unrivalled resort. If some of my statements above are disbelieved, or in
any way questioned, I can only refer to my original authority,
Autolycus, who said long ago, in answer to a similar charge: ‘Why should
I carry lies abroad?’
ON A MOUTH-ORGAN
FOR the past half hour, someone, probably a small boy, has been playing
a mouth-organ underneath my window. I know of no person under this roof
peculiarly susceptible to the sound of a mouth-organ, so that I cannot
think that the unknown musician is serenading. He is probably a small
boy who is simply hanging about, after the fashion of his mysterious
tribe, and whiling away the time with a little music. Why he should
choose a raw day like this on which to do nothing but slide his lips
over the cold metal of a mouth-organ must remain a mystery to me; but I
have long realised that unfathomable motives may be hidden away behind
the puckered face and uncouth gestures of small boyhood.
I have not been able to recognise any of the tunes, or the snatches of
tunes, which have come floating up to my window. Possibly they are all
unknown to me. But I think it is more likely that they are old
acquaintances, coming in such a questionable shape that my ear cannot
find any familiar cadence; they have been transmuted by the mouth-organ
into something rich and strange; for your mouth-organ is one of the
great alchemists among musical instruments and leaves no tune as it
finds it.
It has been pointed out that whatever material Dickens used, however
rich and varied it might be, it was always mysteriously transformed into
the Dickens substance, lengths of which he cut off and called Novels. It
seems to me that the mouth-organ, though a mechanical agent, has
something of this strange power of transformation; whatever is played
upon it seems to come out all of a piece; whatever might be the original
character of the tunes, gay, fantastical, meditative, stirring, as their
sounds are filtered through the little square holes of the instrument,
their character changes, and they all become more or less alike. ‘Rule,
Britannia!’ ‘Annie Laurie,’ and the latest ditty of the music-halls
somehow or other lose their individuality and flow into one endless
lament, one lugubrious strain, that might very well go on for ever.
For this reason, the sound of a mouth-organ has always succeeded in
depressing me. It must have been invented by an incorrigible pessimist,
who sought to create a musical instrument that would give to every tune,
no matter how lively, some touch of his own hopeless view of life; and
probably the only time that he laughed was when he realised that he
could leave this thing as a legacy to the world. I have never played a
mouth-organ, because I know that my own native optimism would not be
strong enough to resist the baneful influence of the music it makes. To
hear it now and again is more than enough for me.
To one who is filled with the joy of life--a small boy, for
example--such hopeless strains may prove only invigorating, may serve as
a wholesome check upon his ebullient spirits, like the skeleton at the
Egyptian feasts. But to most of us weaker brethren, frail in spirit,
music that is unillumined by even a glimmer of hope is intolerable.
For the past half hour, I have been trying to concentrate all my
attention upon some fairly cheerful matter, and I have failed. It has
been impossible to keep out the sound of this mouth-organ. Its formless,
unknown, unending tune, only fit for bewailing a ruined world, has
gradually invaded my room, penetrated through the ear into my brain, and
coloured or discoloured all the thoughts there. There is in it no trace
of that noble sadness which great music, like great poetry, so often
brings with it; the mouth-organ knows nothing of ‘divine despair.’ It
seems to whimper before ‘the heavy and the weary weight of all this
unintelligible world.’
‘Oh de-ar!’ I seem to hear it crying, ‘No hope for yo-ou and yo-ours;
Me-eser-able world! Oh de-ear!’ It has brought with it a fog of
depression; my spirits have been sinking lower and lower; and under the
influence of this evil mangler of good, heartening tunes I have begun to
think that life is not worth living.
Most music worthy of the name has such beauty that it will either raise
us to a kind of ecstasy or give us a feeling of vague sadness, which
some delicate persons prefer to wild joy. Sir Thomas Browne, you
remember, has something to say on this point, in a passage that can
never become hackneyed no matter how many times it is quoted: ‘Whosoever
is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much
distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church
music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius,
I do embrace it; for even that vulgar and tavern-music, which makes one
man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a
profound contemplation of the first composer.’
But these mouth-organ strains will make a man neither mad nor merry, nor
yet strike in him a deep fit of devotion; but if his ear is like mine,
they will make him sink into depression and dye his world a ghastly
blue.
It is curious that certain other popular musical instruments seem to
have the same characteristics as the mouth-organ. The concertina and the
accordion, good friends of the sailor, the lonely Colonist, and rough,
kindly fellows the world over, seem to me to possess the same power of
transforming all the tunes played upon them into one long wail. I have
read about their ‘lively strains,’ but I have never heard them. The
sound of a concertina a quarter of a mile away is enough to shake my
optimism. An average accordion could turn the Sword Theme from
‘Siegfried’ into a plea for suicide. A flageolet or a tin-whistle has
not such a shattering effect; nevertheless, both of them can only give a
tune a certain subdued air, which is certainly preferable to the
depressing alchemy of the other instruments, but which certainly does
not make for liveliness.
The bagpipe, which has been so long the companion of the lonely folk of
northern moors and glens, can produce at times a certain rousing martial
strain, but, even then, a wailing air creeps into the music like a
Scotch mist. Its very reels and strathspeys, which ought to be jolly
enough, only sound to me like elaborate complaints against life; their
transitory snatches of gaiety are obviously forced. At all other times,
the bagpipe is frankly pessimistic, and laments its very existence.
There is probably some technical reason why these instruments produce
such doleful tones. Perhaps our sophisticated ears rebel against their
peculiar harmonies and discords. But it is certainly curious that
mouth-organs, concertinas, tin-whistles, and the rest, so beloved of
simple people, should be intolerable to so many of us. Is it that we
have no miseries to express in sound? Or is it that our optimism is so
brittle that we dare not submit it to the onslaught of this strange
music? I do not know.
All that I do know is that at the present moment I am sitting in my
armchair before a bright fire, depressed beyond belief by the sound
that floats through my window; while outside, in the cold, there stands
a small boy, holding a mouth-organ in his numbed hands and bravely
sliding his lips over the cold metallic edges of the thing; and by this
time he is probably as gay as I am miserable.
AN APOLOGY FOR BAD PIANISTS
Ignoring those musical labourers who are paid so much per hour, at
cinemas and dance-halls, to make some sort of rhythmical sound, all
pianists, I think, may be divided into four classes. There are, first,
the great soloists, the masters, Paderewski, Pachmann, and the rest, who
would seem to have conquered all difficulties. With them the piano, a
dead thing of wires and hammers, becomes a delicately responsive
organism; its hammers are extra muscles, and its strings added nerves,
running and leaping to obey every fleeting impulse; their playing is as
saturated with personality as their gait or speech. Not so with the
members of the second class, which is, to my mind, a dubious fraternity.
They may be called the serious amateurs. Very often they take expensive
lessons from some professor, who undertakes to ‘finish them off.’ But
they never are finished off. The sign and mark of the serious amateur
is that he practises assiduously some piece of music, maybe a Chopin
study or a Brahms sonata, until he has it by heart; after which he
assembles a number of friends (or, more often, new acquaintances),
squashes their attempts at conversation, and, amid a tense silence,
begins to play--or, as he would say, ‘interpret’--his laboured solo.
The fourth class consists of odd strummers, vampers and thumpers;
young ladies who play waltzes and old ladies who play hymns;
cigarette-in-mouth youths with a bang-and-rattle style of performance;
all inexorable, tormenting noise-makers, from those who persist in
riveting--rather than playing--Rachmaninoff’s C sharp minor Prelude to
those who buy Sunday newspapers in order that they may pick out with one
finger the tune of a comic song. All such are the enemies of peace and
harmony, and as they cannot be ignored in any other place, here they can
be quickly dismissed with all the more pleasure.
It remains now to say something of the third class of pianists, which,
if it were reduced to such straits, could count me among its members. To
write at some length of one’s own class after perfunctorily dismissing
others may seem to savour of egotism, but the truth is, we--I speak
fraternally--have been so much maligned and misunderstood up to now, we
have endured so many taunts in silence, that we have a right to be heard
before we are finally and irrevocably condemned.
It is only on the score of technique, the mere rule of thumb business,
that we stand below the serious amateurs; we belong to a higher order of
beings and have grander souls; in spirit we come nearer to the great
masters. The motives of the serious amateur are not above suspicion. In
his assiduous practice, his limited repertoire, his studied semi-public
style of performance, is there not a suggestion of vanity? Is his
conscious parade of skill, taken along with his fear of unknown works,
the mark of a selfless devotion to music, and music alone? I doubt it.
But our motives are certainly above suspicion. Music has no servants
more disinterested, for not only do we gather no garlands in her
service, but daily, for her sake, we risk making fools of ourselves,
than which there can be no greater test of pure devotion. We, too, are
the desperate venturers among pianists; every time that we seat
ourselves at the keyboard we are leading a forlorn hope; and, whether we
fall by the way or chance to come through unscathed, the only reward we
can hope for is a kindly glance from the goddess of harmony.
It is hardly necessary to dwell on the fact that our execution is
faulty, that we are humanly liable to make mistakes, seeing that our
weaknesses have been for years the butt of musical pedants and small
souls. In the dim past we received some sort of instruction, perhaps a
few years’ lessons, but being bright children with wills of our own we
saw no use in labouring at scales and arpeggios, at the tepid
compositions of Czerny, when there were balls to throw, stones to kick,
and penny dreadfuls to be devoured. An unlocked door or an open
window--and we escaped from the wretched drudgery, thus showing early
that eager zest of life which still marks our clan.
Now, it is enthusiasm alone that carries us through. Our performance of
any ‘piece of average difficulty’ (as the publishers say) is nothing
short of a series of miracles. As we peer at the music and urge our
fingers to scurry over the keys, horrid gulfs yawn before us, great
rocks come crashing down, the thick undergrowth is full of pitfalls and
mantraps, but we are not to be deterred. Though we do not know what
notes are coming next, or what fingers we shall use, if the music says
_presto_, then _presto_ it must be; the spirit of the tune must be set
free, however its flesh may be lacerated. So we swing up the dizzy
arpeggios as a hunted mountaineer might leap from crag to crag; we come
down a run of demi-semi-quavers with the blind confidence of men trying
to shoot the rapids of Niagara. Only the stout-hearted and great of soul
can undertake these perilous but magnificent ventures.
Unlike the serious amateurs, we do not pick and choose among pieces
until we have found one to which we can give the cold glitter of an
impeccable rendering. We attend concerts (for, above all, we are the
concert-goers and dreamers of dreams, as O’Shaughnessy might have said)
and come reeling out, intoxicated with sound; for days we are haunted by
a lovely theme or an amazing climax, until we can bear it no longer; we
rush off to the music-shops to see if it is possible to capture this new
lovely thing and keep it for ever; more often than not we return home in
triumph, hardly giving ourselves time to flatten out the music before
plunging into the opening bars. Nothing that has been arranged for the
piano or that can be played in some sort of fashion on the instrument
comes amiss if it has once aroused our enthusiasm; symphonies, operas,
tone-poems, string-quartets are all welcome. Nay, we often prefer the
arrangements of orchestral things, for we do not think of the piano
merely as a solo instrument; to us it is the shining ivory and ebony
gateway to the land of music. As our fingers wander over the keys our
great dream-orchestras waken to life.
I believe that at the very end, when the depths of our folly and
ignorance are fully revealed, when all our false notes have been cast up
into one awful total by the recording angel of music, it will be found
that we, the bad pianists, have been misjudged among men, that we, too,
have loved and laboured for the divine art. When we file into Elysium,
forlorn, scared, a shabby little band, and come within sight of
Beethoven, whom we have murdered so many times, I believe that a smile
will break through the thunder-cloud of his face. ‘Ach! Come you in,
children,’ he will roar, ‘bad players, eh?... I have heard.... Very bad
players.... But there have been worse among you.... The spirit was in
you, and you have listened well.... Come in.... I have composed one
hundred and fifty more symphonies and sonatas, and you shall hear them
all.’
A FATHER’S TRAGEDY
I have lately received a visit from an old acquaintance who floated in
my direction on such a sea of trouble that I have been in low spirits
ever since. Moreover, as it was a family affair, I could not interfere
in any way, and the knowledge of my own impotence has only increased my
depression. My only hope of keeping my thoughts from what is, after all,
no business of mine lies in passing on the tale--if such a mournful
recital of family dissensions can be called a tale--and thus making
others share the burden.
I cannot remember, for the moment, when and where I first met old Tom
Cribcrack, my late visitor, but we have been acquainted for a good many
years. He must be past fifty now (how the time goes on!), but being a
fine upstanding fellow, closely shaved and with his bristly hair always
cropped short, he looks considerably younger. His father, a dear old
man--I met him once--was in the coining business in its best days, but
such a sedentary occupation did not suit young Cribcrack, and he was
soon apprenticed to a successful burglar. In his own way, Tom was an
enthusiastic, clever lad, and it was not long before he became an expert
craftsman himself. He decided to devote his life to the profession, and
though, like other men, he has had his bad times, he has been on the
whole a very successful practitioner, respected by all workers in the
same field. He has had a good connection, mostly among the upper
middle-class, and has always preferred a rather slow but steady run of
business to a few brilliant coups; he has kept away from the showy work,
and has never had the slightest desire for publicity, which is probably
the reason why his name is not so well known to the general public as
that of many an inferior craftsman. ‘No fancy work for Tom Cribcrack,’
he has said more than once in my hearing. ‘Punctuality, neat
workmanship, despatch--that’s the motto for a man what wants to get on
in my line.’ In short, he was a good specimen of the modest self-made
Englishman, and is still, to this day, though now subdued in spirit by a
great disappointment, as you shall learn.
It was not until Cribcrack was thirty or so and had got on to his feet
that he did what most sensible men do sooner or later--he took a wife.
This was a Miss Judy Graggins, eldest daughter of ‘Basher’ Graggins, of
Cod’s Alley, a well-known character in his day. The result of this happy
union was a family of several daughters but only one son, greatly to the
disappointment of both parents. Looking back, as Cribcrack pointed out
the other day, one cannot help noticing how small things have often an
important bearing on the future; for whereas there had been no
difficulty about the girls’ names, when it came to naming the boy there
was for a time some difference between the doting parents. The father
wished to give the boy a plain, sturdy sort of name, Jem or Bill, such
as all the Cribcracks had borne; but, greatly to his surprise, his wife,
for no apparent reason, but from sheer feminine perversity, would have
none of these, and insisted on the child being called Ernest, a name
unknown to the Cribcrack family and one which the father himself
regarded with the greatest contempt. In the end, the mother’s whim
prevailed, and the boy was known henceforth as Ernest Cribcrack.
As might be expected, the advent of a son made a great difference to my
old acquaintance, who, like many other fathers, began to see a fresh
purpose in life. His enthusiasm for his professional work was unabated,
but his son came to share with it the first place in his thoughts, and
it was not long before his one aim was to bring together these two
all-absorbing, beloved things, his son and his work. Morning after
morning, after the nightly duties were at end, Cribcrack would sit
smoking by the fire, watching the sturdy infant at play and dreaming of
the time when he could teach the boy all he knew of the ancient craft,
and they could go out to work together. Then some day they would be
known as Cribcrack and Son to other members of the profession, and in
many a tavern some old hand would remark: ‘That was a fine piece of work
young Cribcrack pulled off the other night. Just like his father, he
is....’
For a time all went well. It was not long before Ernest, a sturdy little
boy, would hear of no other calling for his manhood but his father’s
profession. On his seventh or eighth birthday he was given the boy’s
burglary outfit, and he would play for hours on end with the little
jemmy and other implements, under the direction of his delighted parent.
At times the boy would seem to prefer piracy or even engine-driving,
but Tom knew that these were only the vagaries of childhood; the boy
would soon see the course before him. Like most fathers, however,
Cribcrack never opened out his heart to young Ernest, or Ern’, as he was
known to the family. He cherished his dream in secret, and waited for
the appointed time to speak, so that the lad might choose for himself.
But again, like most fathers, he never doubted that when the moment did
come the boy would choose the right course. As time went on, however,
Ernest became rather a puzzle. For example, contrary to his father’s
expectations, he did not show any particular aversion to ordinary
schooling; indeed, he seemed to become fond of it as he grew older. In
this, as in some other things, his father, a little uneasy, humoured
him, so that at the time when he should have begun his real
apprenticeship he was still spending his time with copy-books and
geography primers. After all, Tom reflected, the boy was a Cribcrack,
and would know where his duty lay.
But when the time came for the father to speak, the great blow fell.
Ernest steadfastly refused to follow his father’s profession, and swept
aside the career that Tom had marked out for him. Now vehement, now
sulky, sometimes tearful, at other times derisive--the boy would be
neither persuaded nor bullied into changing his mind. It was not that he
loathed the burglar’s ancient craft, but while the father had been
dreaming his dreams so, too, he had had his own vision--he would be a
clerk, and nothing else would do for him. On his way to school he had
seen clerks in their stiff white collars and shiny blue suits, crowding
out of their offices at the dinner hour; he had caught glimpses of them
as they bent over their ledgers beneath the shaded electric lights; his
boy’s heart had been thrilled, and he too had had his dream. It was
useless to argue that the Cribcracks had never descended to office
stools; that the glamour would soon fade and leave him face to face with
cold reality. Ernest had decided that he was meant to be a clerk, and a
clerk he would be, however difficult and dangerous the road he must
travel.
What more need be said. Cribcrack entreated, reproached, threatened, but
all in vain. His great dream was shattered, and, cursing the fateful
name of Ernest, he bundled the lad out of his house, and shortly
afterwards came, a broken man, to see me. Ernest, I believe, is now in
the office of the Origen Orange-Ale Company, and though he occasionally
pilfers a few stamps, there is little of the fine old Cribcrack spirit
about him.
ON GETTING OFF TO SLEEP
What a bundle of contradictions is a man! Surely, humour is the saving
grace of us, for without it we should die of vexation. With me, nothing
illustrates the contrariness of things better than the matter of sleep.
If, for example, my intention is to write an essay, and I have before me
ink and pens and several sheets of virgin paper, you may depend upon it
that before I have gone very far I feel an overpowering desire for
sleep, no matter what time of the day it is. I stare at the
reproachfully blank paper until sights and sounds become dim and
confused, and it is only by an effort of will that I can continue at
all. Even then, I proceed half-heartedly, in a kind of dream. But let me
be between the sheets at a late hour, and I can do anything but sleep.
Between chime and chime of the clock I can write essays by the score.
Fascinating subjects and noble ideas come pell-mell, each with its
appropriate imagery and expression. Nothing stands between me and
half-a-dozen imperishable masterpieces but pens, ink, and paper.
If it be true that our thoughts and mental images are perfectly tangible
things, like our books and pictures, to the inhabitants of the next
world, then I am making for myself a better reputation there than I am
in this place. Give me a restless hour or two in bed and I can solve, to
my own satisfaction, all the doubts of humanity. When I am in the humour
I can compose grand symphonies, and paint magnificent pictures. I am, at
once, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo; yet it gives me no
satisfaction; for the one thing I cannot do is to go to sleep.