six months after I was called to the Bar; and I have spoken in the old
Chancery courts that have now been pulled down and forgotten--the two
courts for the Vice Chancellors, that stood where there is now a lawn
just inside the gateway leading into Lincoln’s Inn from Chancery Lane,
and the court of the Master of the Rolls, on the other side of Chancery
Lane on the site of the north-west corner of the present Record Office.
I never spoke in the old Common Law courts at Westminster, but remember
trials there long before I was a barrister.
I once spent a whole day there listening to the Tichborne case, and
found it rather dull. But the Claimant was a sight: he was so corpulent
that they cut a large semicircle out of the table to enable him to sit
at it, and even then his waistcoat bulged out above the edge.
The trial in _Pickwick_ seemed more possible then than now. I once heard
Dickens read that chapter out. I am not certain of the date, but fully
thirty years after he had written it; and he was no longer the same man.
It fell rather flat. As a rule, authors should be read, not seen. I used
to read Browning with interest and respect, if not with pleasure, until
one afternoon I saw him running after an omnibus at the end of
Piccadilly; and I could not stand his loftier poetry after seeing that.
Many years ago, during a Salisbury administration, I was in a train on
the Great Northern, sitting with my back to the engine in one corner of
a carriage, and at Hatfield a bishop got in, and sat with his back to
the engine in the other corner. There was nobody else in the carriage,
and he must have forgotten that I was there, as he started talking to
himself. Apparently, he had been recommending some one for preferment,
and now had qualms of conscience as to what he had been saying. “I said
his preaching was admired by competent judges.” Pause. “Well, so it is.
**** admires it, so does ****, and they’re competent judges. I didn’t
say that I admired it.” Long pause. “I said he was a convinced
Christian.” Pause. “Well, he _is_ convinced. I didn’t say he wasn’t
quarrelsome.” I thought it time to make my presence known.
Amongst the letters here I found one to my father from myself, Trinity
College, Cambridge, 17 November 1877:--“I saw Darwin made a Doctor in
the Senate House to-day. Huxley and Tyndall and the rest of them were
there; and there were two stuffed monkeys--one with a musical-box inside
it--suspended from the galleries by cords and dangled over Darwin’s
head.”
The present Master of Trinity was headmaster at Harrow, while I was
there. In his study one afternoon he was adjusting the accents on some
of my Greek verses; and at last, pointing to a misplaced circumflex, he
asked me how that could possibly go there. I answered him quite honestly
that I didn’t know and didn’t care. It was rather a risky thing to say
to a headmaster; but in the evening I received a parcel, and found it
was Dean Stanley’s _Life of Arnold_--“C.T. from H.M.B. Harrow. Novʳ. 4.
1875.” I suppose my candour pleased him. I know he was quite snappish at
my telling him that I put enclitics in for emphasis, when obviously I
put them in to make my verses scan.
It was in my time at Harrow that _Forty Years On_ was written and
composed; and I helped to sing it at the concert on Founder’s Day, 10
October 1872, which was the first time it was sung in public. Forty
years seemed a very long while then, and does not seem much now; and I
see more meaning in “Shorter in wind, though in memory long, What shall
it profit you that once you were strong.”
* * * * *
For many years I wasted time in trying to play the piano, until at last
I saw that I should never play effectively, and then I gave it up.
Curiously, my grandfather went through this process with the flute,
though I never knew it till I found a letter of his just now:--2 April
1843, “I once had a great wish to learn the flute, and attended to it,
and learnt all that was necessary, but could not make any advancement
for want of an ear for it. I could play a tune by notes, but not give it
that pleasing air that others could, for want of an ear. Therefore I
considered it was time badly spent, and dropt it.” I think the fault was
with the fingers more than with the ear. Had the ear been altogether
bad, our bad playing might have pleased us.
My father had no ear at all for music, yet went to Oratorios, and slept
comfortably through them all, except Haydn’s _Creation_ with its
disturbing bursts of sound. At the Opera he kept awake, as that was
something more than music; and for some years he went pretty
regularly--five-and-twenty times in the season of 1853, and so on. But
he cared less for such things as the première of Berlioz’s _Benvenuto
Cellini_ on 25 June 1853, than for the spectacle on 19 April 1855, when
Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie came there with Queen Victoria.
The best spectacle I ever saw, for opera and audience combined, was
Glinka’s _Life for the Czar_ at Moscow on the Czar’s name-day, 11
September 1889.
I went to the Opera for the first time on 25 May 1863. It was
Meyerbeer’s _Prophête_; and I can still recall the scenery and dresses
and acting, and make comparisons with later performances, though I
cannot recall the singing at any performance vividly enough to compare
it with the singing at another. I suppose my taste in operas has varied
with the fashion, and also with my time of life. I was told some years
ago, by one of our few living poets, that there was only one opera in
the world, and that was Gluck’s _Orfeo_. I should say that others have
also run, but otherwise I now agree with him.
A letter from my brother to my father--Wreyland, 30 June 1853--comes
strangely from a boy of six. “My Dear Papa, I am very much displeased at
your not answering my letter. there is a great fault in you about those
things. and I hope you will answer this. two letters would be the sum
but I would not trouble you to write two for one long one would be
enough.... I know that you are quite an oprea [Opera] man. but you must
not expect me to go to that Theatre for I do not like always to see
things showy but I want something full of frolic such as the Merry Wives
Of Windsor. that is what I want to see.” He knew Shakespeare too well.
My grandfather writes to my father, 12 September 1854:--“He is always
reading Shakespeare, and gets hold of all improper words: he made use of
some to-day.”
The antics of some of the conductors used to amuse me as a boy. They
waved their heads and arms, and swayed their bodies, as if they were
intoxicated with the music. And then Maud Allan arose upon the stage,
and did everything they would have done, were they not compelled to keep
their seats. I was at one of her first performances in London; and there
was no crowding or applause, such as was usual afterwards--in fact the
audience did not quite know what to make of it.
She was not the earliest of these dancers--Isidora Duncan was before
her--but she had the advantage of being highly trained as a musician
before she took to dancing; and certainly her dancing made me understand
much music that I never understood before. I had some correspondence
with Dr Raymond Duncan--the brother of Isidora--about the music of the
ancient Greeks. He claimed to speak with knowledge; but his logic was
too easy for me--the Greeks did everything that was beautiful: this is
beautiful: therefore the Greeks did it. I could not see how this would
solve such problems as the structure of the tetrachords.
Some years before that time I wrote a little treatise _On the
Interpretation of Greek Music_, and prepared to build an instrument of
seventy strings. The ancients had seventy notes, having twenty-one notes
to the octave, and a compass of three octaves and a third; but they
never had so many strings. They tuned their strings to suit the mode or
scale that they were going to use; but my object was to have the notes
all there without this tuning.
I am a Pythagorean myself, and regard the Aristoxenians as silly folk
who misinterpret Aristoxenus--and he merely walked slipshod in the
footsteps of Pythagoras. Accordingly, I increased the mean tones (_ab_,
_cd_, _de_, _fg_, _ga_) to major tones, and decreased the mean semitones
(_bc_, _ef_) proportionately; and then I put _a_¹ and _a_² at about a
quarter and a half of a mean tone above _a_, and _b_¹ and _b_² at rather
less than an eighth and a quarter of a minor tone above _b_, and so on
with the other notes. I worked out the vibrations for one complete
tetrachord; and (omitting decimals) they were 243, 246, 249 for _b_,
_b_¹, _b_², 256, 263, 271 for _c_, _c_¹, _c_², 288, 296, 304 for _d_,
_d_¹, _d_², and 324 for _e_. And then I got Messrs Broadwood to make me
a set of tuning-forks to test it--a troublesome piece of work, to which
their Mr Hipkins gave a great deal of his valuable time and skill and
knowledge. The error in the forks was negligible. The intervals were
very curious, and unpleasant at first hearing; but, on getting used to
them, I got impatient with the piano for having nothing but mean
semitones.
As the piano and all keyed instruments have equal temperament now, they
ought to have black keys and white alternately all through, and the
music could be rewritten in a simpler form. It is ridiculous to keep to
five black keys and seven white, instead of six of each, now we have
dropped the system on which the seven and five were based.
I did not build my instrument of seventy strings, as I did not see how
it could be kept in tune--a tuner would never get these subtle notes
quite true, when his daily work was with the tempered scale. And there
were practical difficulties about an instrument of seventy tuning-forks.
Somebody asked me what I meant to call the instrument, and I said
Cacophone. That was before I grew accustomed to the intervals, and came
to like them. But my answer reached some people’s ears in Paris; and I
read in the _Revue Critique_, 27 July 1896, that I had invented a series
of sounds “inexécutables par aucune voix humaine ou même féline,” in
fact a “miaulement,” which “mérite complètement le nom de Cacophone,
sous laquelle, dit-on, il l’a désignée.” Anyway, my cat-squall was
antique, and their tempered scale was not; and I retorted with some
vigour in that journal, 12 October 1896.
Various people had published transcripts of bits of ancient music, and
had been applauded at the concerts where their transcripts were
performed; and they did not like my saying that twenty notes in
twenty-one were wrong, and the twenty-first was doubtful. Anyone can
calculate the intervals between the notes by means of logarithms and the
ratios given by Ptolemy and other ancient authors. These people told me
volubly that this was only mathematics--“lascia le muse, e studia le
matematiche.” They said that Aristoxenus must have used the tempered
scale, as he assumes that six tones make an octave. Euclid, _Sectio
Canonis_, prop. 9, proves with his usual precision that six tones are
greater than an octave. Ptolemy, _Harmonica_, i. 9, says that the
Aristoxenians should either have accepted what was proved, or set up
something else to take its place; and he would hardly have said that,
had they set up the tempered scale.
I have always felt that, if an opinion was worth publishing, it was
worth defending; and that was why I defended my views about Greek music
in the _Revue Critique_ and elsewhere, and have also defended my views
on many other things. Critics often change their tone, when put on their
defence. There was a professor of theology at Jena, who was displeased
with something that I wrote, and he pitched into me, _Berliner
Philologische Wochenschrift_, 18 June 1898. I wrote an Entgegnung, which
appeared there, 27 August 1898, with an Erwiderung from him. I remarked
that “was er ein Wasserstrahl nennt, ist nicht anderes als der Heilige
Geist,” corrected him on other points, and finished off with “in der
That scheint er von der Litteratur der Sache ebensowenig zu wissen als
von altchristlicher Kunst.” In his reply he was an injured innocent,
although he had come down on me as if he were a Pope and Œcumenical
Council all rolled up into one.
I had been writing about some portraits of Christ that can probably be
dated at 258 A.D., or shortly after that; and I had used them in support
of my opinion that Christ was only a little over twenty years of age at
the date of the Crucifixion. I did not expect people to acquiesce in
this without demur; but the theologians treated dates as dogmas. I
cannot see the merit of believing that something happened in one way, if
it happened in another way, or did not happen at all.
One evening, when some friends were staying with me, one of them was
speaking of something he had seen in Egypt; and he said that he thought
Brugsch’s system was the best, as a rough and ready way of getting at
dates. You reckon three generations to a century; and, though this may
not be true for a century or two, it comes pretty near the truth on an
average of several centuries. Another man looked dubious; so I asked him
what was wrong, and he explained. He was descended from William the
Conqueror both on his father’s side and on his mother’s, but on one side
it was twenty-seven generations, and on the other it was twenty-four;
and he was just wondering whether he was a century older or younger than
himself.
I wrote a book on Egyptian chronology and its application to the early
history of Greece. The evidence required more careful sifting than it
had received; and my point of view was that of Ovid, _Amores_, ii. 2.
57, 58--“viderit ipse licet, credet tamen ipse neganti, | damnabitque
oculos, et sibi verba dabit.” I thought of quoting this upon the
title-page, but found it rather long, and only gave a part. And then the
_Guardian_ reviewed the book, 9 September 1896, and said:--“The motto on
the title-page, _damnabitque oculos_, is, perhaps, the oddest motto that
ever graced a scientific treatise issued by a University Press.” Which
made it plain that the _Guardian_ had a reviewer who was less familiar
with the Latin language than with modern swear-words.
* * * * *
In reviewing books myself, I have often been amazed at their inaccuracy.
Youthful writers have to make mistakes for want of knowledge and
experience, but I have found older writers making just as bad mistakes
from indolence or carelessness.
There is a brilliant volume by Mahaffy on _The Greek World under Roman
Sway_. It came out in 1890, and I reviewed it then. At page 391 I came
on something quite incredible about the Proconsul of Asia reserving an
exceptional privilege for the Christians. The author cited an
inscription in support; so I looked this up, and found it was about the
citizens of Chios. Of course, the Greek _X_ is _Ch_; and I presume he
made his note of this inscription in that form, and then took his Xians
for Christians on the analogy of Xmas for Christmas.
One day Maspero was speaking to me rather strongly of a blunder that a
friend of mine had made. I turned to a great work of his own, that was
lying on the table, _Les momies royales de Deir el-Bahari_, and pointed
to the hieroglyphic _ka_ in one of the hieratic texts he had transcribed
there. He looked at it for a minute, and then wrote down the
hieroglyphic _cha_. He said that he pronounced _cha_ as _ka_, and this
must have led him into writing the wrong sign.
I found mistakes of quite another kind in the article on “Navis” in the
third edition of Smith’s _Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities_.
The article was written by the present Provost of Eton; and, as he was
headmaster at the time, he ought to have asked the boys to instruct him
in the art of cribbing. He gives himself away by copying the misprints
in the books from which he cribbed. On page 219 he cites Plato, _Leges_,
iv. p. 507 instead of 707; and there is the same misprint in Cartault,
_Trière Athénienne_, page 234. On page 223 he cites Polybius, xx. 85
instead of Diodorus, xx. 85; and there is the same mistake in Graser,
_De veterum re navali_, page 53. On the same page he cites Diodorus, 1.
61; and Graser, page 52, has 50, 61 by mistake for 506, 61, which is the
reference to the page and line in Hoeschel’s excerpts. On page 217 he
prints a passage in Lucian, _Navigium_, 4, and says he took it from
Josephus, _Antiquitates_, iv. 8. 37. He took the passage in Lucian from
Breusing, _Nautik der Alten_, page 57, and took the reference to
Josephus from another passage that Breusing prints on the same page.
* * * * *
Now and then I make mistakes myself. In my _Ancient Ships_, note 214, I
quoted a passage from Procopius, and added, “Apparently the _gonia_ is
here the mast-head, as in Herodotus, viii. 122.” I should not have said
that, if I had thought of Herodotus, i. 51; but I did not think of it
until the book was out. However, it was only a single sentence in the
middle of a very long note; and I hoped no harm was done. Some while
afterwards I was at the Royal Academy, when the students were being
lectured on Greek Sculpture. The lecturer was speaking of the trophy of
the Æginetans, as described by Herodotus, viii. 122; and he told them
that the grouping of the things was clear, if the _gonia_ was a
mast-head, as had lately been suggested.
There is no stopping a mistake after it has started. In the preface to
my _Ancient Ships_ I gave the history of a blunder that was made by
Scheffer in 1654, and is now in four authoritative books of reference.
In fact, when I am told that all authorities agree, I feel certain that
one of them has blundered, and the rest have followed him without
inquiry.
Guglielmotti has made a pleasant mistake, which these authorities are
sure to copy some day: namely, that Alexander the Great was a
distinguished German archæologist of the Nineteenth Century. Graser
printed an account of his model of a war-ship of the time of Alexander
the Great--“aus der Zeit Alexanders des Grossen.” Guglielmotti mentions
it in his treatise _Delle due Navi Romane, etc._, and says, page
67:--“Non dai condottieri della nuova età, Bernardo Graser ed Alessandro
de Grossen, egregi giovani, i quali hanno trattati, etc.”
Until I discovered it in Jal, _Archéologie Navale_, vol. ii, page 654, I
never knew that “Sea Cheers” was an order given on English ships. Nor
could I explain the ritual at All Saints’ Church in Margaret Street,
until I got a hint from Baedeker, _Londres_, page 146:--“Cette église
appartient à la secte des Puséystes.” This was in the edition of 1873. I
got it while I was at Harrow, and found I was at “une des principales
universités d’Angleterre,” page 245.
A foreigner once described to me a very interesting survival of our
feudal institutions, which he had observed while travelling in a train.
At one station they waited, and waited, until a man came running along,
carrying a Caduceus, which he handed to the driver; and then at last the
train went on. He took the Caduceus to be the symbol of some great
lord’s permission to them to travel across his lands. And certainly the
Staff did look rather like a Caduceus on some of the older lines that
were worked upon that system.
My father used to tell me of a foreigner, who went into the
refreshment-room at Swindon, had some soup, and was handed someone
else’s change. On returning to the carriage, he extolled this English
system, by which a passenger was entitled to a certain amount of
refreshments, with a refund for the balance, if he did not take the
whole amount.
In a Brighton train a foreigner asked me if he had to change at Clafam
Junction. I said Clapham, and he corrected me:--“But in English _ph_ is
always _f_. I will show you in my book.” At the time of the railway race
to Edinburgh, another foreigner told me that he found the trains very
expressive.
Many years ago an old Belgian gentleman came down upon my father:--“I
ask the butler for mutton-leg, and he say leg-of-mutton. Now you say
mutton-chop. Why do you talk like that?” Some friends of mine from Paris
asked me quite angrily:--“Why do you call Portland Place a Place? It is
not a Place.” They had gone to the Langham under the impression that it
looked out on something like the Vendôme or the Concorde. At an hotel in
Switzerland my father was objecting to rooms without a view. The
landlord said no others were vacant then, “but to-morrow I shall give
you rooms where I shall make you see the Mont Blanc.” Faire voir, of
course.
A learned German told me that Thomas Aquinas was one of the most genial
men that ever lived. (By a genial man he meant a man of genius). Being
in Berlin, I went to see an antiquarian friend, who was a surgeon by
profession. I was then at work upon the sort of book that Germans call a
Corpus; and he said he hoped to get much information from my corpse.
I have made much worse mistakes myself. On a hot summer day at Ferrara I
went into a café to see if I could get an ice. Instead of asking the man
if he had got _Gelati_, which are ices, I asked if he had got _Geloni_,
which are chilblains. Arriving quite exhausted at an inn in the Tyrol, I
said I wanted the _Abendmahl_ at once. The word means Supper, just like
_Abendessen_, but is now used only of the Sacrament.
In all probability I shall never again say Thank-you to a German; but I
find that, if I do, I must say Donkey’s-hair. I fancied it was
Danke-sehr, but am corrected by a girl from a superior sort of school
near here.
A man built a bungalow not far from here, and chose to call it
Chez-nous; but it is known as Chestnuts. Chars-à-banc are known as
Cherubim. On venturing to hint that this was a mistake, I got a crushing
reply:--“Why, us read of the Lord a-ridin’ on the wings of the Cherubim,
and they folk be a-ridin’ on their seats.”
A quantity of plants arrived here while I was away, and among them were
some Kalmias and Andromedas. On my
[Illustration: THE HALL HOUSE (_p. 50_)]
return I asked where they had all been put; and I was told that some of
them were in the greenhouse, others were in various parts of the garden,
and the Camels and Dromedaries were out in the orchards.
An old gardener once gave me his opinion that a laundry was better than
a garden, “as garments had not got such mazin’ names as plants.” And the
maze grows more intricate, when Berberis Darwinii is Barbarous Darwin,
and Nicotiana is Nicodemus, and Irises are Irish, and they English Irish
be braver than they Spanish Irish.
There was an old lady here who always said:--“If there be a flower that
I do like, it be a Pertunium.” It was neither a petunia nor a geranium;
but I never found out exactly what it was. Botanists might adopt the
name, when they want one for a novelty, for it is better than most of
theirs. It may be convenient to give things Greek or Latin names, and it
certainly sounds better to say Archæopteryx and Deinotherium than Old
Bird and Awful Beast. But it is absurd to take the ancient name for one
thing, and give it to another; yet that is what Linnæus and his
followers have very often done.
Besides their botanical names, many things have trade names now. There
is a plant here of the sort that is described at Kew as Rhododendrum
Ponticum Cheiranthifolium. But, when I wanted to get another like it, I
found the nurseryman did not know it by that name. He called it Jeremiah
J. Colman.
Even in plain English there are pitfalls. At a hotel in Penzance I found
the coffee-room quite full, when I came in to breakfast, and I asked the
head-waiter if he couldn’t find me a place. He answered:--“Very sorry,
sir, only whiting and soles to-day.”
* * * * *
One morning in London I was eating potted tunny-fish at breakfast, and I
soon felt that it was having an effect on me. My brain was clearer than
it has ever been before or since. I understood things that had always
puzzled me; and nothing was obscure. In fact, for about two hours I was
a Man of Genius; and then I dropped down to my usual level.
I made many inquiries about it afterwards, but without result until I
came upon a man who had spent a couple of years at the Laboratory of
Marine Zoology at Naples. He had himself felt odd after eating
tunny-fish one day, and he knew of other cases. In his own case there
was increased blood-pressure, especially in the brain, such as might
arise from eating putrid meat. But he thought his fish was sound, and
ascribed the effect to some unknown substance in a tunny.
This tempts me to suggest a problem. The ancient Greeks were the
cleverest people ever known, and they were always eating pickled tunny.
Were they quite so clever before they reached the Mediterranean, and got
this particular food?--Common trout were put into some of the New
Zealand streams, and they became great fish, quite unlike their
ancestors. Did something of the same sort happen to the ancient Greeks,
in intellect though not in body?