initiated and reverent, it can act from the mere title, or more
properly, the binding. Of this I had an instance quite lately in the
library of an old Jacobite house on the North Tyne. This library
contained, besides its properly embodied books, a small collection
existing, so to speak, only in the spirit, or at least in effigy; a
door, to wit, being covered with real book-backs, or, more properly,
backs of real books of which the inside was missing. A quaint,
delightful collection! "Female traits," two volumes; four volumes (what
dinners and breakfasts, as well as suppers, of horrors!) of Webster's
"Vittoria Corombona," etc., the "Siege of Mons," "Ancient Mysteries,"
"The Epigrams of Martial," "A Journey through Italy," and Crébillon's
novels. Contemplating these pseudo shelves of pageless tomes, I felt
acutely how true it is that a book (for the truly lettered) can do its
work without being read. I lingeringly relished (why did not Johnson
give us a verb to _saporate_?) this mixed literature's flavour,
humorous, romantic, and pedantic, beautifully welded. And I recognized
that those gutted-away insides were quite superfluous: they had yielded
their essence and their virtue.
HEARING MUSIC
"Heard melodies," said Keats, "are sweet; but those unheard are
sweeter." The remark is not encouraging to performers, yet, saving their
displeasure, there is some truth in it.
We give too much importance, nowadays, being busy and idle and
mercantile (compatible qualities, alas!) to the material presence of
everything, its power of filling time or space, and particularly of
becoming an item of our budget; forgetful that of the very best things
the material presence is worthless save as first step to a spiritual
existence within our soul. This is particularly the case with music.
There is nothing in the realm of sound at all corresponding to the
actual photographing of a visible object on the retina; our auditive
apparatus, whatever its mysteries, gives no sign of being in any way of
the nature of a phonograph. Moreover, one element of music is certainly
due to the sense of locomotion, the _rhythm_; so that _sound_, to become
music, requires the attention of something more than the mere ear. Nay,
it would seem, despite the contrary assertion of the learned _Stumpf_,
that the greater number of writers on the vexed science of sound incline
to believe that the hearing of music is always attended with movements,
however imperceptible, in the throat, which, being true, would prove
that, in a fashion, we _perform_ the melodies which we think we only
_hear_; living echoes, nerves vibrating beneath the composer's touch as
literally as does the string of the fiddle, or its wooden fibres. A very
delicate instrument this, called the _Hearer_, and, as we all know, more
liable to being out of tune, to refusing to act altogether, than any
instrument (fortunately for performers) hitherto made by the hand of
man. Thus, in a way, one might paraphrase the answer which Mme.
Gabbrielli is said to have made to the Empress Catherine, "Your
Majesty's policemen can make me _scream_, not _sing_!" and say to some
queen of piano keys or emperor of _ut de poitrine_ that there is no
violence or blandishment which can secure the _inner ear_, however much
the outer ear may be solicited or bullied.
'Tis in this sense, methinks, that we should understand the saying of
Keats--to wit, that in a great many cases the happiest conjunction of
music and the soul occurs during what the profane call silence; the very
fact of music haunting our mind, while every other sort of sound may be
battering our ear, showing our highest receptivity. And, as a fact, we
do not know that real musicians, _real_ Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha and
Abt Voglers, not written ones, require organs neither of glass nor of
metal; but build their palaces of sound on a plain deal table with a
paper covered with little lines and dots before them? And was not
Beethoven, in what some folk consider his mightiest era, as deaf as a
post?
I do not advocate deafness. Nay, privately, being quite incapable of
deciphering a score, I confess that there is something dry and dreary in
absolutely soundless music--music which from the silent composer passes
to the silent performer, who is at the same time a silent listener,
without the neighbours being even one bit the wiser? Besides, were this
gift universal, it would deprive us of that delightful personality the
mere performer, whose high-strung nervousness, or opulent joviality, is,
after all, a pleasant item in art, a humorous dramatic interlude, in the
excessive spirituality of music.
I am not, therefore, in favour of absolute silence in the art of sounds.
I am only asking people to remember that sound waves and the auditive
apparatus put in connection, even if the connection costs a guinea, is
not enough to secure the real _hearing_ of music; or, if this formula
appear too vulgar, asking them to repeat to themselves those lines of
Keats. I feel sure that so doing would save much of that dreadful
bitterness and dryness of soul, a state of conscious non-receptivity
corresponding in musical experience with what ascetic writers call
"spiritual aridity"--which must occasionally depress even the most
fortunate of listeners. For, look in thy conscience, O friendly
fellow-concert-goer, and say truly, hast thou not, many times and oft,
sat to no purpose upon narrow seats, blinded by gas, with no outlook
save alien backs and bonnets, while divinest music flowed all around,
yet somehow wetted not thy thirsty and irritated soul?
The recognition of this fact would not only diminish such painful
moments (or rather, alas! _hours_), but would teach us to endure them
cheerfully as the preparation for future enjoyment, the garnering for
private and silent enjoyment. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard," etc., would act like Joseph's interpretation of the fat and
lean kine of Pharaoh; we should consider concerts and musical festivals
as fatiguing, even exhausting, employments, the strain of which was
rendered pleasant by the anticipation of much ease and delight to come.
Connected with this question is that of amateur performance. The amateur
seems nowadays to waste infinite time in vying with the professional
person instead of becoming acquainted, so to speak, with the composer.
It is astonishing how very little music the best amateurs are acquainted
with, because they must needs perform everything they know. This, in
most cases, is sheer waste, for, in the way of performers, the present
needs of mankind (as Auguste Comte remarked about philosophers) can be
amply met by twenty thousand professionals. And many families would,
from a spirit of moderation, forego the possession of an unpaid
professional in the shape of a daughter or an aunt. One of the chief
uses, indeed, of the professional performers should be to suppress
amateurs by furnishing a standard of performance which lovers of music
would silently apply to the music which formed the daily delight of
their inner ear.
For, if we care veraciously for music, we think of it, _or think it_, as
it ought to be performed, not as we should ourselves perform it. Nay,
more, I feel convinced that truly musical persons, such as can really
understand a master's thoughts, are not distressed by the shortcomings
of their own performance, the notes they play or sing merely serving to
suggest those which they hear.
This transcendental doctrine (fraught, I confess, like all transcendent
truths, with gravest practical dangers) was matured in my mind by
friendship with one of the most singular of musicians. This person
(since deceased, and by profession a clerk) suffered from nervousness
so excessive that, despite a fair knowledge of music, the fact of
putting his hands upon the keys produced a maddening sort of stammer,
let alone a notable tendency to strike wrong notes and miss his octaves;
peculiarities of which he was so morbidly conscious that it was only an
accident which revealed to me, after years of acquaintance, that he ever
played the piano at all. Yet I know as a fact that this poor blundering
player, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, and
actually _closed the lid of his instrument_ when the maid came in with
the tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of music
during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid
concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special _cultus_, would surely have
felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my
friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni."
The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of
the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the
piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance it
in glory with the most glorious ghosts of glorious ladies--pshaw! not
with anything so trifling! Dance it _with the notes themselves_, would
sway with them, bow to them, rise to them, live with them, become in
fact part and parcel of the music itself....
So, to return whence I began, it is no use imagining that we necessarily
hear music by going to concerts and festivals and operas, exposing our
bodily ear to showers and floods of sound, unless we happen to be in the
right humour, unless we dispose, at the moment, of that rare and
capricious thing--the _inner ear_.
RECEIVING LETTERS
I think I shall not treat of writing them. That is a different matter,
with pains and pleasures of its own, which do not correspond (the word
fits nicely to this subject) with those of letters received. For 'tis a
metaphysical mistake, or myth of language, like those victoriously
exposed by the ingenious _M. Tarde_, to regard the reading of a letter
as the symmetrical opposite (the right glove matching the left, or
_inside of an outside_) of the writing thereof. Save in the case of
lovers or moonstruck persons, like those in Emerson's essay on
"Friendship," the reading of a letter is necessarily less potent, and,
as the French say, _intimate_, in emotion, than the writing of it.
Indeed, we catch ourselves repeatedly thrusting into our pocket for
perusal at greater leisure those very letters which poured out like
burning lava from their writers, or were conned over lovingly,
lingeringly altered and rewritten; and we wonder sometimes at our lack
of sympathy and wonder also (with cynicism or blushes) whether our
letters also, say that one of Tuesday----But no; _our_ letters are not
egoistical....
The thought is not one to be dwelt on in an essay, which is nothing if
it is not pleasing. So I proceed to note also that pleasure at the
contents has nothing to do with the little excitement of the arrival
of the post-bag, or of watching the clerk's slow evolutions at a
_poste restante_ window. That satisfaction is due to the mere moment's
hope for novelty, the flash past of the outer world, and the
comfortable sense of having a following, friends, relatives, clients;
and it is in proportion to the dulness of our surroundings. Great
statesmen or fortunate lovers, methinks, must turn away from aunts'
and cousins' epistles, and from the impression of so and so up the
Nile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that only
the monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of those
endless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handed
down to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of the
beautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince of
coffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as is
recorded by Scott) the mail occasionally arrived at Edinburgh carrying
only one single letter, has given such letters a reputation for
delightfulness utterly disconnected with any intrinsic merit, but
which we sycophantishly accept after a hundred or two hundred years,
handing it on with hypocritical phrases about "quaintness," and "vivid
picture of the past," and similar nonsense. But the Wizard Past casts
wonderful spells. And then there is the tenderness and piety due to
those poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, beauty,
wit, or genius; and now left shivering, poor, thin, transparent ghosts
in those faded, thrice-crossed paper rags! I feel rebuked for my
inhuman irreverence. Out upon it! I will speak only pious words about
the letters of dead folk.
But, to make up for such good feeling, let me say what I think about the
letters of persons now living, in good health, my contemporaries and
very liable to outlive me. For if I am to praise the letters which my
soul loves, I must be plain also about those which my soul abhors.
And to begin with the worst. The letter we all hate most, I feel quite
sure, is the nice letter of a person whom we think horrid. Some beings
have the disquieting peculiarity, which crowns their other bad
qualities, of being able to write more pleasingly than they speak, look,
or (we suppose) act; revealing, pen in hand, human characteristics,
sometimes alas! human charms, high principle, pathetic sentiment, poetic
insight, sensitiveness to nature, things we are bound to love, but
particularly do not wish to love in _them_. This villainous faculty,
which puts us in a rage and forces us to be amiable, is almost enough to
make us like, or at all events condone, its contrary in our own dear
friends. I mean that marvellous transformation to which so many of those
we love are subject; creatures, supple, subtle and sympathetic in the
flesh, in speech and glance and deed, becoming stiff, utterly impervious
and heartless once they set to writing; lovely Melusinas turning, not
into snakes, but into some creature like a dried cod. This is much
worse with persons of our nation than with our foreign friends, owing to
that fine contempt for composition, grammar, and punctuation which marks
the well-bred Briton, and especially the well-bred Briton's wife and
daughter. As a result, there is a positive satisfaction, a sense of
voluminous well-being, derived from a letter which is merely explicit,
consecutive, and garnished with occasional stops. This question of
punctuation is a serious one. Speaking personally, I find I cannot enjoy
the ineffable sense of resting in the affection and wisdom of my friend,
if I am jerked breathless from noun to noun and from verb to verb, or
set hunting desperately after predicates. Worse even is the lack of
explicitness. The peace and trustfulness, the respite given by
friendship from what Whitman calls "the terrible doubt of appearances"
are incompatible with brief and casual utterance, ragbags of items,
where you have to elucidate, weigh, and use your judgment whether more
(or less) is meant than meets the eye; and after whose perusal you are
left for hours, sometimes days, patching together suggestions and
wondering what they suggest. Some persons' letters seem almost framed
to afford a series of _alibis_ for their personality; not in this thing,
oh no! not concerned in such a matter by any means; always elsewhere,
never to be clutched.
Yet there are bitterer things in letters from friends than even these,
which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feel
cheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent odd
scraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at news
culled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric and
meteorological intelligence. But stay! There is a case when what seems
to come under this heading is really intensely personal, and, therefore,
most welcome to the letter receiver. I mean whenever, as happens with
some persons, such talk about the weather reveals the real writing soul
in its most intimate aspect; wrestling with hated fogs, or prone in the
dampish heat, fretted by winds or jubilant in dry, sunny air. And now I
find that with this item of weather reports, I am emerging from the
region of letters I abhor into the region of letters which I love, or
which I lovingly grieve over for some small minor cruelty.
For I am grieved--nay, something more--by that extraordinary (and I
hope exclusively feminine) fact an absence of superscripture. My soul
claims some kind of vocative. I would accept a German note of
exclamation; I would content myself with an Italian abbreviation, a
Preg^mo, or Chiar^mo; I could be happy with a solemn and discreet
French "Madame et chère amie," or (as may happen) "Monsieur et cher
Maître," like the bow with tight-joined heels and _platbord_ hat
pressed on to waistcoat, preluding delightful conversation. But not to
be quite sure how one is thought of! Whether as _dear_, or _my dear_,
or Tom, Dick, or Harry, or soldier, or sailor, or candlestick maker!
Nay, at the first glance, not quite to know whether one is the
destined reader, or whether even there is a destined reader at all; to
be offered an entry out of a pocket-book, a page out of a diary, a
selection of _Pensées_, were they Pascal's; a soliloquy, were it
Hamlet's: surely lack of sympathy can go no further, nor incapacity of
effort be more flagrant than with such writers, usually the very ones
the reader most clings to, who put off, as it seems, until directing
the envelope, the question of whom they are writing to.
Yet the annoyance they give one is almost compensated when, once in a
blue moon, in such a superscription-less epistle, one lights upon a
sentence very exclusively directed to one's self; when suddenly out of
the vague _tenebrae_ of such a letter, there comes, retreating as
suddenly, a glance, a grasp, a clasp. It seems quite probable that young
Endymion, in his noted love passages with the moon, may have had
occasionally supreme felicity of this kind, in a relation otherwise of
painfully impersonal and public nature; when, to wit, the goddess, after
shining night after night over the seas and plains and hills,
occasionally shot from behind a cloud one little gleam, one arrow of
light, straight on to Latmos.
But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is at
an end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscript
to such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors,
that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often.
NEW FRIENDS AND OLD
There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the rich
cordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it.
Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it,
methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the other
friendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though we
hide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in its
turn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions,
including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything,
improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on
account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it
less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the
full use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old
one. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward"
are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing and
undressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags.
Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They are
among the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get a
chance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actually renew and add to
us, more even than change of climate and season. We are (luckily for
every one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, adds
a new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and our
feeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel a
little as that person does. And when, instead of _liking_ (which is the
verb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship as
distinguished from real friendship), it is a case of _loving_ (in the
sense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, very
often, an animal), there is something more important and excellent even
than this. For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a whole
side of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature's
ways; nay, more, the fact that what we call _loving_ is in most cases a
complete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by our
fancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings.
A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's
nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant
novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our
surroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look--still
familiar but delightfully strange--as we drive along the valleys or
scramble in the hills with the new friend! there is a distant peak one
never noticed, or a scented herb which has always grown upon those
rocks, but might as well never have done so, but for the other pair of
eyes which drew ours to it, or the other hand which crushing made us
know its fragrance. Pages of books, seemingly stale, revive into fresh
meaning; new music is almost certain to be learned; and a harmony, a
rational sequence, something very akin to music, perceived in what had
been hitherto but a portion of life's noise and confusion. The changes
of style which we note in the case of great geniuses--Goethe and
Schiller, for instance, or Ruskin after his meeting with Carlyle--are
often brought about, or prepared, by the accident of a new friendship;
and, who knows? half of the disinterested progress of the world's
thought and feeling might prove, under the moral microscope, to be but a
moving web of invisible friendships, forgotten, but once upon a time
new, and so vivid!
The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it
is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due
in some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than in
new ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce a
definite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as this
track deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, with
little possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunken
Devonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, so
to speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements and
reconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known very
long, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, reciting
the same formulæ of thought and feeling, imitating the _ego_ of former
years in its relations with a _thou_ quite equally obsolete; the real
personality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy!
so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in the
monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of
thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt.... Meanwhile
our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond
irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who
knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the
benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may
ourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated and
more efficacious reality.
The retribution sometimes comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselves
neglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; _we_,
who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! a
newness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing the
newness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon.
But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safe
traditions and lazy habits, are ever tending to become the intercourse
of friendly ghosts.