Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in
the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to
idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a
taste for literature. This is a great mistake.
Of course it is impossible, or at any rate very difficult, properly to
study anything whatever without the aid of printed books. But if you
desire to understand the deeper depths of bridge or of boat-sailing you
would not be deterred by your lack of interest in literature from
reading the best books on bridge or boat-sailing. We must, therefore,
distinguish between literature, and books treating of subjects not
literary. I shall come to literature in due course.
Let me now remark to those who have never read Meredith, and who are
capable of being unmoved by a discussion as to whether Mr. Stephen
Phillips is or is not a true poet, that they are perfectly within their
rights. It is not a crime not to love literature. It is not a sign of
imbecility. The mandarins of literature will order out to instant
execution the unfortunate individual who does not comprehend, say, the
influence of Wordsworth on Tennyson. But that is only their impudence.
Where would they be, I wonder, if requested to explain the influences
that went to make Tschaikowsky's "Pathetic Symphony"?
There are enormous fields of knowledge quite outside literature which
will yield magnificent results to cultivators. For example (since I
have just mentioned the most popular piece of high-class music in
England to-day), I am reminded that the Promenade Concerts begin in
August. You go to them. You smoke your cigar or cigarette (and I
regret to say that you strike your matches during the soft bars of the
"Lohengrin" overture), and you enjoy the music. But you say you cannot
play the piano or the fiddle, or even the banjo; that you know nothing
of music.
What does that matter? That you have a genuine taste for music is
proved by the fact that, in order to fill his hall with you and your
peers, the conductor is obliged to provide programmes from which bad
music is almost entirely excluded (a change from the old Covent Garden
days!).
Now surely your inability to perform "The Maiden's Prayer" on a piano
need not prevent you from making yourself familiar with the
construction of the orchestra to which you listen a couple of nights a
week during a couple of months! As things are, you probably think of
the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a
confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details
because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
If you were asked to name the instruments which play the great theme at
the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them for your
life's sake. Yet you admire the C minor symphony. It has thrilled
you. It will thrill you again. You have even talked about it, in an
expansive mood, to that lady--you know whom I mean. And all you can
positively state about the C minor symphony is that Beethoven composed
it and that it is a "jolly fine thing."
Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel's "How to Listen to Music"
(which can be got at any bookseller's for less than the price of a
stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the
orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you
would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing
intensification of interest in it. Instead of a confused mass, the
orchestra would appear to you as what it is--a marvellously balanced
organism whose various groups of members each have a different and an
indispensable function. You would spy out the instruments, and listen
for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a
French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player
of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is
the more difficult instrument. You would _live_ at a promenade
concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of
beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object.
The foundations of a genuine, systematic knowledge of music might be
laid. You might specialise your inquiries either on a particular form
of music (such as the symphony), or on the works of a particular
composer. At the end of a year of forty-eight weeks of three brief
evenings each, combined with a study of programmes and attendances at
concerts chosen out of your increasing knowledge, you would really know
something about music, even though you were as far off as ever from
jangling "The Maiden's Prayer" on the piano.
"But I hate music!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you.
What applies to music applies to the other arts. I might mention Mr.
Clermont Witt's "How to Look at Pictures," or Mr. Russell Sturgis's
"How to Judge Architecture," as beginnings (merely beginnings) of
systematic vitalising knowledge in other arts, the materials for whose
study abound in London.
"I hate all the arts!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and
more.