Man ever longs for the dawn of a golden day,
Visions of joy in futurity sees,
Ah! he enjoyed Life’s cream in the olden day,
When he wore petticoats down to his knees!
Francis A. Fahy
MUSICAL EXPERIENCES AND IMPRESSIONS.
AT A GIRL’S SCHOOL—THE TONIC SOL-FA METHOD—PAYING AT THE DOOR—FLORAL OFFERINGS—DOROTHISIS.
Last Tuesday, when turning over my invitations, I found a card addressed to me, not in my ancestral title of Di Bassetto, but in the assumed name under which I conceal my identity in the vulgar business of life. It invited me to repair to a High School for Girls in a healthy south-western suburb, there to celebrate the annual prize-giving with girlish song and recitation. Here was exactly the thing for a critic. “Now is the time,” I exclaimed to my astonished colleagues, “to escape from our stale iterations of how Mr. Santley sang ‘The Erl King,’ and Mr. Sims Reeves ‘Tom Bowling’; of how the same old orchestra played Beethoven in C minor or accompanied Mr. Henschel in Pogner’s ‘Johannistag’ song, or Wotan’s ‘Farewell’ and ‘Fire Charm.’ Our business is to look with prophetic eye past these exhausted contemporary subjects into the next generation—to find out how much beauty and artistic feeling is growing up for the time when we shall be obsolete fogies, mumbling anecdotes of the funerals of our favourites.” Will it be credited that the sanity of my project and the good taste of my remarks were called in question, and that I was absolutely the only eminent critic who went to the school!
I found the school on the margin of a common, with which I have one ineffaceable association. It is not my custom to confine my critical opinions to the columns of the Press. In my public place I am ever ready to address my fellow-citizens orally until the police interfere. Now, it happens that once, on a fine Sunday afternoon, I addressed a crowd on this very common for an hour, at the expiry of which a friend took round a hat, and actually collected sixteen shillings and ninepence. The opulence and liberality of the inhabitants were thus very forcibly impressed on me; and when, last Tuesday, I made my way through a long corridor into the crowded schoolroom, my first thought, as I surveyed the row of parents, was whether any of them had been among the contributors to that memorable hatful of coin. My second was whether the principal of the school would have been pleased to see me had she known of the sixteen and ninepence.
When the sensation caused by my entrance had subsided somewhat, we settled down to a performance which consisted of music and recitation by the rising generation, and speechification by the risen one. The rising generation had the best of it. Whenever the girls did anything, we were delighted; whenever an adult began, we were bored to the very verge of possible endurance. The deplorable member of Parliament who gave away the prizes may be eloquent in the House of Commons; but before that eager, keen, bright, frank, unbedevilled, unsophisticated audience he quailed, he maundered, he stumbled, wanted to go on and couldn’t, wanted to stop and didn’t, and finally collapsed with a few remarks to the effect that he felt proud of himself, which struck me as being the most uncalled-for remark I ever heard, even from an M.P. The chairman was self-possessed, not to say hardened. He quoted statistics about Latin, arithmetic and other sordid absurdities, specially extolling the aptitude of the female mind since 1868 for botany. I incited a little girl near me to call out “Time” and “Question,” but she shook her head shyly, and said “Miss—— would be angry;” so he had his say out. Let him deliver that speech next Sunday on the common, and he will not get 16s. 9d. He will get stoned.