Musicians tell me that I am exceptionally fortunate. I know absolutely nothing of music. It is not a bald, fathomless innocence, however. I am not tone-deaf, for instance, and certain compositions please me; and, knowing nothing, I have been treated with indulgent complaisance by the profession, and amongst them I have the unique licence of being privileged to like whatever I choose. It is no small distinction this, nowadays, when one is nicely and strictly rated by his compliance to the regnant mode, but I have to fight tooth and nail to defend my innocence. I have determined that whatever happens, I will not be educated.
For a while, once on a time, I hazarded my franchise of free speech and weakly accepted the tutelage of a master, that I might at least gain a familiarity with the catch-words of the musical fraternity. It was the more reprehensible and foolish because I had already lost my virginity in art circles by the same servility. Long ago I learned to phrase and gesticulate at the picture galleries, and try as I may, I cannot forget the formulas. I learned to stand with eyes half closed before a painting, and waving my hand, murmur, "I like this part, in here!" I caught that knowing waggle of the right thumb, and prated of "modelling, tricky work, atmosphere, composition, values," and such humbuggery. I could say, straight-faced, and with a vicious, explosive gesture, "Oh, it's good in colour, but it just lacks that, you know!" By Jove! I was in it up to the ears before I knew it, and now my critiques are retailed to the semi-elect as coming from one of the Cognoscenti. I have learned the terminology of the craft so well that my very instructors have forgotten my novitiate; but an art exhibition is a horror to me, for I go bound by the tenure of hypocrisy and dare not walk freely, forced to rattle my chains as I limp through the forbidden pastures of delight--the candy box pictures and chromos that my soul loves with that fierce first love that never dies.
So I have learned to avoid the Pierian spring now, having escaped the seductions of Euterpe by the merest chance. He is said to be a fool who is caught twice by the same trick, and I write myself down a worse-witted clown yet when I confess how far on the high-road to folly I was before I jumped the fence of conventional parlance and broke for the wide fields where lies my freedom.
I had been led astray by practicing the non-committal remark, "Oh, what is that?" as soon as the piano keys cooled off from the startling massage of the furious performer. I was bold. I even dared to be the first to speak, and I threw ambiguous meanings into that well-known exclamation, for I was assured it was always safe, whether it followed a Moskowski mazurka hot from the blunt fingers of a Kansas City poor relation, or a somnolent Chopinian prelude hypnotized by the evening star. I learned that the statute of Absorbed Attention had expired, and that the lifted eyebrow, the semi-concealed shrug, the overt smile behind the performer's back, and the ex post facto rescindment of all these in one mucilaginous compliment, were now good taste. Bah! I sickened of it all soon enough, for I had been piously brought up, and my Puritan blood was anti-toxic to the corruptions of the musical microbe.
And so I have forgotten to speak of Grieg as a "mere sentimentalist" and all the rest of the Pharisee's Phrase-book, thank God! I can hear the "Mill in the Forest" and check up its verisimilitudes, item by item, even as I have dared to renew my youth with Charles Dickens, and laugh, cry, and grow hot and cold with Scott's marionettes.
Yet, as I said, my innocence is not altogether empty. There is, indeed, no such thing in life as absolute darkness; one's eyes revolt and hasten to fill the vacuum by floating in sparks, dream-patterns, figures whimsical and figures grotesque, shifting, clad in complimentary colors, to appease the indignant cups and rods of the retina. And so my musical ignorance is alive with a fey intelligence of its own. I have come at last to an original conception of what is good and what is bad by its mere psychological effect, as illogical as a woman's intuition, yet as absolute and empirical as the test of acid and alkali by litmus.
It has come to this, that I know now I shall never hear good music again. When I was young the phrase "classical music" was still extant (I come of the middle classes, where one calls a spade a spade), and that variety of sound, "the most expensive of noises," was as incomprehensible as was the training for its appreciation arduous; so that beauty for its own sake was unknown, or lurked behind the horizontal mountains of Truth that shut in the New England landscape.
But as my knowledge and love of art grew, and I mingled with those that spoke this foreign tongue of beauty, I had opportunity of hearing music, the only music that was worth while to them, the music that endures and lives, continually virile and creative. Curiously enough, and unhappily for me, so long a stranger to such influences, I found that some compositions spelled me with their subtlety, tranced me into revery, while others awakened active feelings of amusement, surprise, or scientific curiosity as to their construction; and so, ignorant of technique and composition, harmony, and all the rules of the art, I have gone back to the woman in me, and trust to her little ounce of instinct.
When the vibrant chords, the sobbing pulsations and the mystical nuances grow faint and die away as my dream mounts on the wings of an invisible melody, leaving the sawing bows, the brazen curly horns, the discs, cylinders, strings, keys, triangles, curves and tubes, with which paraphernalia the magicians of the orchestra have bewitched me, far, far, far below where I soar aloft, naked and alone in the secret spaces of my soul,--I know (not then, but afterward) that the talisman has been at work, and as the rhythm dies and I drop, drop to the world again and turn to the trembling, wide-eyed girl at my left, and am roused by the brutal applause that surges around me,--I know that this was music. But I have not heard it. Alas! Shall I never hear it?
A Music-Box Recital