“If you mean the concerts that have been going on this season, yes, I do,” said the Professor, in a bland, good-humored way.
“And do you take real pleasure in the din of all those screeching and banging and growling instruments?”
“Yes,” he answered, modestly, “I enjoy the brouhaha, if you choose to consider it such, of all this quarrelsome menagerie of noise-making machines, brought into order and harmony by the presiding genius, the leader, who has made a happy family of these snarling stringed instruments and whining wind instruments, so that although
“Linguae centum sent, oraque centum,
“notwithstanding there are a hundred vibrating tongues and a hundred bellowing mouths, their one grand blended and harmonized uproar sets all my fibres tingling with a not unpleasing tremor.”
“Do you understand it? Do you take any idea from it? Do you know what it all means?” said Number Seven.
The Professor was long-suffering under this series of somewhat peremptory questions. He replied very placidly, “I am afraid I have but a superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the unfathomable mysteries, of music. I can no more conceive of the working conditions of the great composer,
“'Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony,'
“than a child of three years can follow the reasonings of Newton's 'Principia.' I do not even pretend that I can appreciate the work of a great master as a born and trained musician does. Still, I do love a great crash of harmonies, and the oftener I listen to these musical tempests the higher my soul seems to ride upon them, as the wild fowl I see through my window soar more freely and fearlessly the fiercer the storm with which they battle.”
“That's all very well,” said Number Seven, “but I wish we could get the old-time music back again. You ought to have heard,—no, I won't mention her, dead, poor girl,—dead and singing with the saints in heaven,—but the S____ girls. If you could have heard them as I did when I was a boy, you would have cried, as we all used to. Do you cry at those great musical smashes? How can you cry when you don't know what it is all about? We used to think the words meant something,—we fancied that Burns and Moore said some things very prettily. I suppose you've outgrown all that.”