Many years ago, during a Salisbury administration, I was in a train on the Great Northern, sitting with my back to the engine in one corner of a carriage, and at Hatfield a bishop got in, and sat with his back to the engine in the other corner. There was nobody else in the carriage, and he must have forgotten that I was there, as he started talking to himself. Apparently, he had been recommending some one for preferment, and now had qualms of conscience as to what he had been saying. “I said his preaching was admired by competent judges.” Pause. “Well, so it is. **** admires it, so does ****, and they’re competent judges. I didn’t say that I admired it.” Long pause. “I said he was a convinced Christian.” Pause. “Well, he is convinced. I didn’t say he wasn’t quarrelsome.” I thought it time to make my presence known.
Amongst the letters here I found one to my father from myself, Trinity College, Cambridge, 17 November 1877:—“I saw Darwin made a Doctor in the Senate House to-day. Huxley and Tyndall and the rest of them were there; and there were two stuffed monkeys—one with a musical-box inside it—suspended from the galleries by cords and dangled over Darwin’s head.”
The present Master of Trinity was headmaster at Harrow, while I was there. In his study one afternoon he was adjusting the accents on some of my Greek verses; and at last, pointing to a misplaced circumflex, he asked me how that could possibly go there. I answered him quite honestly that I didn’t know and didn’t care. It was rather a risky thing to say to a headmaster; but in the evening I received a parcel, and found it was Dean Stanley’s Life of Arnold—“C.T. from H.M.B. Harrow. Novʳ. 4. 1875.” I suppose my candour pleased him. I know he was quite snappish at my telling him that I put enclitics in for emphasis, when obviously I put them in to make my verses scan.
It was in my time at Harrow that Forty Years On was written and composed; and I helped to sing it at the concert on Founder’s Day, 10 October 1872, which was the first time it was sung in public. Forty years seemed a very long while then, and does not seem much now; and I see more meaning in “Shorter in wind, though in memory long, What shall it profit you that once you were strong.”
For many years I wasted time in trying to play the piano, until at last I saw that I should never play effectively, and then I gave it up. Curiously, my grandfather went through this process with the flute, though I never knew it till I found a letter of his just now:—2 April 1843, “I once had a great wish to learn the flute, and attended to it, and learnt all that was necessary, but could not make any advancement for want of an ear for it. I could play a tune by notes, but not give it that pleasing air that others could, for want of an ear. Therefore I considered it was time badly spent, and dropt it.” I think the fault was with the fingers more than with the ear. Had the ear been altogether bad, our bad playing might have pleased us.
My father had no ear at all for music, yet went to Oratorios, and slept comfortably through them all, except Haydn’s Creation with its disturbing bursts of sound. At the Opera he kept awake, as that was something more than music; and for some years he went pretty regularly—five-and-twenty times in the season of 1853, and so on. But he cared less for such things as the première of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini on 25 June 1853, than for the spectacle on 19 April 1855, when Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie came there with Queen Victoria. The best spectacle I ever saw, for opera and audience combined, was Glinka’s Life for the Czar at Moscow on the Czar’s name-day, 11 September 1889.
I went to the Opera for the first time on 25 May 1863. It was Meyerbeer’s Prophête; and I can still recall the scenery and dresses and acting, and make comparisons with later performances, though I cannot recall the singing at any performance vividly enough to compare it with the singing at another. I suppose my taste in operas has varied with the fashion, and also with my time of life. I was told some years ago, by one of our few living poets, that there was only one opera in the world, and that was Gluck’s Orfeo. I should say that others have also run, but otherwise I now agree with him.
A letter from my brother to my father—Wreyland, 30 June 1853—comes strangely from a boy of six. “My Dear Papa, I am very much displeased at your not answering my letter. there is a great fault in you about those things. and I hope you will answer this. two letters would be the sum but I would not trouble you to write two for one long one would be enough.... I know that you are quite an oprea [Opera] man. but you must not expect me to go to that Theatre for I do not like always to see things showy but I want something full of frolic such as the Merry Wives Of Windsor. that is what I want to see.” He knew Shakespeare too well. My grandfather writes to my father, 12 September 1854:—“He is always reading Shakespeare, and gets hold of all improper words: he made use of some to-day.”
The antics of some of the conductors used to amuse me as a boy. They waved their heads and arms, and swayed their bodies, as if they were intoxicated with the music. And then Maud Allan arose upon the stage, and did everything they would have done, were they not compelled to keep their seats. I was at one of her first performances in London; and there was no crowding or applause, such as was usual afterwards—in fact the audience did not quite know what to make of it.
She was not the earliest of these dancers—Isidora Duncan was before her—but she had the advantage of being highly trained as a musician before she took to dancing; and certainly her dancing made me understand much music that I never understood before. I had some correspondence with Dr Raymond Duncan—the brother of Isidora—about the music of the ancient Greeks. He claimed to speak with knowledge; but his logic was too easy for me—the Greeks did everything that was beautiful: this is beautiful: therefore the Greeks did it. I could not see how this would solve such problems as the structure of the tetrachords.