April, 1820.—Attended Dr. Crotch’s lecture on music at the Royal Institution.
‘The student should distrust his own taste, and also that of any master who advises a scholar to copy him exclusively. He must distrust the oracles of fashion. Fashion can operate neither as a guide, nor yet as a beacon, being sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. He must carefully distinguish applause from fame. The first may be given from various causes, independent of merit, and may be only temporary; while fame is the consolidated opinion of the best judges, increasing from year to year, till in the lapse of time it bears down, as it rolls along, the opposition which interest, prejudice, or fashion may have raised. The works of the best ancient masters stand on this firm foundation, and therefore ought to be the student’s chief study. If he does not admire them at first, let him dwell upon them till he does.
‘But some will say, The best music is that which naturally pleases those who have not studied the science. This is not the case. Among a number of hearers, the majority will be best pleased by music of an inferior kind; and something analogous to this takes place in all the arts. The finest efforts of art will only appear such to the finest judges, who are always rare. A good ear and good general taste is not sufficient to qualify a man for being a judge of music. We often hear such an one desire to be lulled to sleep by what pleases him most. If he was really a judge, the best music would much more probably keep him awake. Vocal performers are bad judges of instrumental, and instrumental of vocal music.
‘Music may be divided into the sublime, the beautiful, the ornamental. From “To Thee, Cherubim,” to “the majesty of Thy glory,” in Handel’s Te Deum on the battle of Dettingen, is sublime. Pergolesi’s “Dove sei,” in Eurydice, is beautiful. Handel’s Fifth Harpsichord Lesson is ornamental. The sources of the sublime are awe, magnitude or extent, simplicity, and intricacy. A chorus of heavenly beings uniting in praise of their Creator, is an awful and sublime idea, awakened by many of Handel’s compositions. The full effect of an orchestra reaching to the heights and depths of musical sound, gives an idea of vastness and extent. Simplicity from the powerful effect it conveys of a single feeling, creates conceptions of intensity and force. Thus the unadorned columns of a Grecian temple are sublime in their simplicity and reiteration; while in a Gothic cathedral, the intricacy of infinitude gives the same result of sublimity.’[62]
April 9.—A conversation passed at Lord Clifden’s on the delusive opinion that authors were best known by their works, and on the possibility of a Revolution in England. The combination of these two ideas produced the following extract from a Review, supposed to be carried on a century hence by the descendants of some of our noble families, then obliged to write for subsistence, and edited in Birmingham, then become one of the chief seats of literature.
From an article in The Birmingham Review of 1920, on Howard’s Lives of the Poets:—
It is lamentable that the late civil wars have destroyed nearly all the private memoirs of those writers who flourished in the 19th century. The number of libraries burnt by the insurgents, or made into ball-cartridges by both parties, or bought up by charitable associations and boiled down into jelly, to make nourishing soups for the poor during the years of famine, have left us no materials from whence to collect any account of that pleasing versifier, Rogers, who forms a sort of link between the minor poets of the time and such powerful writers as Scott and Byron. Yet, in fact, an author is best known by his works; and we do not hesitate to pronounce Samuel Rogers one of the mildest of men, wholly without gall, and partaking largely of the quality our friends the French call bonhomie. There are no strokes of wit, vivacity, or powerful imagination in his writings; but so much mildness, and such exquisite feeling for all the tendernesses of domestic life, as speak him one whom to know was to love, who never suffered a sharp word to pass his lips, and in whom his friends could have had no fault to lament but an excess of meekness. Indeed, this is strongly proved in his permitting his Jaqueline to be bound up in most unequal alliance with Byron’s Lara and an offensive preface, in which the latter jocosely, but rudely, establishes a comparison between them.
Some have suggested that it is probable he may have been Byron’s domestic chaplain. We know this noble author (to speak in the jargon of those days), after being suspected of philosophical principles, became extremely superstitious, having even proceeded so far as to publish a volume of hymns, a change that may have been caused by his grief for the elopement of his wife, which seems, from his pathetic ‘Farewell,’ to have affected him deeply. We cannot, however, adopt this opinion, as The Revᵈ. was always prefixed to the names of the national clergy, till that order was dissolved by the seventeenth General Assembly in 1870. Rogers may, however, have been one of the numerous Dissenters of his time. We think we see him, with an affectionate wife, and half a dozen rosy children like himself, free from envy or solicitude, his honest face beaming with health and cheerfulness, retired and contented—‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot.’