All this time the poor woman on whose shoulder I was leaning stood silent and motionless, gazing with apparent tranquillity on her burning house. I remember saying to her with a shudder—"But this is dreadful! to stand by and look on while one's home and property are destroyed!" And she replied quietly, "Yes, ma'am; but I dare say some good will come of it. All is for the best, if one knew it; and now Jemmy's safe, I don't care for the rest." Now Jemmy was not her son, as I found, but a poor little orphan, of whom she took charge.
There had been at first a scarcity of water, but a hole being hewed through the ice on the lake, the supply was soon quick and plentiful. All would have been well over, if the sudden fall of a stack of chimneys had not caused some horrible injuries. One poor boy was killed, and some others maimed—poor Mr. B. among the number. After this I returned home rather heart-sick; and nigh to the house a sleigh glanced by at full gallop, on which I could just perceive, in the moonlight, the extended form of a man with his hands clenched over his head—as in agony, or lifeless.
MUSIC.
March 1.
In the different branches of art, each artist thinks his own the highest, and is filled with the idea of all its value and all its capabilities which he understands best and has most largely studied and developed. "But," says Dr. Chalmers, "we must take the testimony of each man to the worth of that which he does know, and reject the testimony of each to the comparative worthlessness of that which he does not know." For it is not, generally speaking, that he overrates his own particular walk of art from over enthusiasm, (no art, when considered separately, as a means of human delight and improvement, can be over-rated,) but such a one-sided artist, whose mind and powers have flowed in only one direction, underrates from ignorance the walks of others which diverge from his own.
Of all artists, musicians are most exclusive in devotion to their own art, and in the want of sympathy, if not absolute contempt, for other arts. A painter has more sympathies with a musician, than a musician with a painter. Vernet used to bring his easel into Pergolesi's room, to paint beside his harpsichord, and used to say that he owed some of his finest skies to the inspired harmonies of his friend. Pergolesi never felt, perhaps, any harmonies but those of his own delicious art.
"Aspasia, he who loves not music is a beast of one species, and he who overloves it is a beast of another, whose brain is smaller than a nightingale's, and his heart than that of a lizard!" I refer you for the rest to a striking passage in Landor's "Pericles and Aspasia," containing a most severe philippic, not only against the professors, but the profession, of music, and which concludes very aptly, "Panenus said this: let us never believe a word of it!" It is too true that some excellent musicians have been ignorant, and sensual, and dissipated; but there are sufficient exceptions to the sweeping censure of Panenus to show that "imprudence, intemperance, and gluttony" do not always, or necessarily, "open their channels into the sacred stream of music." Musicians are not selfish, careless, sensual, ignorant, because they are musicians, but because, from a defective education, they are nothing else. The German musicians are generally more moral and more intellectual men than English or Italian musicians, and hence their music has taken a higher flight, is more intellectual than the music of other countries. Music as an art has not degraded them, but they have elevated music.
The most accomplished and intellectual musician I ever met with is Felix Mendelssohn. I do not recollect if it were himself or some one else who told me of a letter which Carl von Weber had addressed to him, warning him that he never could attain the highest honours in his profession without cultivating the virtues and the decencies of life. "A great artist," said Weber, "ought to be a good man."
While I am "i' the vein," I must give you a few more musical reminiscences before my fingers are quite frozen.