But the Dean may have Southey. He is surrendered freely and ungrudgingly. He certainly had no feeling for music and no desire to feel it. "You are alive to know what follows," he says, describing a play, "and lo!—down comes the curtain and the fiddles begin their abominations." The fiddles begin their abominations! Take Bob Southey out, good Dean, and relieve us of his unctuous presence. And I am afraid we must let the Dean have Scott, too, though I part with him with sorrow. "I do not know and cannot utter a note of music," wrote Sir Walter; "and complicated harmonies seem to me a babble of confused though pleasing sounds." Pleasing, you observe. I am not sure that we cannot snatch Sir Walter from the Dean's clutches after all. We must part with Tennyson and Ruskin, neither of whom had the sense of music, and with Macaulay, who could only recognise one tune—The Campbells are Coming. But we cannot let the Dean have Coleridge, for though he disclaimed any understanding of complicated harmonies, he admits that he loved to hear Beethoven, and the man who could appreciate Beethoven a hundred years ago must not go in the Dean's gloomy galley.
Nor shall old Sam Johnson go there, though he confessed that he was insensible to the power of music. "I told him," says Boswell, "that it affected me to such a degree as to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution, so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest part of the battle. 'Sir,' said he, 'I should never hear it if it made me such a fool.'" But I claim Samuel on the ground that during the tour in the Hebrides he heard with rapt attention the performance of the Lament of the Scalded Cat, and still more because at Ashbourne he listened patiently to a great number of tunes on the fiddle, and desired to have Let ambition fire thy mind played over again. It is a small thing, I own—a trivial ground on which to claim him. I have never heard Let ambition fire thy mind, but the incident shows that Johnson had the root of the matter in him. Would the Dean, or Bob Southey, have asked to have Let ambition fire thy mind played over again? Would they have listened with rapt attention to The Lament of the Scalded Cat? Not they.
But even in the case of the Dean there is one pale, watery gleam of light in the general gloom. He knows John Peel. In his sombre heart that jolly song perhaps wakens some latent emotion of joy. It may be that with that key to the prison he might yet be rescued from his dungeon and turned into a happier man. Why should not the choir of St. Paul's try to convert him? Let them step across the Churchyard at night to the Dean's recess and ask in resonant chorus—
D'ye ken John Peel wi' his coat so grey?
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D'ye ken John Peel when he's far, far away
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?
and go on asking until the Dean comes to the window with the response—
Yes, I ken John Peel, and Ruby too.
Ranter and Ringwood, Bellman and True,
From a find to a check, from a check to a view.
From a view to a death in the morning.
And now, gentlemen, the chorus, if you please— all together:
For the sound of his horn called me from my bed, etc.
It would be a great night in St. Paul's Churchyard, and it might do the Dean good. And we should all rejoice to hear him make a joyful noise for a change, even though it could not be called music.