Mr. Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate
music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don't
want it--the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the
prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an
important article. You need not look at pictures or statues, Mr. Lang
contends; you need not even read poetry, if you "hate poetry and
painting," like George II. But you must often listen to music whether you
will or not. There is no escape from it any more than from the influenza.
Mr. Lang no doubt speaks chiefly for himself. Nature, as he frankly
admits, has not made him musical; and though he can stand "Will ye no come
back again?" and "Bonnie Dundee," Wagner and Chopin say absolutely nothing
to him. In any case, he is somewhat astray in declaring that literary men
dislike music. Even Johnson, who is generally quoted as among the
music-haters, and who, as we all know, called music "the least
disagreeable of noises," even he was at the worst only insensible to the
charms of the art. He once bought a flageolet--that he never made out a
tune is no matter--and Burney, the musical historian, says that six months
before his death he asked to be taught "at least the alphabet of your
language." Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear
drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music
of his country, and, like Congreve's Jeremy, had a "reasonable ear" for a
jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly
proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent
Novello's house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ
and listen to his daughter's singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types
of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they
ever hear music or not. But look at the number of authors who have
explicitly declared their delight in music. De Quincey was one; Browning
was another. Did not Goldsmith play the flute, and Milton amuse himself
with the organ? Rogers loved a barrel organ to distraction, and Ruskin
went into mild raptures over Halle's playing of Thalberg's "Home, sweet
home." Burns and Hogg scraped on the fiddle, and Shelley strummed on a
guitar, now on the Bodleian at Oxford. Moore sang Irish songs, Tom
Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him;
and if Shakespeare wasn't musical he ought to have been considering the
way in which he has spoken of the man who "hath no music in his soul." In
short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other
people--some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a
mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.
To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged
it would be somewhat difficult to say. That he was musical at all will
probably be regarded as a revelation to most people; and indeed it is
only since the recent publication of his correspondence that even the
elect have realized the full extent of his musical tastes and
accomplishments. That he took at least a mild interest in music might have
been inferred from various allusions to the art in his tales and essays.
In "The Wrong Box," for example, we have the humorous situation where the
young barrister pretends that he is engaged on the composition of an
imaginary comic opera. It is in the same story, again, that there occurs a
veritable "locus classicus" on the art of playing the penny whistle, and
the difference between the amateur and the professional performer.
Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and
in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this
story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that
instrument. "The young of the penny whistler," as he puts it, "like those
of the salmon, are occult from observation." He endows David, his forbear
at Pilrig, with a musical ear, for the Laird received David Balfour "in
the midst of learned works and musical instruments, for he was not only a
deep philosopher, but much of a musician."
It is, however, needless to dwell upon these vague impersonal references
to music when so much that is directly explicit on the subject is to be
found both in the Vailima letters and in the latter correspondence. Miss
Blantyre Simpson, who knew Stevenson in his early days, says that he had
not much of a musical ear, and had only a "rudimentary acquaintance" with
"Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green." It is clear that he
improved as the years went on, but his family seem always to have regarded
his musical accomplishments with something like scorn. In 1874, when he
was 24, he was at Chester with his father, and the verger was taking the
visitors round the cathedral.
"We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir
children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them with,
I dare-say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me.
'Ah,' says he (the verger), 'You're very fond of music.' I said I
was. 'Yes, I could tell that by your head,' he answered. Then my
father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger
so distressed and shaken in the foundation of his creed that, I hear,
he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was
something in my face, and wanted to know what it was if not music."
The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of
music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally
different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular
case. "I have," he said, "no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save
my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good
from bad." Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that
he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly
clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never
could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him;
but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it "fascinates me
like a tune." Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is
"useful for only two things--a yacht and a string quartette." In his
younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De
Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre
every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was "terribly
excited" over Halevy's "La Juive," so much so indeed that he had to
"slope" in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside,
so he went into a "bierhalle" and brooded for nearly an hour over his
glass. "An opera," he mused, "is far more real than real life to me. It
seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and
most conventional illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon
me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I
don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so
constituted. Besides, it would soon pall--imagine asking for three-kreuzer
cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your
dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!" Here, as some one has
remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man--the tinsel and the
humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real.
That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural,
but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far.
When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that "I
write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five;
write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano
until I go to bed." At this time the whistle was Osborne's instrument.
"You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!"
Stevenson exclaimed to his father, "Dear powers, what a concerto! I now
live entirely for the piano; he for the whistle; the neighbors in a
radius of a furlong and a half are packing up in quest of better climes."
By his own confession, it was a case of picking out the melody with one
finger! In the matter of musical arrangements he proclaims himself a
purist, and yet, with charming inconsistency, announces that he is
arranging certain numbers of the "Magic Flute" for "two melodious
forefingers." Clearly, it does not say much for Mr. Henley's powers as a
virtuoso that Stevenson should have "counterfeited his playing on the
piano."
But Stevenson's particular instrument was the flageolet, the same that
Johnson once bought. Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was
merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he
liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt
about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are
full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised
instrument. "Played on my pipe," "took to tootling on the flageolet," are
entries which constantly occur, the context always making it clear that
"pipe" is synonymous with flageolet. "If I take to my pipe," he writes on
one occasion, "I know myself all is over for the morning." Writing to Mr.
Colvin in June, 1891, he says:--"Tell Mrs. S. I have been playing 'Le
Chant d'Amour' lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather
prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce
short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had
forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new,
when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence." Generally
speaking, Stevenson "tootled" by himself; but now and again he took part
in concerted music with Osborne and Mrs. Strong. One day he makes music
"furiously" with these two. A day or two later he writes:--"Woke at the
usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the
evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and
up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my
flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it,
and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves
into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their
individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the
springs shoving different ways--it took me till two." However, he got over
his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. "In the evening our
violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a
good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up
at nine." It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice,
Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. "Even my
clumsinesses are my joy," he said--"my woodcuts, my stumbling on the
pipe."
But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at
one time quite ousted the flageolet. "I am a great performer before the
Lord on the penny whistle," he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in
1888. "We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make
the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would
correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I
have always some childishness on hand." To play a bass of any kind on a
tin whistle must indeed have been "no joke." But the instrument appears to
have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed
to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called "A Child's
Garden of Verses." When he sent the manuscript for publication he could
not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he
tentatively fixed on "The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c." Then he
thought of a variation--"Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers," and directed
that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or
"a sheaf of 'em."
But Stevenson was more than a player of music: he actually tried his hand
at composition! In one letter of the year 1886 he sets down in musical
notation from memory a part of a dance air of Lully's. About the harmony,
which he has evidently made himself, he talks quite learnedly. "Where I
have put an A," he says, "is that a dominant eleventh or what? or just a
seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very
funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my
leading ignorance and curiosity) I have always to babble questions; all my
friends know me now, and take no notice whatever." A few months later and
he had composed his Opus 1. He called it a Threnody, and he sent it for
criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in
the art. Some plain talk on the part of the cousin apparently followed,
for we find the composer urging certain points in self-justification.
"There may be hidden fifths in it," he says, "and if there are it shows
how damn spontaneous the thing was. I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a
piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody which was poured forth
like blood and water on the groaning organ." There was the true composer,
putting down his inspiration as it came to him, and allowing it to stand
as it was in defiance of all rule! Nothing daunted, he made another
attempt. "Herewith another shy," he said, "more melancholy than before,
but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good
as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the damn
bareness of the base, it looks like a real piece of music from a distance.
I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time. The base was of
synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, and may God
have mercy on their souls." That is too characteristically charming to be
spoiled by comment.