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CHARLES AUCHESTER
VOLUME I.
[Illustration: MENDELSSOHN
FROM AN ORIGINAL PORTRAIT--1821.]
CHARLES AUCHESTER
BY
ELIZABETH SHEPPARD
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES_
BY GEORGE P. UPTON
AUTHOR OF "THE STANDARD OPERAS," "STANDARD ORATORIOS," "STANDARD
CANTATAS," "STANDARD SYMPHONIES," "WOMAN IN MUSIC," ETC.
In Two Volumes
VOLUME I.
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY
1891
COPYRIGHT,
BY A. C. MCCLURG AND CO.
A.D. 1891.
INTRODUCTION.
The romance of "Charles Auchester," which is really a memorial to
Mendelssohn, the composer, was first published in England in 1853. The
titlepage bore the name of "E. Berger," a French pseudonym, which for
some time served to conceal the identity of the author. Its motto was
a sentence from one of Disraeli's novels: "Were it not for Music, we
might in these days say, The Beautiful is dead." The dedication was
also to the same distinguished writer, and ran thus: "To the author of
'Contarini Fleming,' whose perfect genius suggested this imperfect
history." To this flattering dedication, Mr. Disraeli replied in a
note to the author: "No greater book will ever be written upon music,
and it will one day be recognized as the imaginative classic of that
divine art."
Rarely has a book had a more propitious introduction to the public;
but it was destined to encounter the proverbial fickleness of that
public. The author was not without honor save in her own country. It
was reserved for America first to recognize her genius. Thence her
fame travelled back to her own home; but an early death prevented her
from enjoying the fruits of her enthusiastic toil. Other works
followed from her busy pen, among them "Counterparts,"--a
musico-philosophical romance, dedicated to Mrs. Disraeli, which had a
certain success; "Rumor," of which Beethoven, under the name of
Rodomant, is supposed to have been the hero; "Beatrice Reynolds,"
"The Double Coronet," and "Almost a Heroine:" but none of them
achieved the popularity which "Charles Auchester" enjoyed. They shone
only by the reflected light of this wonderful girl's first book. The
republication of this romance will recall to its readers of an earlier
generation an old enthusiasm which may not be altogether lost, though
they may smile as they read and remember. It should arouse a new
enthusiasm in the younger generation of music-lovers.
Elizabeth Sheppard, the author of "Charles Auchester," was born at
Blackheath, near London, in 1837. Her father was a clergyman of the
Established Church, and her mother a Jewess by descent,--which serves
to account for the daughter's strong Jewish sympathies in this
remarkable display of hero-worship. Left an orphan at a tender age,
she was thrown upon her own resources, and chose school-teaching for
her profession. She was evidently a good linguist and musician, for
she taught music and the languages before she was sixteen. She had
decided literary ambition also, and wrote plays, poems, and short
stories at an age when other children are usually engaged in pastimes.
Notwithstanding the arduous nature of her work and her exceedingly
delicate health, she devoted her leisure hours to literary
composition. How this frail girl must have toiled is evidenced by the
completion of "Charles Auchester" in her sixteenth year. In her
seventeenth she had finished "Counterparts,"--a work based upon a
scheme even more ambitious than that of her first story. When it is
considered that these two romances were written at odd moments of
leisure intervening between hours of wearing toil in the school-room,
and that she was a mere child and very frail, it will be admitted that
the history of literary effort hardly records a parallel case. Nature
however always exacts the penalty for such mental excesses. This
little creature of "spirit, fire, and dew" died on March 13, 1862, at
the early age of twenty-five.
Apart from its intrinsic merits as a musical romance, there are some
features of "Charles Auchester" of more than ordinary interest. It is
well known that Seraphael, its leading character, is the author's
ideal of Mendelssohn, and that the romance was intended to be a
memorial of him. More thoroughly to appreciate the work, and not set
it down as mere rhapsody, it must be remembered that Miss Sheppard
wrote it in a period of Mendelssohn worship in England as ardent and
wellnigh as universal as the Handel worship of the previous century
had been. It was written in 1853. Mendelssohn had been dead but six
years, and his name was still a household word in every English
family. He was adored, not only for his musical genius, but also for
his singular purity of character. He was personally as well known in
England as any native composer. His Scotch Symphony and Hebrides
Overture attested his love of Scotch scenery. He had conducted
concerts in the provinces; he appeared at concerts in London in 1829
and in subsequent years, and was the idol of the drawing-rooms of that
day. Some of his best works were written on commissions from the
London Philharmonic Society. He conducted his "Lobgesang" at
Birmingham in 1840, and he produced his immortal "Elijah" in the same
town in 1846,--only a year before his death. There were numerous ties
of regard, and even of affection, binding him to the English people.
From a passing remark in the course of the romance, we learn that it
opens about the year 1833, when Mendelssohn was in his prime; and as
it closes with his death, it thus covers a period of fourteen
years,--the most brilliant and productive part of his life.
Curious critics of "Charles Auchester" have found close resemblances
between its characters and other musicians. There is good reason to
believe that Starwood Burney was intended for Sterndale Bennett, not
only from the resemblance of the names in sound and meaning, but also
from many other events common to each. It requires, however, some
stretch of the imagination to believe that Charles Auchester was
intended as a portrait of Joachim the violinist; that Aronach, the
teacher at the St. Cecilia School, was meant for Zelter; Clara Benette
for Jenny Lind; and Laura Lemark for Taglioni. It is altogether likely
that the author in drawing these characters had the types in mind, and
without intending to produce a parallel or to preserve anything like
synchronism, invested them with some of the characteristics of the
real persons, all of whom, it may be added, except Taglioni, were
intimately associated with Mendelssohn.
All this lends the charm of human interest to the book; but, after
all, it is the author's personality that invests it with its rare
fascination. It would not bear searching literary criticism;
fortunately, no one has been so ungracious as to apply it. It is more
to the purpose to remember that here is a young girl of exquisite
refinement, rare intellectuality, and the most overwhelming
enthusiasm, who has written herself into her work with all her girlish
fancies, her great love for the art, her glowing imagination, and that
rapturous devotion for the hero of her exalted world which is
characteristic of her sex at sixteen. And in doing this she has
pictured her dreams with most glowing colors, and told them with
delicate _naivete_ and exuberant passion. In a word, she has expressed
the very spirit of music in language, and in a language so pure and
adoring as to amount to worship. In Disraeli's words, it is "the
imaginative classic of the divine art." To those who have not lost
their early enthusiasms, this little book will come like the perfume
of a flower, or some tone of a well-remembered voice, recalling the
old days and reviving an old pleasure. To those who have lost such
emotions, what is left but Lethe?
In preparing the work for publication, I have added some brief notes,
indicating the connection between the real and the ideal, and making
the meaning of the text clearer to the general reader of to-day.
Anything which will throw light upon this charming romance should be
welcome, and the more so that the gifted author has been strangely
neglected both in musical and general biographical dictionaries. It is
to be hoped that an adequate sketch of her life may some day appear.
GEORGE P. UPTON.
_Chicago, 1891._
CHARLES AUCHESTER.
CHAPTER I.
I never wrote a long letter in my life. It is the manual part I
dislike,--arranging the paper, holding the pen in my fingers, and
finding my arm exhausted with carrying it to and from the inkstand. It
does not signify, though; for I have made arrangements with my
free-will to write more than a letter,--a life, or rather the life of
a life. Let none pause to consider what this means,--neither quite
Germanly mysterious, nor quite Saxonly simple, like my origin.
There are many literal presentations of ordinary personages in books
which, I am informed, and I suppose I am to assure myself, are
introduced expressly to intensify and illustrate the chief and
peculiar interest where an interest is, or to allure the attention of
the implicit, where it is not. But how does it happen that the
delineations of the gods among men, the heroic, gifted few, the beings
of imaginative might or genius, are so infinitely more literal?
Who--worshipping, if not strong enough to serve, the Ideal--can endure
the graceless ignorance of his subject betrayed by many a biographer,
accepted and accomplished in his style? Who, so worshipping, can do
anything but shudder at the meagre, crude, mistakable portraits of
Shakspeare, of Verulam, of Beethoven? Heaven send my own may not make
me shudder first, and that in my attempt to recall, through a kind of
artistic interlight, a few remembered lineaments, I be not
self-condemned to blush for the spiritual craft whose first law only I
had learned.
I know how many notions grown persons entertain of their childhood as
real, which are factitious, and founded upon elder experience, until
they become confounded with it; but I also feel that in great part we
neglect our earliest impressions, as vague, which were the truest and
best we ever had. I believe none can recall their childish estimate or
essence without identifying within their present intimate selves. In
my own case the analogy is perfect between my conceptions then and my
positive existence now. So every one must feel who is at all
acquainted with the liabilities of those who follow art.
The man of power may manage to merge his individuality in his
expansive association with the individuality of others; the man of
science quenches self-consciousness in abstraction; and not a few who
follow with hot energy some worldly calling, become, in its exercise,
as itself, nor for a solitary moment are left alone with their
personality to remember even that as separate and distinctly real.
But all artists, whether acknowledged or amateur, must have proved
that, for themselves, the gauge of immortality, in life as in art,
consists in their self-acquaintance, their self-reliance, their exact
self-appreciation with reference to their masters, their models, their
one supreme ideal.
I was born in a city of England farthest from the sea, within whose
liberties my grandfather and father had resided, acquiring at once a
steady profit and an honorable commercial fame. Never mind what they
were, or in which street or square their stocked warehouses were
planted, alluring the eyes and hearts of the pupils of Adam Smith. I
remember the buildings well; but my elder brother, the eldest of our
family, was established there when I first recall them, and he was
always there, residing on the premises. He was indeed very many years
my senior, and I little knew him; but he was a steady, excellent
person, with a tolerable tenor voice and punctilious filial
observances towards our admirable mother. My father was born in
England; but though his ancestors were generally Saxon, an infusion of
Norman blood had taken place in his family a generation or two behind
him, and I always suspected that we owed to the old breeding of Claire
Renee de Fontenelle some of our peculiarities and refinements; though
my father always maintained that they flowed directly from our mother.
He was travelling for the house upon the Continent when he first found
her out, embedded like a gem by a little German river; and she left
with him, unrepiningly, her still but romantic home, not again to
revisit it.
My mother must have been in her girlhood, as she was in her maturest
years, a domestic presence of purity, kindliness, and home-heartedness;
she had been accustomed to every kind of household manoeuvre, and her
needlework was something exquisite. From her German mother she
inherited the quietness of which grace is born, the prudence with
which wisdom dwells, and many an attribute of virtue; but from her
father she inherited the right to name herself of Hebrew origin.
Herein my chief glory lies; and whatever enlightenment my destiny has
boasted, streams from that radiant point. I know that there are many
who would as genuinely rejoice in descent from Mahomet, from Attila,
or from Robin Hood, as from any of Israel's children; but I claim the
golden link in my genealogy as that which connects it with eternity
and with all that in my faith is glorious.[1]
My mother had lived in a certain seclusion for some years before I
first began to realize; for my father died before my first year's
close. We still resided near the house of business,--not in it, for
that was my brother's now, and Fred had lately brought home a wife.
But we were quite settled and at home in the house I first remember,
when it breaks, picture-like, on my dawning memory. I had three
sisters: Clotilda was the oldest, and only a year younger than Fred.
She was an extraordinarily clever person, though totally destitute of
art or artistic yearnings. She had been educated unwontedly, and at
least understood all that she had learned. Her favorite pursuits were
reading, and comparing lexicons and analyses of different languages,
and endeavoring to find common roots for all; but she could and did
work perfectly, write a fine, close hand, and very vigorously
superintend the household in my mother's absence or indisposition. She
had rather a queer face, like one of the Puritan visages in antique
portraits; but a very cheerful smile, and perfect composure of
manner,--a great charm in mine eyes, O ye nymphs and graces! Millicent,
three years younger, was a spirit of gentleness,--imperceptibly
instructing me, she must be treated with a sort of awe. Her melancholy
oval face and her pale eyelids showed more of the Hebrew than any of
us excepting myself; only I was plain, and she remarkably pleasing.
Lydia, my youngest sister, was rather showy than brilliant, and rather
bright than keen,--but not much of either; and yet she was always kind
to me, and I should have grieved to miss her round brown eyes at our
breakfast-table, or her loud, ringing laugh upstairs from the kitchen;
for she had the pantry key.
Both Millicent and Lydia played and sang, if not very powerfully, yet
with superior taste. Millicent's notes, not many in number, were as
the notes of a cooing dove. Before I was five years old I used to sit
upon the old grand piano and watch their faces while they sang on
Sunday evenings,--my mother in a tremulous soprano, with Fred's tenor,
and the bass of a friend of his. This did not please me; and here let
me say that musical temperament as surely asserts itself in aversion
to discordant, or not pure, as in desire for sweet and true sounds. I
am certain this is true. I was always happy when Millicent sang alone,
or even when she and Lydia mixed their notes; for both had an ear as
accurate for tune and for time as can be found in England, or indeed
in Germany. But oh! I have writhed beneath the dronings of
Hatchardson's bass, on quartet or chorale an audible blemish, and in a
rare composition now and then, the distorting and distracting point on
which I was morbidly obliged to fasten my attention. We had no other
music, except a little of the same kind, not quite so good, from
various members of families in the neighborhood professing to play or
sing. But I will not dwell on those, for they are displaced by images
more significant.
I can never recollect a time when I did not sing. I believe I sang
before I spoke. Not that I possessed a voice of miraculous power, but
that everything resolved itself into a species of inward rhythm, not
responsive to by words, but which passed into sound, tone, and
measure before I knew it was formed. Every sight as well as all that
touched my ears produced this effect. I could not watch the smoke
ascending, nor the motions of the clouds, nor, subtler yet, the stars
peeping through the vaulted twilight, without the framing and
outpouring of exuberant emotion in strains so expressive to my own
intelligence that it was entranced by them completely. I was a very
ailing child for several years, and only the cares I received
preserved me then; but now I feel as if all healthfulness had been
engendered by the mere vocal abstraction into which I was plunged a
great part of every day. I had been used to hear music discussed,
slightly, it is true, but always reverently, and I early learned there
were those who followed that--the supreme of art--in the very town we
inhabited,--indeed, my sisters had taken lessons of a lady a pupil of
Clementi; but she had left for London before I knew my notes.
Our piano had been a noble instrument,--one of the first and best that
displaced the harpsichords of Kirkman.[2] Well worn, it had also been
well used, and when deftly handled, had still some delights
extricable. It stood in our drawing-room, a chamber of the red-brick
house that held us,--rather the envy of our neighbors, for it had a
beautiful ceiling, carved at the centre and in the corners with
bunches and knots of lilies. It was a high and rather a large room. It
was filled with old furniture, rather handsome and exquisitely kept,
and was a temple of awe to me, because I was not allowed to play
there, and only sometimes to enter it,--as, for example, on Sundays,
or when we had tea-parties, or when morning callers came and asked to
see me; and whenever I did enter, I was not suffered to touch the rug
with my feet, nor to approach the sparkling steel of the fire-irons
and fender nearer than its moss-like edge. Our drawing-room was, in
fact, a curious confusion of German stiffness and English comfort; but
I did not know this then.
We generally sat in the parlor looking towards the street and the
square tower of an ancient church. The windows were draped with
dark-blue moreen, and between them stood my mother's dark-blue velvet
chair, always covered with dark-blue cloth, except on Sundays and on
New Year's day and at the feast of Christmas.
The dark-blue drugget covered a polished floor, whose slippery,
uncovered margin beneath the wainscot has occasioned me many a tumble,
though it always tempted me to slide when I found myself alone in the
room. There were plenty of chairs in the parlor, and a few little
tables, besides a large one in the centre, over which hung a dark-blue
cover, with a border of glowing orange. I was fond of the high
mantelshelf, whose ornaments were a German model of a bad Haus, and
two delicate wax nuns, to say nothing of the china candlesticks, the
black Berlin screens, and the bronze pastille-box.
Of all things I gloried in the oak closets--one filled with books, the
other with glass and china--on either side of the fireplace; nor did I
despise the blue cloth stools, beautifully embroidered by Clo, just
after her sampler days, in wool oak-wreaths rich with acorns. I used
to sit upon these alternately at my mother's feet, for she would not
permit one to be used more than the other; and I was a very obedient
infant.
My greatest trial was going to church, because the singing was so
wretchedly bad that it made my ears ache. Often I complained to my
mother; but she always said we could not help it if ignorant persons
were employed to praise God, that it ought to make us more ready to
stand up and sing, and answer our very best, and that none of us could
praise him really as the angels do. This was not anything of an
answer, but I persisted in questioning her, that I might see whether
she ever caught a new idea upon the subject. But no; and thus I
learned to lean upon my own opinion before I was eight years old, for
I never went to church till I was seven. Clo thought that there should
be no singing in church,--she had a dash of the Puritan in her creed;
but Lydia horrified my mother oftentimes by saying she should write to
the organist about revising the choir. But here my childish wisdom
crept in, and whispered to me that nothing could be done with such a
battered, used-up, asthmatic machine as our decrepit organ, and I gave
up the subject in despair.
Still, Millicent charmed me one night by silencing Fred and Mr.
Hatchardson when they were prosing of Sternhold and Hopkins, and Tate
and Brady,[3] and singing-galleries and charity-children, by saying,--
"You all forget that music is the highest gift that God bestows, and
its faculty the greatest blessing. It must be the only form of worship
for those who are musically endowed,--that is, if they employ it
aright."
Millicent had a meek manner of administering a wholesome truth which
another would have pelted at the hearer; but then Millicent spoke
seldom, and never unless it was necessary. She read, she practised,
she made up mantles and caps _a ravir_, and she visited poor sick
people; but still I knew she was not happy, though I could not
conceive nor conjecture why. She did not teach me anything, and Lydia
would have dreamed first of scaling Parnassus. But Clo's honorable
ambition had always been to educate me; and as she was really
competent, my mother made no objection. I verily owe a great deal to
her. She taught me to read English, French, and German between my
eighth and tenth years; but then we all knew German in our cradles, as
my mother had for us a nurse from her own land. Clo made me also spell
by a clever system of her own, and she got me somehow into
subtraction; but I was a great concern to her in one respect,--I never
got on with my writing. I believe she and my mother entertained some
indefinite notion of my becoming, in due time, the junior partner of
the firm. This prescience of theirs appalled me not, for I never
intended to fulfil it, and I thought, justly enough, that there was
plenty of time before me to undo their arrangements. I always went to
my lessons in the parlor from nine till twelve, and again in the
afternoon for an hour, so that I was not overworked; but even when I
was sitting by Clo,--she, glorious creature! deep in Leyden or
Gesenius--I used to chant my geography or my Telemachus to my secret
springs of song, without knowing how or why, but still chanting as my
existence glided.
I had tolerable walks in the town and about through the dusty lanes
with my sisters or my nurse, for I was curious; and, to a child,
freshness is inspiration, and old sights seen afresh seem new.
I liked of all things to go to the chemist's when my mother
replenished her little medicine-chest. There was unction in the smell
of the packeted, ticketed drugs, in the rosy cinnamon, the golden
manna, the pungent vinegar, and the aromatic myrrh. How I delighted in
the copper weights, the spirit-lamp, the ivory scales, the vast
magazines of lozenges, and the delicate lip-salve cases, to say
nothing of the glittering toilet bagatelles, and perfumes and soaps! I
mention all this just because the only taste that has ever become
necessary to me in its cultivation, besides music, is chemistry, and I
could almost say I know not which I adhere to most; but Memory
comes,--
"And with her flying finger sweeps my lip."
I forbear.
I loved the factories, to some of which I had access. I used to think
those wheels and whirring works so wonderful that they were like the
inside of a man's brain. My notion was nothing pathetic of the pale
boys and lank girls about, for they seemed merely stirring or moveless
parts of the mechanism. I am afraid I shall be thought very unfeeling;
I am not aware that I was, nevertheless.
I sometimes went out to tea in the town; I did not like it, but I did
it to please my mother. At one or two houses I was accustomed to a
great impression of muffins, cake, and marmalade, with coffee and
cream; and the children I met there did nothing adequately but eat. At
a few houses, again, I fared better, for they only gave us little
loaves of bread and little cups of tea, and we romped the evening
long, and dramatized our elders and betters until the servants came
for us. But I, at least, was always ready to go home, and glad to see
my short, wide bed beside my mother's vast one, and my spotless dimity
curtains with the lucid muslin frills; and how often I sang the best
tunes in my head to the nameless effect of rosemary and lavender that
haunted my large white pillow!
We always went to bed, and breakfasted, very early, and I usually had
an hour before nine wherein to disport myself as I chose. It was in
these hours Millicent taught me to sing from notes and to discern the
aspect of the key-board. Of the crowding associations, the teeming
remembrances, just at infancy and early childhood, I reject all,
except such as it becomes positively necessary I should recall;
therefore I dwell not upon this phase of my life, delightful as it
was, and stamped with perfect purity,--the reflex of an unperverted
temperament and of kindly tenderness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The character of Charles Auchester is supposed to have been
intended for a sketch of the violinist Joachim, whose talent was first
recognized by Mendelssohn, and who studied for many years at Leipsic
under that composer's influence, though his own writings betray a
strong leaning towards Schumann.
[2] A family of eminent harpsichord-makers. Jacob, the founder of the
business, went to London from Germany early in the last century, and
died in 1778. The business has been continued through five
generations, and is now conducted by Joseph Kirkman in the same city.
[3] Compilers of English psalmody in the last century.