It was at Bunsen’s house, at a matinée musicale, that I saw him last. He took the liveliest interest in my work, the edition of the Rig Veda, the Sacred Hymns of the Brâhmans. A great friend of his, Friedrich Rosen, had begun the same work, but had died before the first volume was finished. He was a brother of the wife of Mendelssohn’s great friend, Klingemann, then Hanoverian Chargé d’Affaires in London, a poet many of whose poems were set to music by Mendelssohn. So Mendelssohn knew all about the Sacred Hymns of the Brâhmans, and talked very intelligently about the Veda. He was, however, subjected to a very severe trial of patience soon after. The room was crowded with what is called the best society of London, and Mendelssohn being asked to play, never refused. He played several things, and at last Beethoven’s so-called “Moonlight Sonata.” All was silence and delight; no one moved, no one breathed aloud. Suddenly in the middle of the Adagio, a stately dowager sitting in the front row was so carried away by the rhythm, rather than by anything else, of Beethoven’s music, that she began to play with her fan, and accompanied the music by letting it open and shut with each bar. Everybody stared at her, but it took time before she perceived her atrocity, and at last allowed her fan to collapse. Mendelssohn in the meantime kept perfectly quiet, and played on; but, when he could stand it no longer, he simply repeated the last bar in arpeggios again and again, following the movements of her fan; and when at last the fan stopped, he went on playing as if nothing had happened. I dare say that when the old dowager thanked him for the great treat he had given her, he bowed without moving a muscle of his inspired face. How different from another player who, when disturbed by some noise in the audience, got up in a rage and declared that either she or the talker must leave the room.
And yet I have no doubt the old lady enjoyed the music in her own way, for there are many ways of enjoying music. I have known people who could not play a single instrument, who could not sing “God save the Queen” to save their life, in eloquent raptures about Mendelssohn, nay, about Beethoven and Bach. I believe they are perfectly honest in their admiration, though how it is done I cannot tell. I began by saying that people who have no music in them need not be traitors, and I alluded to my dear friend Stanley. He actually suffered from listening to music, and whenever he could, he walked out of the room where there was music. He never disguised his weakness, he never professed any love or admiration for music, and yet Jenny Lind once told me he paid her the highest compliment she had ever received. Stanley was very fond of Jenny Lind, but when she stayed at his father’s palace at Norwich he always left the room when she sang. One evening Jenny Lind had been singing Händel’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” Stanley, as usual, had left the room, but he came back after the music was over, and went shyly up to Jenny Lind. “You know,” he said, “I dislike music; I don’t know what people mean by admiring it. I am very stupid, tone-deaf, as others are colourblind. But,” he said with some warmth, “to-night, when from a distance I heard you singing that song, I had an inkling of what people mean by music. Something came over me which I had never felt before; or, yes, I had felt it once before in my life.” Jenny Lind was all attention. “Some years ago,” he continued, “I was at Vienna, and one evening there was a tattoo before the palace performed by four hundred drummers. I felt shaken, and to-night while listening to your singing, the same feeling came over me; I felt deeply moved.” “Dear man,” she added, “I know he meant it, and a more honest compliment I never received in all my life.”
However, unmusical as Stanley’s house was, Jenny Lind, or Mrs. Goldschmidt as she was then, often came to stay there. “It is so nice,” she said; “no one talks music, there is not even a pianoforte in the house.” This did not last long however. A few days after she said to me: “I hear you have a pianoforte in your rooms at All Souls’. Would you mind my practising a little?” And practise she did, and delightful it was. She even came to dine in College, and after dinner she said in the most charming way: “Do you think your friends would like me to sing?” Of course, I could not have asked her to sing, but there was no necessity for asking my friends. In fact, not only my friends listened with delight to her singing, but the whole quadrangle of All Souls’ was black with uninvited listeners, and the applause after each song was immense, both inside and outside the walls of the College.
Stanley’s feeling about music reminds me of another music-hater at Oxford, the late Dr. Gaisford, the famous Dean of Christ Church. It was he who put my name on the books of “The House,” a very great honour to an unknown German scholar on whom the University, at his suggestion, had just conferred the degree of M.A. What the Dean’s idea of music was may best be judged from his constantly appointing old scouts or servants who were too old to do their work any longer as bedmakers to be singing men in the Cathedral choir. The Dean’s stall was under the organ, and one day in every month, when “The voice of Thy thunder was heard round about, and the lightnings shone upon the ground, and the earth was moved and shook withal,” a certain key in the organ made the seat on which the Dean sat vibrate under him. On that day, before he left the Cathedral, he invariably thanked the organist, Dr. Corfe, for the nice tune he had played.
Music, in fact, was at a very low ebb at Oxford when I arrived there. The young men would have considered it almost infra dignitatem to play any instrument; the utmost they would do was now and then to sing a song. Yet there was much love of music, and many of my young and old friends were delighted when I would play to them. There was only one other person at Oxford then who was a real musician and who played well, Professor Donkin, a great mathematician, and altogether a man sui generis. He was a great invalid; in fact, he was dying all the years I knew him, and was fully aware of it. It seemed to be quite admissible, therefore, that he, being an invalid, and I, being a German, should “make music” at evening parties; but to ask a head of a house or a professor, or even a senior tutor, to play would have been considered almost an insult. And yet I feel certain there is more love, more honest enjoyment of music in England than anywhere else.
And how has the musical tide risen at Oxford since those days! Some of the young men now come up to college as very good performers on the pianoforte and other instruments. I never know how they learn it, considering the superior claims which cricket, football, the river, nay, the classics and mathematics also have on their time at school. There are musical clubs now at Oxford where the very best classical music may be heard performed by undergraduates with the assistance of some professional players from London. All this is due to the influence of Sir F. Ouseley, and still more of Sir John Stainer, both professors of Music at Oxford. They have made music not only respectable, but really admired and loved among the undergraduates. Sir John Stainer has been indefatigable, and the lectures which he gives both on the science and history of music are crowded by young and old. They are real concerts, in which he is able to illustrate all he has to say with the help of a well-trained choir of Oxford amateurs. As to myself, I have long become a mere listener. One learns the lesson, whether one likes it or not, that there is a time for everything. Old fingers grow stiff and will no longer obey, and if one knows how a sonata of Beethoven ought to be played, it is most painful to play it badly. So at last I said: “Farewell!” The sun has set, though the clouds are roseate still with reflected rays. It may be that I have given too much time to music, but what would life have been without it? I do not like to exaggerate, or say anything that is not quite true. Musical ears grow sensitive to anything false, whether sharp or flat. But let us be quite honest, quite plain. Is there not in music, and in music alone of all the arts, something that is not entirely of this earth? Harmony and rhythm may be under settled laws; and in that sense mathematicians may be right when they call mathematics silent music. But whence comes melody? Surely not from what we hear in the street, or in the woods, or on the sea-shore, not from anything that we hear with our outward ears, and are able to imitate, to improve, or to sublimise. Neither history nor evolution will help us to account for Schubert’s “Trockne Blumen.” Here, if anywhere, we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven to earth, and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth earthy. Melodies, however, are not of this earth, and the greatest of musical poets has truly said:—
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS
I
I am the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance gracefully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work I have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to their thoughts in rhyme and metre. Some of the more honest among them have even gone so far as to confess that their best thoughts had often been suggested to them by the rhyme. Platen may be quite right when he says:
Was stets und aller Orten sich ewig jung erweist