, by waking 
 ears have sometimes been received wafted adown the wind 
 from lake or stream ; 
 
 • ' A most melodious requiem, a supreme 
 And perfect harmony of notes, achieved 
 By a fair swan on drowsy billows heaved, 
 O'er which her pinions shed a silver gleam. 
 
THE DYING SWAN. 305 
 
 Will not go from my mind : I have much to do 
 But to go hang my head all at one side, 
 And sing it like poor Barbara." 
 
 For is she not the votary of Apollo ? 
 And knows she not, singing as he inspires, 
 That bliss awaits her which the ungenial Hollow 
 Of the dull earth partakes not, nor desires ? 
 Mount, tuneful bird, and join the immortal quires ! 
 She soared — and I awoke, struggling in vain to follow." 
 
 The Dyi?ig Swan is one of Mr. Tennyson's earliest poems — 
 telling how the wild swan's death-hymn took the soul of waste 
 places with joy hidden in sorrow ; a low warble at first, but 
 full and clear ; 
 
 "And floating about the under-sky, 
 Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole 
 Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear ; 
 But anon her awful jubilant voice, 
 With a music strange and manifold, 
 Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold," 
 
 which is likened to the rejoicing of a mighty people with 
 shawms, and cymbals, and harps of gold, the tumult of whose 
 acclaim is rolled through the open gates of the city afar, to 
 the shepherd who watcheth the evening star. By the wild 
 swan's death-hymn, the creeping mosses and clambering 
 weeds and hoar dank willow branches, and the soughing 
 reeds, and the silvery marish- flowers among desolate creeks 
 and pools, "were flooded over with eddying song." And 
 what is the ending of the king who hied him to the island- 
 valley of Avilion, — what the morte d? Arthur ? 
 
 "So said he, and the barge with oar and sail 
 Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan 
 That, fluting a wild carol ere her death," 
 
 ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood with swarthy 
 webs. Again, the Earl's old minstrel, in Owen Meredith's 
 poems, whom, with his long white hair and golden harp, 
 
 20 
 
306 SWAN SONGS. 
 
 There is another passage in Shakspeare on music 
 for the moribund, which might do for motto to 
 
 they watch roving back to the burning halls of his master* 
 " chanting a lonely lay," is described as 
 
 •' Chanting and changing it, o'er and o'er, 
 Like the mournful mad melodious breath 
 Of some wild swan singing himself to death, 
 As he floats down a strange land leagues away." 
 
 By poetical licence, consecrated by tradition, this melody is 
 ever assumed to be of ravishing sweetness. The swan's is 
 by prescription of Parnassus, emphatically a dulcet voice, a 
 douce voix : 
 
 "Tel qu'au jour de sa mort, pour la derniere fois 
 Un beau cygne soupire, et de sa douce voix, 
 De sa voix qui bientot lui doit dtre ravie, 
 Chante, avant de partir, ses adieux a la vie." 
 
 But even poets are constrained to become prosaic on the 
 subject, when they merge poetics in matter-of-fact natural 
 history. Walter Savage Landor could make as much melody 
 out of a swan song as most of his contemporary bards, when 
 le cha.7it du cygiie was his cue ; but in his Imaginary con- 
 versations Tersitza talks with Odysseus about the "low 
 hoarse voices " of two swans, old friends of hers, on the lake, 
 and goes on to quote Agatha's assertion " that their voices 
 are not always low and hoarse," and that when they are about 
 to die they sing delightfully. " I was glad," quoth Tersitza, 
 u the poor creatures had many years to live, for they certainly 
 had made no progress in their singing." So Lord Lytton 
 somewhere takes note of that low hissing salutation, which, 
 it is to be hoped, they change for something less sibilant in 
 that famous song with which they depart this life. And in 
 another place he refers to the half snort and half grunt, to 
 which change of time or climate has reduced the vocal 
 accomplishments of those classical birds, so pathetically 
 
MUSICIAN'S REQUIEM. 307 
 
 Mozart's Requiem, according to the story, be it 
 myth or not, which asserts its composition to be 
 the utterance of his own Requiescam : 
 
 " Cause the musicians play me that sad note 
 I named my knell," 
 
 Katharine of Aragon bids her good Griffith, — the 
 while she meditates on that celestial harmony she 
 goes to. However it may have been with Mozart, 
 Adolf Hasse, the once accepted rival of Handel, 
 some years before his death composed a Requiem 
 for his own funeral, which was duly applied to the 
 intended purpose, and which is said to be a work 
 affording evidence of unabated vigour at an ad- 
 vanced period of his life. 
 
 Mr. Hogarth, in his History of Music, after re- 
 
 melodious in the age of Moschus, and on the banks of 
 Cayster. It is only by poetical licence the swan-song is 
 supposed to be melodious or pathetic now ; or by way, 
 perhaps, of sarcastic similitude, as in the Rape of the Lock : 
 
 "Thus on Mseander's flow'ry margin lies 
 Th' expiring swan, and as he sings he dies." 
 
 The swan songs of prose romance are typified in the story 
 of the boy minstrel in Antonina, upon whose ear, at the close 
 of his song to Glyco, the applause of the guests falls noiseless. 
 His voice had changed as he sang to an almost unearthly 
 tone, and those who turned to look at him saw a change in 
 the face as well. A spasm, a fall, and all was over. " We 
 have heard the note of the swan singing its own funeral 
 hymn," the patrician Placidus placidly remarks. 
 
308 DEATH OF HAYDX. 
 
 cording Haydn's composition of that national hymn 
 of Austria which mainly constitutes the popularity 
 of his Quartet in C, No. 77, and which he expressly 
 composed for the Emperor Francis, to whom the 
 old maestro was greatly attached, goes on to de- 
 scribe Papa Joseph's anxiety for the Kaiser's safe 
 return to Vienna, in 1S09 ; the French beginning to 
 bombard the city on the 10th of May. Four bombs 
 fell close to Haydn's dwelling, and their explosion 
 filled his little household with terror. " He roused 
 himself, and getting up from his chair, rebuked his 
 servants with dignity for their want of firmness. 
 But the effort was too much for him ; he was seized 
 with a convulsive shivering, and carried to bed. 
 His strength continued to diminish ; yet on the 
 26th of May he caused himself to be placed at the 
 pianoforte, where he again sang the national hymn, 
 God preserve the Emperor, three times over, with all 
 his remaining energy. It was the song of the swan. 
 While he sat at the pianoforte, he fell into a state 
 of stupor, and at length expired, on the morning 
 of the 31st of May," in his seventy-ninth year. Of 
 Chopin's last hours the account, as elsewhere given, 
 is, that feeling the approach of death, he was intent 
 on bidding a last farewell to the instrument which 
 had given utterance to his poetic inspirations, and 
 had been musically and materially the making of 
 him. So a piano was brought to his bedside, and 
 
CHOPIN, LAB LA CHE. 309 
 
 with icy hands and clouded vision he attempted to 
 draw a few sounds from it. " A sweet and touch- 
 ing melody, deeply expressive of regret, was whis- 
 pered forth ; but the musician was unable to 
 complete his pathetic improvisation. He fell back 
 on his bed of suffering, and expired a few hours 
 aftenvards." Then again of the great basso — phy- 
 sically great, as well as artistically — Lablache, we 
 read, that he attempted to sing upon his death-bed, 
 that he might in death, as he had done in life, 
 assert his devotion to his art. " Go to the piano," 
 he bade one of his children, " and accompany me." 
 The son, struggling to conceal his emotion, obeyed. 
 Lablache then sang the first verse of our English 
 Home, sweet home* At the second verse the 
 
 * That is the tune to which a popular novelist makes his old 
 fantoccini man "play himself out" of life when his time comes. 
 " ' Hick'ry,' says he, ' the performance is over ; but I tell you 
 what I should like to do, — just to play that old tune when 
 the skeleton used to come up in the fantysceny before he 
 tumbled to bits. 'Where's the pipes?' Now, you see the 
 curious thing was we hadn't worked them dolls — not, not for 
 years. Well, we gave him the pipes, and he began to play 
 Home, siveet home, quite slow, as he used. And when he 
 came to the part where the skeleton fell to pieces, down he 
 went, all of a heap, just as the doll did ; and never spoke 
 again. Played himself out, regularly." The factor in Scott's 
 Zetland story says of Claud Halcro and his fiddle, " whilk, 
 I am apt to think, wad skirl at his father's death-bed, or at 
 his ain, sae lang as his fingers could pinch the thairm." 
 
3 io SONGS OF THE DYING. 
 
 singer's throat contracted, and not a note could 
 issue from it. That night he died. 
 
 Of William Blake, the artist, who died (1827) in 
 his seventieth year, we are told by Mr. Smith, that 
 on the day of his death he " composed and uttered 
 songs to his Maker, so sweetly to the ear of his 
 Catherine [wife for forty-five years past], that when 
 she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most 
 affectionately, said, ' My beloved ! they are not 
 mine. No ! they are not mine!'" Or as his bio- 
 grapher* describes the scene, — in that plain back 
 room, but a few yards' remove from the roaring 
 Strand, " he lay chanting Songs to Melodies, both 
 the inspiration of the moment, but no longer as 
 of old to be noted down. To the pious songs fol- 
 lowed, about six in the summer evening, a calm 
 and painless withdrawal of breath ; the exact 
 moment almost unperceived by his wife, who sat 
 by his side." Another account, by a " now distin- 
 guished painter," records of Blake, that, just before 
 he died, his countenance became fair, his eyes 
 brightened, and he " burst out into singing of the 
 things he saw in heaven." 
 
 When the days of Thomas Moore were dwindled 
 to a span, he would sing, or ask his wife to sing to 
 him, the favourite airs of his past days. Even the 
 
 * Gilchrist, Life of Blake, voL i., p. 361. 
 
SELF-SUNG TO SLEEP, IN DEATH. 311 
 
 day before his death, as Earl Russell tells us, he (in 
 his Bessie's phrase) " warbled." His Diary and his 
 letters contain a plurality of instances of the same 
 kind, mostly in his own family, as though it ran in 
 the blood. In 18 16 we find him writing to his 
 fast friend and constant correspondent, Miss God- 
 frey, — " We have had a melancholy event among 
 us lately : a lovely young girl of eighteen, left us 
 a bride, and in six weeks afterwards was a corpse. 
 During her last delirium she sang several of my 
 sacred songs, of which the poor girl was a most 
 enthusiastic admirer." In 1829 the poet suffered 
 the bitter loss of his darling child Anastasia, whom 
 he describes essaying her voice in song again and 
 again — especially on one occasion, his own " When 
 in death I shall calm recline." And when, four- 
 teen years later, Moore was again bereaved of a 
 beloved child, — this time his younger boy, Russell, 
 — after recording with a thankful heart that the 
 " poor little fellow suffers but little pain," his 
 father adds : " A night or two since he was sing- 
 ing over some of his favourite songs, and, indeed, 
 sang himself to sleep." 
 
 That Captain Hamilton, of the Abercorn family, 
 whose portrait was one of the first painted by 
 Sir . Joshua Reynolds, lost his life at sea, while 
 imprudently venturing in a boat from his ship to 
 land at Plymouth, on a tempestuous day, all in his 
 
312 SONGS OF THE DYING. 
 
 impatience to rejoin his wife ashore. The boat 
 turned keel upwards, and the captain, being a good 
 swimmer, trusted to his skill, and would not 
 accept of a place on the keel, but, that he might 
 leave room there for others, clung merely to the 
 edge of the boat His great-coat was a hindrance 
 to him, and this he attempted to throw off ; but, 
 in the words of Lord Eliot, whose too are the 
 italics, " finding his strength fail, he told the men 
 he must yield to his fate, and soon afterwards sank 
 while singing a psalm! '* 
 
 The Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart, that 
 "model of Virginian cavaliers and dashing chief- 
 tains," who received his death-wound in the early 
 summer campaign of 1864, and whose loss occa- 
 sioned more painful regret than that of any 
 Southern leader since Stonewall Jackson, is said 
 
 * Mr. Carlyle may well call it a " characteristic trait" in his 
 favourite Friedrich Wilhelm, as that "wild son of Nature" 
 lay a-dying, that on a certain German hymn which he "much 
 loved" being sung to him, or along with him, — when they 
 came to the words, "Naked I came into the world, and naked 
 shall I go out," — "No," said he, with vivacity, "not quite 
 naked ; I shall have my uniform on." After which the singing 
 went on again. — With vivacity. Akin, say, to that with which 
 the mother of Henri Quatre — not left the world, but brought 
 her son into it ; for historians, without romancing, tell us she 
 had sung a gay Bearnese song as her brave boy was coming 
 into the world at Pau. 
 
DEATH CONFRONTED WITH SONG. 313 
 
 to have turned to the Episcopal clergyman who 
 attended him ' at the last, and asked him to sing 
 the hymn, " Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide 
 myself in Thee," — and Stuart himself joined in the 
 singing with all the voice and strength that re- 
 mained to him. 
 
 On the memorable night, as Gibbon designates 
 it, when the church of St. Theonas was invested 
 by the troops of Syrianus, the archbishop, Atha- 
 nasius, seated on his throne, expected, with calm and 
 intrepid dignity, the approach of death. "While 
 the public devotion was interrupted by shouts of 
 rage and cries of terror, he animated his trembling 
 congregation to express their religious confidence 
 by chanting one of the psalms of David." * 
 
 * Gibbon, Rom. Empire, ch. xxi. 
 
 A deep impression was made on Wesley, during his outward 
 passage to America with the Moravians, by the circumstance 
 that, during imminent peril from a storm at sea, they calmly 
 sang on, — with death, but not the fear of death, before their 
 eyes. Having admired their, meekness, and tranquillity, and 
 freedom from every trace of resentment, during the earlier 
 part of the voyage, Wesley, was now curious, as Southey 
 relates the incident, " to see whether they were equally 
 delivered from the spirit of fear, and this he had an opportu- 
 nity of ascertaining. In the midst of the psalm with which 
 they began their service, the sea broke over, split the main- 
 sail, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if, 
 he says, the great deep had already swallowed us up. A 
 dreadful screaming was heard among the English colonists ; 
 
3U SINGING AT THE STAKE. 
 
 Jerome of Prague, bound naked to the stake, 
 continued to sing hymns with his " deep un- 
 trembling voice" — that voice which was ever " clear, 
 sweet, sonorous," and with "a certain dignity" in 
 its accents. The Christian hero could emulate 
 the Pagan braves of whom Strabo tells us they 
 pealed forth the psean of victory from the cross to 
 which Roman cruelty had nailed them. So the old 
 Germans would sing their death-song in the midst 
 of torture. The Red Indians * would do that too. 
 
 the Moravians calmly sang on. Wesley afterwards asked 
 one of them, if he was not afraid at that time. He replied, 
 1 1 thank God, no ! ' He was then asked if the women and 
 children were not afraid. His answer was, ' No > our women 
 and children are not afraid to die.' " — Southe/s Life of Wesley, 
 ch. iii. 
 
 * Fenimore Coopers tales have familiarized us all with ex- 
 amples of this, — and not all his Red Indian fictions are devoid, 
 or defiant, of fact. The Leatherstocking testifies to his know- 
 ledge of the redskins singing their death-songs, with their flesh 
 torn with splinters, and cut with knives, the fire raging round 
 their naked bodies, and death staring them in the face.— The 
 Pathfinder, ch. ii. The aged Indian John, in another story, 
 though past recognizing familiar faces, — his own blackening 
 with the last shadow, — begins to sing, in low guttural tones, 
 his notes rising with his theme till they swell to fulness ; and 
 the priest inquires of Leatherstocking, with tender interest, 
 what it is he sings, whose praise ? — to be answered, His own ; 
 the redskin's vaunt of victories achieved and of prowess once 
 supreme. — The Pioneers, ch. xxxviii. In yet another of these 
 tales wc have David, the precentor, in the belief that his last 
 hour is come, and with the war-whoop of the savages in his 
 
GUILLOTINE CHANTS. 315 
 
 It is very French, the marching of the Girondins 
 to the guillotine, singing in full chorus A lions, 
 enfans de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrive ; 
 and still singing as the executions went on, one 
 voice the less each time, the dwindling remnant 
 never ceasing to chanter* with firm voices, as their 
 
 ears, breaking forth in a loud and impassioned strain, for he 
 essays to smooth his passage into the other world by singing 
 the opening verse of a funeral anthem. — The Last of the 
 Mohicans, ch. xxvii. 
 
 * There is a nice touch of discrimination in Father Prout's 
 rendering into French the fate of the too notorious Larry in 
 the Irish ballad. In the original, Larry meets his fate with 
 unostentatious fortitude — not a syllable about singing ; for 
 
 " Not one word did poor Lany say." 
 
 Whereas, the French version runs — 
 
 " Le trajet en chantant il fit, 
 La chanson point ne fut un psaume " — 
 
 his ruling passion for theatrical display, i.e., the French 
 Larry's, being, as an English critic observes, strong in death. 
 When Latour was guillotined at Foix, in 1864, for the 
 murder of a family in four persons, great was the throng in 
 the streets, despite the heavy rain that fell ; for, to ensure a 
 good attendance, the condemned man had announced his 
 intention to compose for the occasion a series of verses, which 
 he would sing on his way (in the cart, vis-a-vis with messieurs 
 the headsmen) from prison to scaffold. And sing them he 
 did, all the way, — a matter of some three hundred and fifty 
 yards. Lightly he tripped up the steps of the scaffold, and 
 then, after a deliberate survey of the crowd below and all 
 around, he thundered forth, tonna, the following lines — a 
 
316 GUILLOTINE CHANTS. 
 
 friends gone before were successively beheaded ; 
 until one voice alone was left to chanter the 
 Marseillaise — it was that of Vergniaud, who, as 
 leader of the Girondins, was chosen to suffer last. 
 " They all died," writes one historian of those 
 times, "with the resolution of Romans, chanting 
 with their last breath the hymn of the Revolution." 
 A year later, a similar but more Christian-like 
 scene occurred, when all the nuns of the Abbey of 
 Montmartre, with the lady abbess, were executed 
 together : they began to chant the Salve Rcgina 
 as they left the doors of the Conciergerie, and con- 
 tinued singing the whole way through the streets 
 to the scaffold ; nor did the devout strain end 
 until the head of the last of the nuns — there were 
 eighteen of them — had fallen beneath Saint Guil- 
 lotine. There were spectators, and, in the French 
 sense, assistants, who were capable of putting a 
 
 parody, or rather say a personal appropriation, of the Mar- 
 seillaise : 
 
 "Allons, pauvre victime, 
 Ton jour de mort est arrive 1 : 
 Contre toi de la tyrannie 
 Le couteau sanglant est \ev6 1" 
 
 Being then tied to the plank and flung into the usual hori- 
 zontal position in order to be brought under the blade, he still 
 
 went on — Allons, pauvre victime, Ton jour de mort 
 
 — until a heavy sound was heard, the blade fell, something 
 else fell with it, and all was over. 
 
JOINVILLE: S DYING CHAPLAIN. 317 
 
 question as heartless as that of the rustic in the fable, 
 already cited, who said to the roasting shell-fish, 
 " Oh, ye Cockles ! near to death, wherefore do ye 
 sing?" It is a tradition in Corsica, that when St. Pan- 
 taleon was beheaded, the caput mortuum, as it might 
 have been thought, rose from the block and sang. 
 
 Full as Joinville is of a touching sensibilite which 
 gives emphasis and relief to his characteristic 
 gaiete, and which finds expressions en traits simples 
 et rapidcs, there are perhaps few examples of it 
 more telling, not to say tear-compelling, than the 
 incident of his chaplain singing mass for him, and 
 dying as he sang. Joinville was ill of an epidemic, 
 and so was his chaplain, — " pareillement l'etoit son 
 pauvre pretre. Un jour advint, ainsi qu'il chantoit 
 messe devant le senechal couche dans son lit, 
 quand le pretre fut a l'endroit de son sacrement, 
 Joinville l'apercut si tres-malade, .que visiblement 
 il le voyoit pamer." Joinville instantly scrambled 
 out of bed, and, as well as he could, supported that 
 fading form. " Et aussi acheva-t-il de celebrer sa 
 messe, et onques puis ne chanta, et mourut. Dieu 
 en ait lame," 
 
 Malherbe is said to have died singing in a 
 broken voice (en mourant il chantait d'une voix 
 cassec), " Je suis a Rhodante, je veux mourir sien." 
 
 If Lucan died not singing — as the blood ebbed 
 gradually away and away from the veins he had 
 
318 PAULO PR^E, PAULO POST MORTEM. 
 
 opened, — at least he died repeating some of his 
 own verses, which described the death of a wounded 
 soldier from loss of blood. Thomas Hood, when 
 his mind was wandering, towards the last, though 
 he sang not, repeated, in tones his children can 
 never forget, "I'm wearin' awa', Jean, like snaw- 
 wreaths in thaw, Jean, — I'm wearin' awa' — to the 
 land o' the leal." No one, testifies Mrs. Broderip, 
 could listen to this without tears, coming from the 
 frail form that was fading so fast ; and the effect 
 must have been the more touching from Jane being 
 the name of the wife he was leaving. Sometimes 
 the dying person will have others sing, — perhaps 
 enjoin a song of praise after the last sigh is 
 exhaled ; as did John Wesley's venerable mother, 
 the widow of the good rector of Epworth. " We 
 stood round the bed," says the most renowned of 
 her sons, "and fulfilled her last request, uttered a 
 little before she lost her speech : ' Children, as 
 soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to 
 God.'" Dr. Holmes somewhere utters a bene- 
 diction on 1 " dear good Dr. Watts," for " those 
 blessed hymns of his " that sing us into conscious- 
 ness in our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, 
 single verses, between the moments of wandering 
 and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over 
 us when we can no longer hear them, " bringing 
 grateful tears to the hot aching eyes beneath the 
 
"SKIRLING AT AULD SANGS? 319 
 
 thick black veils." Blind Alice in Mary Barton, 
 dying, sings at intervals, like the child she deems 
 herself; with the dearly-loved ones around her, 
 with the scent of the heather, and the song of the 
 wild bird hovering about her in imagination — with 
 old scraps of ballads, or old primitive versions of 
 the Psalms (such as are sung in country churches 
 half draperied over with ivy, and where the running 
 brook, or the murmuring wind among the trees, 
 makes fit accompaniment to the chorus of human 
 voices uttering praise and thanksgiving to their 
 God). Zilia, in the Surgeon's Daughter* seizes a 
 harpsichord, and wanders over the keys, producing 
 a wilderness of harmony, composed of passages 
 recalled by memory, or combined by her own 
 musical aptitude, until at length her voice and 
 instrument unite in "one of those magnificent 
 hymns in which her youth had praised her Maker, 
 with voice and harp, like the royal Hebrew who 
 composed it." Her vocal tones, conjoined with 
 those of the instrument, " rose to a pitch of bril- 
 liancy seldom attained by the most distinguished 
 
 * In a much earlier, and happier, fiction of Sir Walter's, 
 The Antiquary, there is an aged woman whom, on her 
 dying bed, Monkbarns is surprised to overhear, chanting 
 with tremulous voice a wild and doleful ballad. Ochiltree 
 calls it a sad thing " to see human nature sae far o'erta'en as 
 to be skirling at auld sangs " after that sort 
 
320 SONGSTRESS DYING WITH HER STRAIN. 
 
 performers, and then sank into a dying cadence, 
 which fell, never again to rise, — for the songstress 
 had died with her strain." Anon her husband 
 speaks of her as the angel who had escaped from 
 earth in a flood of harmony. Mr. Nassau Senior, 
 without condescending to details, pronounces the 
 death of Zilia, her last breath poured out in song, 
 to be a physical impossibility. He would probably 
 have taken exception, on other grounds, to Madame 
 de Charriere's Caliste, " exhalant a Dieu sa belle 
 ame en faisant ex^cuter le Messiah de Handel et 
 le Stabat de Pergolese." But he might have 
 borne with the death-song of poor Fantine in Les 
 Miserables, who "all at once began singing in a 
 voice faint as a sigh. It was an old cradle-song 
 with which she had in former times lulled her little 
 Cosette to sleep, and which had not once recurred to 
 her during the five years since she had been parted 
 from her child."* The realism of the romancer 
 
 * " She sang with so sad a voice and to so soft an air that 
 it was enough to make any one weep, even " [this is like M. 
 Hugo] " a nun. The sister, who was accustomed to austere 
 things, felt a tear in her eye." (ch. liv.) — Mrs. Gore, in her 
 tale of Court and City, puts into the mouth of an affectionate 
 old nurse the graphic, homely description of her dead-and- 
 gone young mistress's last hours, and it comprises this in- 
 cident : " And then, bursting out a-singing, all as one as she 
 was in the organ-loft. Never did her poor voice sound finer 
 nor more sweet than only half an hour before she died ; and 
 
SELF-SUNG TO THE LAST SLEEP. 321 
 
 has touched more hearts to the core than the 
 classical eloquence of an earlier French poet, who 
 pictures aj6 lie expirant sous le cypres paterncl : 
 
 " Sa voix mourante a son luth solitaire 
 Confie encore un chant delicieux, 
 Mais ce doux chant, commence sur la terre, 
 Devait, helas ! s'achever dans les cieux." 
 
 master's hand in hers, begging her to compose herself, and 
 not sing so. . . . At last, another hymn, as clear and sweet 
 as a nightingale ! — Everybody present said 'twas the song of 
 angels." (ch. xxv.) 
 
 There is a strange impulse, observes the author of Bred, 
 which sometimes comes in the restlessness and distress of 
 dissolving nature, to sing. Accordingly the Nina of that 
 book is described, as she lies with her eyes closed, apparently 
 in a sort of trance, singing over and over again the verse 
 of the song she was singing when the cholera struck her 
 down. 
 
 Of old Jacques, in the story called Hedged In, from a pen 
 which took so many notes of things seen, or guessed at, 
 through gates ajar, this account is given by the rough help 
 whose help he could almost as well have done without : "As 
 fast as he grew worse, he took to singin' ; and at the last, — 
 at nine o' the clock this day nicht, in a fearsome, still kind o' 
 nicht, a' munelicht an' stars, .... he sang as you mought 
 hear him across the street, an' sang as he war bent on singin' 
 o' himsel' to sleep like ; . . . . an' sae singin' an' playin' 
 in the air wi' his fingers on guitars as nae mon but himsel' 
 could see, he dropped off, plump ! wi' the stroke o' nine." 
 (ch. xviii.) 
 
 The Romance of War tells us of a Gordon Highlander in 
 one of the Peninsular campaigns, who, in delirious agony, as 
 he lay quivering in the grasp of death, chanted in low mur- 
 
 21 
 
322 SONGS OF THE DYING. 
 
 But Millevoye's lines had in their own day, and in 
 
 his own land, an acceptance as cordial as, in ours, 
 
 have had those of the laureate on her who, robed 
 
 in snowy white, floated down to Camelot ; and as 
 
 the boat-head wound along, the willowy hills and 
 
 fields among, they heard her singing her last song, 
 
 the Lady of Shalott. 
 
 "Heard a carol, mournful, holy, 
 Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, 
 Till her blood was frozen slowly, 
 And her eyes were darken'd wholly, 
 
 Turn'd to tower'd Camelot ; 
 For ere she reach'd upon the tide 
 The first house by the water-side, 
 Singing in her song she died, 
 
 The Lady of Shalott." 
 
 When the time was come for Bunyan's last band 
 of pilgrims to cross the swellings of Jordan, 
 Mr. Despondency's daughter, Much-afraid, "went 
 through the river singing, but none could under- 
 stand what she said." 
 
 muring tones a plaintive Gaelic dirge, probably the death- 
 song of his race ; and how, as his voice sunk and died away, 
 the spirit of that " son of the mist " seemed to pass with it. 
 Tradition relates that Rob Roy was visited on his death-bed 
 by a person with whom he was at enmity, and that as soon 
 as the visitor, whom he treated with a cold, haughty civility 
 during their short conference, had departed, the dying man 
 said, " Now all is over — let the piper play Ha til mi tulidh 
 (we return no more) " — and he is said to have expired before 
 the dirge was finished. 
 
SONGS OF IMMORTALITY. 323 
 
 And across the river, on the other side, they 
 sing a new song. For as surely as if the soul of 
 man is immortal, death hath no dominion over it> 
 and effects no solution of continuity in its exist- 
 ence, so surely, if the Christian creed be true, and 
 truly interpreted, the voice of praise shall renew 
 its strength in other worlds than this. ' 
 
 " I'll praise my Maker with my breath ; 
 And when mine eyes are closed in death, 
 
 Praise shall employ my nobler powers : 
 My day of praise shall ne'er be past, 
 While life and thought and being last, 
 
 Or immortality endures." 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abbey, Westm r ., organ, 33, 36 
 Addison, quoted, 10, 174, 209, 
 
 231, 244 
 Agesilaus, 217 
 Alcibiades, 178 
 Allen of Bristol, 27 
 Amphion, 187, 188 
 Analogies of the Sister Arts, 122 
 Anstey, C, quoted, 229, 233 
 Anthem, Rustic, 16, 225 
 Antwerp cathedral, 32 
 Arnauld, 97 
 
 Arne, Dr., 143, 237, 253 
 Art analogies, 122 
 As vinegar upon nitre, 50 
 Ass's bray 156, 164. sq. 
 Aula lang syne, 294 
 Aytoun, W. E., quoted, 281 
 
 B. 
 
 Bach, J. S., 288 
 Ballad tunes, 57 sq., 259 
 Balzac, quoted, 34, 38, 82 
 Barham, R. H., quoted, 58 
 Basil, St., on dancing, 98 
 Beattie, quoted, 217 
 Beddoes, W. L., quoted, 206 
 Beethoven, 54, 65, 119.577., 145 
 
 sq., 197, 199, 20I sq., 288 
 Bennett, Sir W. S., 195 
 Blake, W., Death of, 310 
 Boileau, quoted, 166, 187 
 Boswell, quoted, 290 
 
 Bounds to province of music 
 
 241 sq. 
 Boyd, Dr., quoted, 103, 241 
 Brass bands, 70 sq. 
 Bravura singing, 23 sq., 83 
 Braying, 164 sq. 
 Brienne, 158 
 Bronte, C, quoted, 95 
 Brooks, C. S., quoted, 102 
 Brown, Dr. John, quoted, 166, 
 
 184, 242 
 Browne, Sir T., quoted, 7, 193, 
 
 254, 303 
 Browning, E. B., quoted, 24, 
 
 39, 45, 135, 151, 177, 278, 
 
 286 
 Browning, R., quoted, 25 sq., 
 
 189, 228 
 Brute- world and music, 164 sq. 
 Bunyan, quoted, 101, 137, 267 
 
 sq., 322 
 Burgess, Bishop, 301 
 Burns, R., quoted, 55 
 Burton's Anatomy, 74, 89 
 Butler, S., quoted, 31, 130, 139 
 Buxton, Sir T. F., 169 
 
 C. 
 
 Cant of connoisseurs, 161 
 Carlyle, quoted, 8, 112, 180, 
 
 201, 312 
 Cary, H. F., quoted, 28 
 Casuistry of dancing, 96 
 Cattle and music, 167 sq. 
 Cellini, B., 181 
 
326 
 
 INDEX, 
 
 Cervantes, quoted, 167, 168, 242 
 Chalmers, Dr., preaching, 3 
 Channing, Dr., 194, 251 
 Charles VI., Emperor, 112 
 Charles IX., 76 
 Chasles, Ph., quoted, 168, 204 
 Chateaubriand, quoted, 176 
 Chatterton, quoted, 27 
 Chaucer, quoted, 138, 262, 303 
 Chesterfield, Lord, quoted, 129, 
 
 Choir, Rustic, 9 sq., 225 sq. 
 
 Chopin, 308 
 
 Choral symphonies, 8 
 
 Clarke, Dr. Adam, 236 
 
 Clarke, Rev. Erskine, on danc- 
 ing, 103 
 
 Cleomenes, 106 
 
 Cockburn, Lord, quoted, 2 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, quoted, 8, 
 11, 122, 166, 215 
 
 Coleridge, H. N., quoted, 228 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., quoted, 89, 
 172, 179, 193 
 
 Collier, Jer., quoted, 170 
 
 Collins, W. W., quoted, 82, 84, 
 
 85. 307 
 Concerted music, 117 
 Congreve, quoted, 187 
 Cooper, J. F., quoted, 278, 314 
 Copleston, Bp., quoted, 172 
 Comwallis, C. F., quoted, 243 
 Counterpoint, 63 
 Cowley, quoted, 74 
 Cowper, quoted, 165, 171, 270 
 Coxe, Archdeacon, quoted, 112 
 Croly, Dr. G., quoted, 2, 140, 292 
 Crotch, Dr., quoted, 64 
 Crying singers, 289 
 Currie, Dr., quoted, 102 
 Czerwinski, quoted, 97 
 
 Dallas, E. S., quoted, 33, 101, 
 
 212 
 Dancing, 30, 96 sq. 
 Dapples bray, 168 
 David's minstrelsv. n?. 
 
 Davies, Sir John, quoted, 96, 99 
 Deaf musicians, 145 sq. 
 Delitsch, quoted, 245 
 Deschauel, E., quoted, 42 
 Dickens, C., quoted, 161, 183, 
 
 273, 289 
 Discordant sounds, 166 
 Disraeli, B., quoted, 53, 79, 118, 
 
 192, 222 
 Disraeli, Isaac, quoted, 175, 176 
 
 290 
 Dogs and music, 184 
 Dorian music, 250 
 Dryden, quoted, 2, 22, 32, 134, 
 
 136, 176, 179, 261 
 
 E. 
 
 Eagles, J., quoted, 61, 225 
 Ear for music, 142 sq. 
 Eastern music, 153 sq. 
 Eastlake, Lady, quoted, 20, 22, 
 
 123^., 198, 222, 228, 237, 
 
 241, 296 
 Effeminacy, charged on music, 
 
 250 sq. 
 Eglintoune, Lady, 181 
 Eliot, George, quoted, 14, 15, 
 
 56, 184, 241, 243, 283, 300 
 Elisha and minstrel, 191 
 Emerson, R. W., quoted, 94 
 Emigrants and songs of home, 
 
 292 
 Epaminondas, flute player, 179 
 "Ethiopians" of the streets, 
 
 66 sq. 
 Exile, Songs of, 277 
 Exorcism, Musical, 75, 77, 80 
 Expectoration in church, 4 
 
 F. 
 
 Feltham, O., quoted, 95, 96, 99 
 
 sq., 152, 238 
 Fiddling, no sq., 184 
 Fielding, quoted, 57 
 Flute, 177 sq. 
 Fontaine, La, quoted, 169, 171, 
 
 271, 304 
 
INDEX. 
 
 327 
 
 Franklin, B., 293 
 Frederick the Great, 1 12, 180 
 Freytag, G., quoted, 297 
 Fugue, 19, 25 sq. 
 Fuller, Margaret, 234 
 
 G. 
 
 Gait, John, quoted, 255 
 Gaskell, Mrs., quoted, 319 
 George, King, of Hanover, 
 
 quoted, 52, 119 
 German and Italian music com- 
 pared, 196 jy., 204 jy. 
 Gibbon, quoted, 138, 139, 261, 
 
 31? 
 Girondins, 315 
 Gluck, 231, 337 
 Goddard, Joseph, quoted, 200, 
 
 210 
 Goethe, quoted, 82, 274 
 Golden lecture, 3 
 Goldsmith, 182 ; quoted, 93 . 
 Gore, Mrs., quoted, 23, 62, 234, 
 
 320 
 Goya, 149 
 
 Grahame, J., quoted, 35, 74 
 Gregorian chants, 24 
 Grinders, Organ, 49 sq., 71 
 Grote, G., quoted, 20 
 
 H. 
 
 Hahn-Hahn, quoted, 154 
 Hailstone chorus, 219 
 Haliburton, quoted, 62, 128 
 Hall, Bp., quoted, 298 
 Hall, Robert, preaching, 4 
 Halle, Charles, 198 
 Hainan, 113 
 
 Handel, 123 sq., 213, 219 sq. 
 Hare, J. C., quoted, 230, 255 
 Harmony in music, 19, 20 
 Harp, 79, 80 
 Hartley, D., quoted, 146 
 Haweis, H. R., 252 
 Hawthorne, N., quoted, 285 
 Haydn, 62, 125, 204, 207, 220, 
 308 
 
 Hazlitt, W., quoted, 37, 94, 291 
 Helps, A., quoted, 18, 65, 93 
 Heman, 113 
 
 Hemans, Mrs., quoted, 135 
 Henry VIII., 112 
 Herbert, G., quoted, 134 
 Herbert, Lord, quoted, 112 
 Herodias' daughter, 98, 102 sq. 
 Herrnhuters, 301, 313 
 Hill, Rowland, 127 
 Hoffman, quoted, 238 
 Hogg, J., quoted, 29, 190 
 Holland, Dr. J. G., quoted, 33 
 Holmes, Dr. O. W., quoted, 12, 
 
 45, 7o, 83, 199, 231, 279, 
 
 319 
 Homer, 246, 249 
 Hood, T., Death of, 318; 
 
 quoted, 67, 19 1 
 Horner, F., quoted, 56 
 Hughes, T., quoted, 13 
 Hugo, Victor, quoted, 144, 320 
 Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, 25 sq. 
 Hullah, J., quoted, 24 
 Hume, D., quoted, 58 
 Hunt, Leigh, quoted, 32, 42, 94, 
 
 103, 136, 159, 230, 246, 
 
 255, 263 
 
 I. 
 
 Imitative music, 216 sq. 
 
 Instrumental music, 119 sq. 
 
 Instruments of music, Jewish, 
 116^. 
 
 Irving, Washington, quoted, 11, 
 36, 61, 218, 261, 294 
 
 Italian and German music com- 
 pared, 196 jy., 204^. 
 
 Jahn, quoted, 25, 116 
 James I. of Scotland, 109 
 James III., n 1 
 Jannsen, quoted, 24 
 Jean Paul, 264 sq. 
 Jerrold, D., quoted, 280 
 Joachim, Joseph, no, 198 
 Johnson, Dr., 143, 273 
 
328 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Joinville, quoted, 317 
 
 Jones of Nayland, on dancing, 
 
 104 
 Jonson, B., quoted, 70, 76, 189 
 Jubal, 17, 25, 29 
 
 Keats, quoted, 137, 263, 304 
 Keble, quoted, 13, 246, 270 
 Kelly, Michael, 63 
 Kiesewetter, quoted, 21 
 Knowles, J. S., quoted, 61 
 Kreutzer sonata, The, 175 
 
 Lablache, Death of, 309 
 Lamartine, quoted, 258 
 Lamb, C, quoted, 142, 198 
 Landor, W. S., quoted, 130, 
 
 231, 247, 279, 306 
 Laprade, V., 239 
 Lecky, W. H., quoted, 80 
 Lenz, quoted, 205 
 Leslie, C. R., 160 
 Lewes, G. H., quoted, 121, 196 
 Lieder ohne Worte, 200, 213 
 Lizard, 176 
 
 Lochaber no more, 290, 295 
 Lock, M., 229 
 Locke, John, quoted, 227 
 Longfellow, quoted, 68,126,134, 
 
 271 
 Lowell, J. R., quoted, 172 
 Lucan, 317 
 Lulli, 229 
 
 Luther, 75, 153, 182 
 Lytton, Lord, quoted, 34, 107, 
 
 186, 306 
 Lytton, Hon. R., quoted, 306 
 
 M. 
 Macaulay, Lord, quoted, 3, iSS 
 Mace, Thos., quoted, 11, 
 Mackenzie, H., quoted, 35, 55 
 Malherbe, 317 
 Marcello, 219 
 Martin, Theodore, quoted, 129 
 
 Mather, Cotton, 28 
 Maurice, F. D., quoted, 194 
 Meetz, 62 
 
 Melvill, Henry, 1 sq. 
 
 Mendelssohn, F.B., 76, 146, 175, 
 199, 200, 219, 243, 272, 
 274, 287, 2S8, 300 
 
 Merivale, H., quoted, 97 
 
 Merry, Is any? 253 
 
 Meyerbeer, 65, 237, 244 
 
 Millevoye, quoted, 321 
 
 Milman, Dean, quoted, 72 
 
 Milton, quoted, 24, 28, 79, 91, 
 133, 13S, 239 
 
 Mimetic music, 209 sq. 
 
 Moir, D. M., quoted, 281, 293 
 
 Moliere, quoted, 162 
 
 Montaigne, quoted, 146 
 
 Moore, T., 84, 234, 259, 260, 
 283, 295^., 311 
 
 Motley, J. L., quoted, 32 
 
 Mouse and music, 174 sq. 
 
 Mozart, 20, 63, 125, 135, 307 
 
 Music and Morals, 236 
 
 Musical box, 301 
 
 Musical monarchs, 86 sq. 
 
 Musicians, Strictures on charac- 
 ter of, 247 
 
 N. 
 
 Nero, 107 
 
 Nerval, G. de, quoted, 57 
 
 Newbigging on church music, 12 
 
 Niebuhr, 56 
 
 Night, Songs in the, 298 
 
 Nightingale, 172 
 
 Nohl, L., quoted, 119 
 
 O. 
 
 Odium musicum, 248 
 
 O'Keefe, 79 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., quoted, 5, 235, 
 
 282 
 Organ, Church, 25 sq. ; street-, 
 
 grinding, 41 sq., 71 
 Orleans, Duchesse d', Si ; 
 
 Madame Mere, 92 
 Orpheus, 174, 176 
 
INDEX. 
 
 329 
 
 Oublicheff, quoted, 205 
 Ovation, 18 
 
 Overbury, Sir T., quoted, 30, 
 3i> i§9 
 
 P. 
 
 Faganini, 211 
 
 Pan's pipe, 23 
 
 Patmore, C., quoted, 255 
 
 Peacock, T. L., quoted, 19, 23, 
 
 62 
 Pellisson in prison, 1 76 
 Pepys, S., quoted, 31, 58, 156^. 
 Perthes, F., 290 
 Phelps, E. S., quoted, 321 
 Pied piper, 174 
 Pilgrimage, Songs of, 267 
 Planche, G., quoted, 208, 210 
 Plutarch, quoted, 106, 134, 138, 
 
 169, 251 
 Polko, Mine., quoted, 175 
 Pope, quoted, 166, 167, 307 
 Power of sound, 262 
 Prior, quoted, 93, 259 
 Prison songs by night, 302 
 Procter, 13. W., quoted, 163, 
 
 275 
 
 Q. 
 
 Quarterly Review, quoted, 20, 
 
 52,63 
 Quiet street, 65 
 Quillinan, E., quoted, 93 
 Quincey, Thos. de, quoted, 53 
 
 sq., 89 sq., 192, I95i 216, 
 
 283, 299 
 Quixote, Don, 168 
 
 R. 
 
 Racine, quoted, 1 31 
 Rameau, 204 
 
 Ramsay, Dean, quoted, 88 
 Ranz des Vaches, 290 . 
 Reade, C., quoted, 14, 78, '92, 
 
 184, 273, 296 
 Religion and Art, 124 
 Remusat, Mme. de, quoted, 179 
 
 Rene, King, 109 sq., 152 
 Requiem, 307 
 Richard III., in 
 Richter, J. P. F. , 264 sq. 
 Rob Roy, Death of, 322 
 Rogers, S., 42, 57 
 Roscoe, \V. C, quoted, 93 
 Rossini, 256 
 Rousseau, J. J., quoted, 84, 
 
 283 
 Rowe, N., quoted, 51 
 
 Sadness and music, 256 sq. 
 Safety-valve, Music a, 83 
 Sainte-Beuve, quoted, 108, 128, 
 
 178, 262 
 Sala, G. A., quoted, 46, 62, 66 
 Sand, G., quoted, 60 
 Saturday Review, quoted, 12, 
 
 47, 59, 65, 114, 205, 214, 
 
 251 
 Saul's malady, 72, 191 
 Savage, M. W., quoted, 58 
 Schimmelpenninck, M. A., 
 
 quoted, 180, 291 
 Schreckensnote, 205 
 Schubert, 197, 264 sq. 
 Scientific music, 60 sq. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, quoted, -51, 57, 
 
 63, 77, 100, 105, 109 sq., 
 
 139, 152,159, 160, 183, 189, 
 
 271,281,319 
 Shakspeare, quoted, 7, 18, 45, 
 
 69, 81, 130, 140^., 151, 
 
 162, 173, 177, 246, 253, 
 
 255, 303, 304, 307 
 Sharpe, Granville, 80 
 Shell, Sea-, murmur, 279 sq. 
 Shenstone, quoted, 126 
 Sheridan, 156 ; quoted, 61, 69 
 Sidney, Sir P., 84 
 Smart, Chr., quoted, 73 
 Smith, Adam, quoted, 87 
 Smith, Alex., quoted, 37, 294- 
 Smith, Sydney, quoted, 223 
 Smollett, quoted, 69 
 Snake-charming, 176^. 
 
33o 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Solace, Music a, 81 sq. 
 
 Sonata, 203 
 
 Songs, 56 sq. ; of exile, 277 ; 
 of pilgrimage, 267 ; in the 
 night, 298 ; of other years, 
 
 295 
 Sophocles, quoted, 272 
 Southey, quoted, 7, 30, 75, 113, 
 
 144, 313 
 Spencer, Herbert, quoted, 17, 
 
 42, 94, 150, 230 
 Sphere-music, 6 sq. 
 Spicier and music, 175, 176 
 Spohr, 197, 262 
 Squalling-boxes in church, 12 
 Stael, Mme. de, quoted, 237, 
 
 254, 297, 300 
 Sternhold and Hopkins, IO 
 Stowe, Mrs., quoted, 274, 321 
 Street-music, 66 sq. 
 Swan song, 303 sq. 
 Swift, quoted, 96, 106, 156, 175, 
 
 176 
 Swinburne, A. G., quoted, 237 
 Swiss, 290 
 Symphonies, 119 sq., 201, 208^. 
 
 Taine, H., quoted, 231, 239 
 Talking against music, 228 sq. 
 Taylor, Sir H., quoted, 50 
 Tears at music, 284 sq. 
 Temple music, 29 sq., 113 sq. 
 Temple, Sir W., 188 
 Tennyson, quoted, 36, 174, 211, 
 
 213, 249, 305, 322 
 Thackeray, W. M., quoted, 43, 
 
 156, 250, 289, 295 
 Theodoric, 252 
 Thibault, 106 
 Thomson, J., quoted, 22, 1 77, 
 
 246, 250. 301 
 Tocqueville, Ue, quoted, 26 1 
 Trench, Mrs. Rd., quoted, 232 
 Tramp, The last, 132 sq., 141 
 Trumpet, 129 sq., 164 
 
 Tune, Catching, 65 ; A mere, 54 
 
 160 ; Hymn, 126 sq. 
 Tytler, P. F., quoted, II, 229 
 Tytler, S. A., quoted, 294 
 Tytler, W., quoted, 153 
 
 U. 
 
 Uncertain sound, 224 
 
 V. 
 
 Vanbrugh, Sir J., quoted, 232 
 
 Vergniaud, 316 
 
 Vinegar upon nitre, As, 50 
 
 Violin, 211 
 
 Virgil, quoted, 271 
 
 Vocal and instrumental, 1 18 
 
 W. 
 
 Waits, 299 sq. 
 
 Waller, quoted, 9, 1S7, 283 
 
 Wardlaw, Dr., quoted, 4 
 
 War Horse, 164, 175 
 
 Watts's Songs, 318 
 
 Weber, 286 
 
 Weeping at music, 284 sq. 
 
 Wesley, 313, 318 
 
 Whately, Miss, quoted, 155 
 
 Wilson, John, quoted, 166, 178 
 
 Windham, W, quoted, 42 
 
 Winter, De, 1S0 
 
 Wolcot, quoted, 23, 156, 172, 
 
 173 
 Wordless music, 198, 237 
 Words, Songs without, 200 
 Wordsworth, quoted, 36, 39, 
 
 40, 115, 123, 141, 159, 171, 
 
 174, 179, 1S8, 262,279, 2S1, 
 
 291. 304 
 Work, Singing at, 273 
 Wortley, LadyM. W. , quoted, 156 
 
 Y. 
 
 Yates, E., quoted, 45 
 Yonge, C. M., quoted. 258 
 Young, quoted, 133, 249. 
 
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