The cosmopolitan nature of the German speaks to all the world in his music. Of all national musics it is the grandest and the most developed: we see this in the position it gives to rhythms. National musics with undeveloped rhythms are the speech of people just awakening, while music that has them strongly marked and regularly introduced belongs to people of fully-matured energies. Only in the Jodlers and Landlers of the Tyrolese, Austrian and Swiss mountains is the original Teutonic iambic preserved in its purity. In all other German music every kind of rhythm is met with, no kind being predominant. For the musical language of Germany embraces not only the few octaves of passion, but the whole keyboard of existence. It has preludes, symphonies and sonatas for every phase of life. Nothing smaller than this range would suffice to express the multiform ideas of a people so thoughtful and cosmopolitan. And though by this universal sympathy German music may have lost a purely national life, it is a most sufficing compensation to have gained the power of expressing the ideas of a whole epoch.
Musical taste in America is in progress of formation. We have no national music: we have not even a decided preference for any style. We like Beethoven and Chopin, but we also like Rossini and Donizetti and delight in Lecocq and Sullivan. In no respect is the national pride so utterly forgotten as in music. We give to all schools a fair hearing. The great German masters are household words: the national music of every land is welcome. We have been learning to like Italian opera at an insane cost; we have kindly winked at the follies of opera-bouffe; probably nowhere in the world are the intellectual depths of a German symphony and the passionate declamation of an Italian recitative more thoroughly appreciated. This is the natural musical exposition of our complex and various life. This wondrous variety, which indicates possibilities not yet revealed, pleases us without being always clear to our feelings and intellect. Still, we shall not ask, with the Frenchman, "Sonate, que veux-tu?" We are satisfied with what the present affords, and what new masters shall appear or what new instruments be invented we know not. Always the epochs will have their own interpreter. One hundred years ago who had imagined a Weber or Steinway piano, that piece of furniture with a soul in it?
It has been suggested to me while writing this paper that national melodies are in a great measure influenced by the physical features of the country in which they rise. I think very little so. It is true that the music of all mountainous countries has many points of resemblance, but it is because the people of such countries have strong mental and moral similitudes. Savages are not inspired by the most lovely scenery, and a collection of national airs from different parts of the world would not reveal to us whether they were written in valleys or on mountains or by the sounding seashore.
There are distinct ensigns by which national music may be as promptly detected as a ship by its colors. Spanish airs have in them the rapid twinkling, so to speak, of the guitar; the mountain-melodies of Switzerland recall the open notes of the Alp-horn; the Irish and Scotch musics have their marks as plainly impressed upon them as the physiognomy of the peoples is distinct, and it is nothing to the purpose to say that they have been cleverly imitated: the mark still remains a fact, and is the mysterious specialty that thrills the rich, the poor, the soldier and the churchman, the peasant and the exile. Whatever analogy exists between a country and its music is mainly with the inward character of the people themselves, and is generally too profound to be theorized upon. We only know that at every step we advance in the science of music we are deciphering what is written within us, not transcribing anything from without.
Nor as Americans are we insensible to the value of a national music. The few airs which have any claim to represent us in this capacity have done service that no money can estimate. During the late war wherever the rebel flag was raised it was necessary to silence "Yankee Doodle." Like the "Marseillaise," it was an institution before which its enemies trembled; and when we have produced or annexed something infinitely grander we shall not forget the saucy, free-and-easy, mind-your-own-business melody that carried the nation cheerfully through two great crises.
Amelia E. Barr.
MALLSTON'S YOUNGEST.
The railroad-village of Fairfield woke up one spring morning and found a clumsy blue car, with a skylight in its roof, standing on the common near the blacksmith-shop. Horses and tongue were already removed, the former being turned into the tavern pasture and the latter stowed in the tavern barn. A small sky-colored ladder led up to the door of this artistic heaven, which remained closed long after a crowd of loungers had gathered around it.
The Fairfield loungers were famously lazy savages, though to the last degree good-natured and obliging. They wore butternut overalls and colored shirts, a few adding the picturesque touch of bright handkerchiefs and broad straw hats: there were a few coats in various stages of rags and grease, and one or two pairs of boots, but the wearers of these put on no airs over the long ankles and sprawling toes which blossomed around them. The whole smoking, stoop-shouldered, ill-scented throng were descendants of that Tennessee and Carolina element which more enterprising Hoosiers deplore, because in every generation it repeats the ignorance and unthrift branded so many years ago into the "poor white" of the South.