“I was very near-sighted from about my 30th year; but though it is usually thought that that sort of sight improves with age, I have not discovered that the notion was well founded. My sight became not only more short, but more feeble. Instead of a concave glass, I was forced to have recourse to one that was convex, and that magnified highly, for pale ink and small types.”
Dr. Burney meets the Prince of Wales at Lady Salisbury’s, and, of course, is enchanted by him. At the same party is Lady Melbourne, an old pupil of the Doctor, who reproaches him with never having been to dine with her, and promptly mixes up a party, in which the heir apparent and the musical historian are the chief ingredients. The Prince and the Doctor agree surprisingly well in their opinions, and meet again afterwards at the Opera, where their unanimity is not less remarkable. But a few months later, Dr. Burney being on a visit to the Duke of Portland, at Bulstrode, is in company with Lord and Lady Darnley, with whom he did not so well agree in matters of musical taste.
“They came in,” he says in his journal, “while I was dressing, and I had not heard their names, and knew not who they were. Unacquainted, therefore, with the bigoted devotion to the exclusive merit of Handel that I had to encounter, I got into a hot dispute that I should else, at the Duke’s house, have certainly avoided. The expression ‘modern refinements,’ happened to escape me, which both my lord and his lady, with a tone of consummate contempt, repeated: ‘Modern refinements, indeed!’ ‘Well, then,’ cried I, ‘let us call them modern changes of style and taste; for what one party calls refinements, the other, of course, constantly calls corruption and deterioration.’ They were quite irritated at this; and we all three went to it ding-dong! I made use of the same arguments that I have so often used in my musical writings,—that ingenious men can not have been idle during a century; and the language of sound is never stationary, any more than that of conversation and books. New modes of expression, new ideas from new discoveries and inventions, required new phrases: and in the cultivation of instruments, as well as of the voice, emulation would produce novelty, which, above all things, is wanted in music. And to say that the symphonies of Haydn, and the compositions of Mozart and Beethoven, have no merit because they are not like Handel, Corelli, and Geminiani,—or to say that the singing of a Pacchierotti, a Marchese, a Banti, or a Billington, in their several styles, is necessarily inferior to singers and compositions of the days of Handel,—is supposing time to stand still.”
In 1805, the King visited and closely inspected Chelsea College, of which Dr. Burney was resident organist; and he had the honour to be summoned to the royal presence, when a long conversation, very diligently recorded in the Doctor’s journal, took place, of which the following is a small portion:—
“‘And what are you doing now, Dr. Burney?’ said the King.
“‘I am writing for the new Cyclopædia, Sir.’
“‘I am glad the subject of music,’ he answered, ‘should be in such good hands.’
“And then, with an arch smile, he added: ‘For the essay writers and the periodical writers are all, I believe, to a man, at this time, Jacobins.’
“And afterwards, with a good-humoured laugh, he said: ‘That disease (the Jacobin) was first caught here, I believe, by the poets; and then by the actors; and now the infection has caught all the singers, and dancers, and fiddlers.’”
Nearly all the poets thus alluded to are still living, but most of them are entirely recovered from such diseases. The dancers and fiddlers so elegantly spoken of, and in the plural number, to avoid apparent personality, were, we conjecture, M. Didelot and Mr. Viotti, both of whom were, for a time, obliged to leave this country.