I heard “King Billy,” the Australian Aboriginal King, play the violin by the kerb-side in Sydney. He was the world’s worst “great violinist,” made a squeaking row and thought more of the cash the Colonials dropped in his tin pot than of the melody which he performed.
River Scene, West Africa
An artistic public performance on the violin is widely divided from the poetry of violin-playing in solitude, out of sheer love to express the performer’s feelings and relieve the tension of sorrow and joy that is oppressing him. When I was a boy, staying at Leichardt, in Sydney, I heard someone playing the violin and accompanying his playing with his own voice. The sound came from a little wooden house on a flat. I stood still and listened. It was dusk. On the window was a bit of scribbled paper: “Room to let, cheap.” That gave me a good excuse, for I was intensely curious to see the man who played and sang so beautifully. I knocked at the door and was asked in, and I got in conversation with the player. He was a Norwegian with a handsome face, but unshaved and worried-looking. His wife was about thirty years older than he was, and as he played to me she sat near and her old wrinkled face beamed with delight as I praised his playing. He played by ear and was self-taught. I could easily see that. But he was a great violinist. He expressed his very soul as he played, in a weird, peculiar style, Norwegian melodies. I felt greatly drawn toward him as he played and sang to me, looking past me with steady, dreaming eyes as he extemporised sweet strains. He had hard, rough hands, through working on the roads. I saw him night after night. I thought at first that his wife was his mother, and I said, “Your son is a real musician.” When he smiled at me and said, “My wife, not mother,” I felt very uncomfortable. He took her old wrinkled hand and led her into the little kitchen and kissed her tenderly. I suppose Norwegian women age quickly, or they had fallen in love with each other when he was quite a lad; but it was beautiful to see their sincere, sweetheart-like affection for each other.
He secured a job on the Broken Hill Silver Mines, packed up and went off to Melbourne. I never saw him again. I often think of him and his clever, handsome face as he sat breathing heavily and playing and singing to me. He would have been better than Joachim and Kubelik if he had had their technical equipment and no road stones to break and ruin his hands. I cannot remember any special feelings when I heard the great violinists, Joachim, Kubelik and Kreisler, except curiosity and momentary admiration, but the memory of the stone-breaking Norwegian’s playing is as vivid to-day as then; and when I think of it all the poetic atmosphere of his playing still haunts me. So if it’s true that Time is the great critic of poetry and music, then assuredly, as far as I am concerned, my Norwegian friend was the greatest violinist I ever heard.
It is difficult to define art. I suppose anything that appeals to the best emotions in men and women is art. A good deal of what is known as art to-day will soon be cast on the rubbish heap of the mediæval ages with the old ideals and idols. People move in the realms of art as they do in frock-coats; it must be just so, and must have three buttons on the front only; if it has four buttons it’s not art. Art should be natural and oblivious of fashion, and, like true religion, beautiful in rags and tatters, pale-faced, walking the streets of humanity, singing with the birds and stars, and looked down upon by affluence.
Do the thousands who hear Wagner understand the depth and meaning of the music as Wagner thought they would understand? Do they hear the barbarian note in his music that tells so well of the savagery of the German people, the barbarian shriek, the exultation over the fallen and the tramp of bloodthirsty warriors driving the helpless victims of the fallen cities before them? I do not think so. It’s fashionable, and to have heard Wagner is to be in the fashion, and so off people go and hear and see “Wagner.” Most of them would more thoroughly understand and enjoy a phonographic record of a Solomon Islander’s cannibalistic dance, accompanied by living pictures of the scantily clad native men and women, beating their drums and whirling round the blushing bride, clad in half a coco-nut shell and her hair only. Their funerals are conducted with the same austere art that makes them all go and see Wagner.
I like Beethoven and Mendelssohn’s concertos, also Schubert’s music, indeed all the really good classical compositions, but my memory of the old chantey, Blow the Man Down, as I heard it sung, and sang it myself, with crooked-nosed old sailors as we rounded Cape Horn, with seas crashing over the decks and the flying scud racing the moon, the old skipper on the poop shouting, muffled to the teeth in oilskins, his grey beard swinging sideways to the wind as the full-rigged ship dipped and rolled homeward bound, is something of music, singing and haunting my soul, that will only die when my memory dies. I can still see the crew climbing aloft and along the yards, their shadows falling softly through the moonlit grey sails and yards on to the decks. Melodies from the sails aloft, gliding under the stars, still sing beautifully to me as I watch the sleeping sailors, far out at sea, in their tossing bunks. Then they stand by the galley door, with their mugs for the hot coffee, while the chief mate tramps away the night to and fro on the poop, humming Soon we’ll be in London Town. Then, as I dream, the sails crumble in the moonlight, the decks are awash, sink and disappear; sailors are struggling in the moonlit waters. Their white hands are tossed up as they sink, one by one; and now daybreak steals over the sky-lines that fence that vast grave of wandering waters.
Often memories play on the strings of my heart as I stand listening to the great orchestra of the winds fingering the giant forest boughs, or to the noise of seas on the moonlit shores.