John Runciman was one of the bright, particular lights at the inn. He was a very unconscious man with a brave brain and would quietly say anything he pleased. He was also a musician of no mean attainment and could sit at the piano with his back turned to the keys and play Chopin well enough to suit me. He had the audacity to write the musical criticisms for the Saturday Review (Frank Harris being the editor at the time), and all the time he was living in the Fontainebleau Forest! I asked him how he could manage to satisfy his readers without having heard the concerts.
“Oh,” he replied, “one conductor always plays too fast, and a certain soprano invariably breaks on her high C. Besides, I know all the music, and the public does not want anything new in the way of criticism.”
Runciman once showed me a magazine which he had saved, with an article by Stevenson telling how he had written Treasure Island. He was down in Bournemouth for his health, and at the same place was a little boy who was dying of tuberculosis. Stevenson composed the tale for him and got him to draw the map of the island as he had imagined it. This he sent with the manuscript, to London to the publisher. Through some carelessness in the office, the boy’s drawing was lost, and, although Robert Louis Stevenson tried to do it from memory, he declared it was greatly inferior to the naïve child’s fancy.
I hesitate to tell about something that I have always thought very beautiful, and that is the song of the nightingale, but I remember some typical Gopher Prairie people coming to Grez and, doubtless, being disappointed at the abandoned street, the dogs, and the hens, when remaining up especially to hear the songbird, said that they had been awakened many times by that sound, but had “always thought it was the croaking of frogs.”
However it may have sounded to the Middle West, it was sufficiently beautiful to my untrained musical ear to make me journey back to Grez twenty years later to hear it again. You can take a scientific or sentimental view of the flight of the queen bee, and I prefer to hold with Maeterlinck.
No birds in the world make real music except the nightingale and the wood thrush. The remainder whistle. Shelley’s lark is the ideal of the going to heaven and disappearing, but there is no song. This little bird in our dark wood coppice used to come out and sit on a garden post at night and commit suicide from love in such a way as nearly to tear his throat apart. Look out how you take it seriously, though, for the next minute after you are sure the life has gone out of his body he is fooling you by gurgling such sentimental poppycock as “I took you away and made you love me.” All the way from Hamlet to Pierrot, it is music burbling through blood and tears.
V. Stuttgart
It is a far cry from Paris to Stuttgart, but my only experience of Germany is in this town, and there are several things about it that I like to remember. The greatest impression left to me is the music, everything was permeated with it. I have never been able to perform on any instrument, and my only claim to singing is that I could yell louder than anyone else in school, but some how I have always felt the rhythms inside, and the wonder to me was to see a whole race of people who were musicians. In the later afternoon the workmen come home from their work in the vineyards, fifteen or twenty of them in one group. They fall into singing quite naturally, each one taking the part best suited to his voice, while away down the road another group will take up the melody, fitting in perfect harmony, until the whole has formed a large chorus, singing in accord. I often think it is a pity that we do not have something like that, but I suppose that these songs must be the growth of the soil—and we are too young.
Many years ago—I do not know how many—a citizen left a sum of money in his will, providing for music to be played from the cathedral tower at twelve o’clock noon. I do not know if he directed the kind of music it should be, but in my time it was provided by four stringed instruments. Just after the clock had struck the hour, proclaiming that the weary worker might pause and rest, this music would come down from the sky, as if some heavenly chorus were singing.
My host in Stuttgart was a scion of one of the aristocratic families, and I had a chance to peep into the gay German life of the period. We used to lunch quite often at the officers’ mess of a certain smart cavalry regiment who were noted for their daring and bravery as well as for lavish entertaining. A most amazing habit that these genial souls indulged in struck horror to my very marrow. At regular intervals, as a test, they were required to ride a distance of twenty miles. Tied to the saddlebow was a magnum of champagne, and they must drink this on the way, the one reaching the end of the journey first being considered the real male of the crowd. This was not so bad, but they did not hesitate to run down peasants and kill them without compunction. Their foolhardiness and utter indifference to the lives of the country people was an ingrained part of their natures, and no one seemed to think anything about it. It was considered a huge joke if one of the cavalry officers was found later thrown from his horse into the bushes and dead drunk.