IFyou who read this have one or two favourite authors among the living, take care that you do not meet them; above all, do not seek them out. If you think Mr. Horace Tendency’sBones and Bottlesthe greatest novel of the age, if you have concluded that Mr. Gadfly, essayist and critic, has more wit and wisdom than any man now living, write and tell them so if you like, but do not go any further. Be satisfied with exchanging a letter of admiration for a badly executed autograph, or you will court disaster. If you should want more, remember that we have a literary press that makes a business of publishing photographs or paragraphs or both. Do not imagine that you have heard the last of your favourites; I know for a fact that Mr. Tendency has a novel in the press that is even greater thanBones and Bottles, and I have heard that Mr. Gadfly has just signed an agreementto combine wit and wisdom in a perfectly astonishing manner.
There are several gentlemen now earning a fair living by feeding public curiosity and battening on the fame of its darlings. They do it by seeking out a celebrity and retailing his unconsidered trifles of talk at a good market price. When they do it maliciously, as some do by making merry with the great man’s moustache or sneering at his wife, they are really doing the literary public a service, for they act as a warning and, indeed, point a moral. They and their works say to the enthusiast: If you would be happy, avoid the company of your favourite authors or you will be speedily disillusioned, and either preserve a cynical silence for the rest of your time or make capital out of your misery by falling into our unsavoury practices. It is possible, of course, to meet a few authors without wishing to do so. A good many of them go out a great deal nowadays, and some move in very decent society, so that there is no knowing when and where one may meet an author or two. At any moment, one or other of us may be faced with what appears to be a pair of overfed, pompous merchants or manufacturers, only to learn, on being introduced, that while one of them, Mr.Dash of Dot & Dash, Leadenhall Street, is the real thing, his companion is no other than Mr. Blank, the mystical poet. But to encounter authors in this way is no great matter; there is no need to reveal the fact that one knows anything about them. If they happen to be men whose work is good, some disappointment may attend the encounter, but it will only be slight, for we can afford to be amused when the meeting is accidental and we have not deliberately asked to be disillusioned. But if we are decoyed by a naive enthusiasm into seeking out our men, it is almost certain that we shall be grievously disappointed, and it is more than likely that our admiration for their work will soon be on the wane. Knowing the men, we may pretend to admire them more than ever; most of us do; but it hardly deceives anybody, and certainly not ourselves, who are left with the unpleasant thought that we have thus cut down our own pleasures.
But why, some innocent may ask, should there be any disillusionment; surely a man must be better than his books? He may be in the sight of a god, but not necessarily in the sight of a fellow mortal. A man—any man, let alone an author—is not sotractable as a book; we are rarely in a position to choose him so that he can minister to a mood; he will not wait upon our convenience like our patient volumes. A book may be a vain thing, but it knows nothing of that swelling vanity which belongs to us alone, and to creators more than most. This apart, we must discriminate between good and bad authors. A writer who has been unsuccessful in his art, one who is not master of his craft, a bad author in fact, may be, and very often is, better than his books. An encounter with such a one will not be sought after, except by the wise few, but it may very well bring surprise and delight in its train. It is far otherwise with the great craftsmen, those fine fellows that you and I admire and sometimes long to meet. A good author is his own worst book. We go to him in the hope of catching again that rounded utterance which moved us in this volume or persuaded us in the other; we go—to put the matter shortly—expecting fine talk, and completely overlook the fact that we have already had the best of the man to wait upon us. Our hopes running so high, small wonder that we discover such a falling-off; the best of our author’s talk is but a slovenly paraphrase of his most successfulthings, or a rehash of his rejected manuscripts; and the worst is probably far below what we have to endure in the smoke-room or the railway carriage. Moreover, along with this decline in matter and style, we have to put up with unexpected and totally unwelcome mannerisms, irritating tricks of voice and gesture, and we know not what fumbling and mouthing, all of them acquired during the making of books but all kept outside the covers. And nowadays, very few writers cultivate the picturesque in their appearance or try to look the part, so that our favourites never resemble our private images of them, and inevitably they always look worse, being dingier or shorter or fatter. Can this squat, fussy nonentity be our great novelist, we cry, when we see him for the first time. Probably all of us read and admire the exquisite lyrics of W., who seems to live all his days among lovely unsubstantial things, fleeting shadows and strangely significant silences; but whereas you think of him as a tall, rather fragile man with dreamy eyes and a silky beard, I who have actually met him can only call up a very different image, that of a solid, blue-chinned fellow with an arrogant, almost sinister profile, suggesting an unscrupulous lawyeror money-lender rather than a singer of exquisite songs. Count D’Orsay, you will remember, discovered Byron in a faded nankeen jacket and green spectacles—a notable anti-climax!
We could perhaps overlook appearance and manners if only we got what we principally looked for—fine talk. We are disappointed, of course, and it is our own fault. Even if we had never reasoned the matter out, we ought to have had the sense to put away such expectations, or take care that they were never tested by reality. History shows us great writers and great talkers, but we rarely find the two combined in one figure. It is true that there was nobody more celebrated in his day as a talker than Coleridge, but he did his best literary work before he had this reputation, and the more he talked, the less he wrote. His contemporary, Mackintosh, was a great talker, but who reads Mackintosh now! Do not let us deceive ourselves by thinking that memoirs and biographies of literary men will help us; do not let us imagine that reading them is the same thing as actually meeting authors. Memoirs and biographies are books, with all the virtues of books; they can be put aside, skipped, or disbelieved, ifnecessary; they are art, and very good art too, some of them. Johnson as he appears in Boswell is good enough for me, for there I can enjoy that very unpleasantness which must have made an actual encounter such a risky business. As for those enthusiasts who are always telling us what they would give to spend an evening with this or the other demi-god of letters, most of them do not realise what they are saying. They would barter we know not what for one evening with Shakespeare at the Mermaid, as if they expected to find him mouthing over his liquor alternately in the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff. I, for one, would not be surprised if all Shakespeare’s talk at the Mermaid was not worth a rush; he probably never did more than exchange a few commonplaces and listen smilingly to the others before he emptied his flagon and went home. The epithets that contemporaries bestowed so grudgingly upon him, ‘gentle’ and ‘civil’ and the like, suggest a quiet man and good listener. I warrant that Jonson was the better talker. Even with Lamb, who is usually the next to be singled out, an encounter might not be entirely successful. Among his intimates, he could stammer out some wonderful things, but he was apt toprove an odd, sometimes unpleasant companion for others. The hapless Distributor of Stamps who called on Wordsworth at Haydon’s, whom Lamb baited so unmercifully, would be very unwilling to subscribe to the popular opinion of ‘gentle Elia.’ As for Milton and Wordsworth, I have no doubt that they were insufferable. And if any man argues the charm of Shelley’s society from his verse, let him go into the first fanatical group he can find, single out the young man who has the greatest number of half-digested notions and talks incessantly in a high-pitched voice, and by listening to such a one for a few hours, let him test the truth of his idea that a day with Shelley would be unmixed delight. But enough—reason and experience both tell us to avoid meeting good authors, though they say nothing of bad ones. It only remains for us to decide which are good and which are bad, and we cannot begin too soon.
THEwar has not changed him. But then all the tumults and long wars of centuries have not changed him. Like the pedant, the demagogue, or the place-hunter, the cheap-jack is an ever-enduring figure. Boccaccio’s Frate Cipolla and Chaucer’s Pardoner were his first cousins; from Shakespeare to O. Henry (to adopt the popular termini), he has chaffered and cozened his way through literature. And he is with us yet in the flesh, for I saw him only last week. I was visiting the weekly fair in a pleasant little town, and had joined the crowd of country folks drifting about the stalls in the market square, when, suddenly, a mighty voice burst forth from the centre of a group of persons huddled in a far corner. In the country, where the long days are filled with the sight and sound of the lower creatures, there is no resisting this eruptive clamour of a human voice for an audience,and, along with others, I hurried to join the thickening press of folk in the corner. There, after many years, I found him, as of old.
There was the same indefinable air of something like bravado about his whole figure. His hard face still bore that curious trace of the Jew, mingled with something a great deal worse than the Jew. His clothes, which were new and smart, still seemed to proclaim that they had been made for someone else; and the various trinkets about his person still confessed their inability to inspire confidence. In front was the same old stall, laden with innumerable, mysterious packages, all thickly wrapped in tissue paper; and by the side of the stall stood the inevitable assistant, silent, dejected, unshaven, looking like a rough and shabbier copy of his master, or perhaps a poor relation. Nothing had changed. The great man still flourished the sign of his office, a wooden mallet with a ponderous head, with which he hammered upon the stall from time to time as a sort of dramatic punctuation.
Best of all, his voice, that one talent which removed him from common men, was there in all its pristine fullness. He spoke in the manner of his kind; in that accentwhich owns no shire, city, or clan, and yet is heard in all the market places in the land. His very whispered confidences were enough to stir the old bones in the neighbouring churchyard. The crowd, trying to appear sophisticated, was held and mastered by the voice that was trumpeting, cajoling, mocking, within the space of one mighty breath, and yet still went sounding on, dropping manna by the way. Unknowingly he was a passionate votary of the art that has now nearly forsaken the pulpit and the council chamber. We, his audience, stifled all doubts, and waited, promise-crammed.
There was little or no alteration in his methods. Whether they have been designed, once for all, by some Master Psychologist of cheap-jacks, or are the result of accumulated experience, a secret tradition passed from generation to generation of genial tricksters, I cannot say; but these methods, like the human nature on which they are based, do not change much. As before, he had not come among us to make money. With passionate emphasis, he declared that he was not a profiteer (a new note, this), but had been sent down here by the well-known firm of Mumble-Mumble to smash profiteering. He would teach us the meaning of the wordLib-er-al-ity—that is how he mouthed it, with splendid significance. And then he proceeded in the time-old fashion.
From some half-a-dozen persons nearest the stall, he borrowed a few coppers, promising to return the loan with the addition of a ‘small present.’ These people, becoming sharers in the business, naturally do not care to go away, and thus, by this simple trick, whatever may happen he has about him at least the nucleus of a crowd. Then, flourishing several mysterious packages before our eyes, he asked us to bid for them. ‘Any gentleman got the pluck,’ he demanded, with the dispassionate earnestness of a god, ‘any gentleman got the courage to offer me a Silver Shilling for this?’ Any gentleman showing the necessary public spirit was given the article in question, and his money, his Silver Shilling, was handed back to him. Nor did our friend spoil his acts of munificence by the manner of giving; every package was divested of its numerous wrappings before it was handed over to the lucky man; the contents were exposed to the public view, and described in a style that ‘Ouida’ would have envied. Our minds reeled before this riotous splendour of gold and jewels. Sometimes, in a frenzy ofreckless generosity, he would pile up a heap of articles, and, with a magnificent sense of the dramatic, would cry: ‘Here’s number One! And here’s number Two! And here’s another one, making number Three! And another one, making number Four!’—working up to a climax that left us gasping. Then, after being extraordinarily bountiful to one person, he would pretend to answer a perfectly imaginary charge of confederacy from some member of the crowd, looking all the while very sternly at no one in particular. ‘One of a click (i.e.clique) is ‘e?’ he would roar. ‘One of the click! Do I know yer, Mister? Never seen yer before. I’ll show yer whether ‘e’s one of the click! I’ll show yer!’ And being apparently stung by this vile taunt, he would lash himself into a fury, and proceed to squander his glittering wares even still more wildly. I left him with the sweat running down his face, his hair all rumpled and his collar a wreck; yet he was still undaunted, giving away gold watches with the magnificent air of an Eastern Emperor.
I, for one, welcome the cheap-jack because his presence in our midst proves that there is still a little poetry left in the race. For all his machinations are based on a certainnotion which the experience of this world proves to be a fallacy, and which is yet as old as the hills and as little to be despised. It is the fine old notion that it is possible, somehow or other, to get something for nothing; and it was not born of this world. When we have entirely forsaken the idea, then we are lost indeed, for it comes from the depths of our primal innocence, and has about it the last lingering scent of the Garden of Eden.
AFRIENDof mine, who is a great traveller, has just put into my hands a letter that should be interesting to those who have not yet decided where to go for their holidays and are looking for fresh fields. This letter came from an old acquaintance of his, one Autolycus, an amusing fellow, who boasts that he has been a courtier and in his time worn ‘three-pile’ velvet. As a correspondent he is not to be taken too seriously, but the substance of his letter is engaging, and can be given here. He says that he can remember the time when the coast of Bohemia, his adopted land, was nothing but a desert country, but now, under the genial sway of Prince Florizel and his lovely Perdita, all is changed: the place is blossoming into a sea-bound garden; the sunlit woods and sands, the sweet air, and the good company to be found there are attractingvisitors from countries near and far; and villas and hostels are springing up everywhere to lodge the host of new residents and guests. The coming season promises well, and our correspondent, himself the owner now of a large hostel, admits that he is thriving, and well on his way to ‘three-pile’ again.
Being an arrant gossip, Autolycus soon learns all the news of the place, and any scraps that he misses his friend and barber, Figaro, can usually supply to him. He makes it plain that there is no lack of good company, for he mentions scores of familiar names, of which only a few can find a place here. Some of the visitors who spent last winter there have now left the district: a lively talkative couple from Padua, Benedick and Beatrice, have departed for the country house of their friends Katherina and Petruchio; a certain Major Pendennis has now returned to London, where, we understand, he is a notable figure; Senor Gil Blas has gone to relate his adventures elsewhere; and Master Touchstone, a friend of Autolycus and a fellow of some wit, has now left for the Forest of Arden, where he intends to pass an idle summer with his patrons, now Sir Orlando and Lady Rosalind de Boys. Such visitors as these, with otherswho have gone, will no doubt be missed, but the loss is more than made up by the crowd of new arrivals.
Prince Florizel has now opened his new Summer Palace, and is entertaining a great company. Almost the first group of guests to arrive was a gay party from Illyria, including the Duke and his Duchess Viola, Sebastian and Olivia, and that witty fellow Feste, whose strange songs are now heard throughout the land. Sir Toby and his friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, are not staying with the party at the palace, but are lodging with Autolycus, where there are cakes and ale and catches in plenty. A new tutor has been engaged for the Royal children, but little is known of him; he is thought to be a Scotsman, and has been heard muttering ‘Prodeegious’ on his infrequent walks abroad. Next month there comes to the palace a famous Spanish knight, who is said to have suffered strangely from the persecutions of enchanters. Some will have it that his squire, one Sancho Panza, is better worth a hearing than the knight himself.
Here and there along the coast the sea has been steadily encroaching upon the land, and the Prince has decided to fortify these places by the building of embankments andother devices. The work has now begun, under the direction of two experts, Captain Toby Shandy and the Baron of Bradwardine. Another famous martial figure has been added to the list by the arrival of Captain Dugald Dalgetty, who now commands the Bohemian Marine Horse, in the place of Bobadil—lately cashiered.
There is certainly no lack of amusements now that the season has begun, for there are dances and pageants in the open air and indoor entertainments for the occasional rainy evenings. Next month will see the opening of the new Royal Theatre, which will be under the management of that renowned impresario Mr. Vincent Crummles. There, a professional company—including, I believe, the ‘infant phenomenon’—will perform. But this is not the only dramatic enterprise, for an Artisan’s Amateur Dramatic Society has just been formed. The leading spirit in this venture is a recent settler on these shores, one Bottom, a weaver, who is said to have had long and valuable experience as an amateur performer. Nor should it be hard to please those who prefer graver and more edifying diversion. It appears that, only two weeks ago, a lecture on the ‘Golden Cadence of Poesy’ was given by Holofernes,the schoolmaster, and was well received. Unfortunately, according to report, the audience was a very small one, there being only seven people present, and that is including Master Slender, who fell asleep almost at the beginning. Some contribution will certainly be made to solid learning at the debate, upon some antiquarian question, between Jonathan Oldbuck, Esquire, and Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, P.P.C. This takes place early next month, and Justice Shallow will be in the chair. The prospect of hearing this debate alone is surely enough to draw any right-minded man, who is free to travel, across half the world.
There have been so many English visitors, of late, to this part of the kingdom that special arrangements have been made for the benefit of their bodies and souls; a small English church and a large English tavern have been built within a short distance of the sea. This year there are two pastors doing duty at the church, the Rev. Dr. Primrose and Parson Adams, both of whom have been fervent in denouncing from the pulpit the evils of the world; indeed, Dr. Primrose caused quite a stir with his ‘Folly of Cosmogony.’ The tavern has been named the New Boar’s Head, and the hostess isMistress Quickly, late of Eastcheap, London. Autolycus writes that it is a rowdy house, but this can be set down to professional jealousy and his ignorance of the persons concerned. The best room is now occupied by Sir John Falstaff, who is reported to be a man of some substance; and the house is becoming renowned for good talk and the drinking of ‘healths five fathoms deep.’
It is unfortunate that one of Sir John’s followers has got himself into trouble with the constables. The latter were recently appointed by the Prince to look after the watch, and are from Messina, where everyone knows Dogberry and Verges. So far, they have only made one arrest, and that was of Pistol, Sir John’s Ancient. It seems that he, Ancient Pistol, being full of sack, encountered the constables and expressed himself in Cambyses’ vein, calling Dogberry a ‘dung-hill cur,’ and Verges ‘a recreant coward base.’ This led to his arrest and confinement, where he will remain for the time being, unless the justices are willing to accept Bardolph as security....
But I have dwelt long enough on the wonders of this delectable unrivalled resort. If some of my statements above are disbelieved, or in any way questioned, Ican only refer to my original authority, Autolycus, who said long ago, in answer to a similar charge: ‘Why should I carry lies abroad?’
FORthe past half hour, someone, probably a small boy, has been playing a mouth-organ underneath my window. I know of no person under this roof peculiarly susceptible to the sound of a mouth-organ, so that I cannot think that the unknown musician is serenading. He is probably a small boy who is simply hanging about, after the fashion of his mysterious tribe, and whiling away the time with a little music. Why he should choose a raw day like this on which to do nothing but slide his lips over the cold metal of a mouth-organ must remain a mystery to me; but I have long realised that unfathomable motives may be hidden away behind the puckered face and uncouth gestures of small boyhood.
I have not been able to recognise any of the tunes, or the snatches of tunes, which have come floating up to my window. Possibly they are all unknown to me. ButI think it is more likely that they are old acquaintances, coming in such a questionable shape that my ear cannot find any familiar cadence; they have been transmuted by the mouth-organ into something rich and strange; for your mouth-organ is one of the great alchemists among musical instruments and leaves no tune as it finds it.
It has been pointed out that whatever material Dickens used, however rich and varied it might be, it was always mysteriously transformed into the Dickens substance, lengths of which he cut off and called Novels. It seems to me that the mouth-organ, though a mechanical agent, has something of this strange power of transformation; whatever is played upon it seems to come out all of a piece; whatever might be the original character of the tunes, gay, fantastical, meditative, stirring, as their sounds are filtered through the little square holes of the instrument, their character changes, and they all become more or less alike. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ ‘Annie Laurie,’ and the latest ditty of the music-halls somehow or other lose their individuality and flow into one endless lament, one lugubrious strain, that might very well go on for ever.
For this reason, the sound of a mouth-organ has always succeeded in depressing me. It must have been invented by an incorrigible pessimist, who sought to create a musical instrument that would give to every tune, no matter how lively, some touch of his own hopeless view of life; and probably the only time that he laughed was when he realised that he could leave this thing as a legacy to the world. I have never played a mouth-organ, because I know that my own native optimism would not be strong enough to resist the baneful influence of the music it makes. To hear it now and again is more than enough for me.
To one who is filled with the joy of life—a small boy, for example—such hopeless strains may prove only invigorating, may serve as a wholesome check upon his ebullient spirits, like the skeleton at the Egyptian feasts. But to most of us weaker brethren, frail in spirit, music that is unillumined by even a glimmer of hope is intolerable.
For the past half hour, I have been trying to concentrate all my attention upon some fairly cheerful matter, and I have failed. It has been impossible to keep out the sound of this mouth-organ. Its formless, unknown, unending tune, only fit forbewailing a ruined world, has gradually invaded my room, penetrated through the ear into my brain, and coloured or discoloured all the thoughts there. There is in it no trace of that noble sadness which great music, like great poetry, so often brings with it; the mouth-organ knows nothing of ‘divine despair.’ It seems to whimper before ‘the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world.’
‘Oh de-ar!’ I seem to hear it crying, ‘No hope for yo-ou and yo-ours; Me-eser-able world! Oh de-ear!’ It has brought with it a fog of depression; my spirits have been sinking lower and lower; and under the influence of this evil mangler of good, heartening tunes I have begun to think that life is not worth living.
Most music worthy of the name has such beauty that it will either raise us to a kind of ecstasy or give us a feeling of vague sadness, which some delicate persons prefer to wild joy. Sir Thomas Browne, you remember, has something to say on this point, in a passage that can never become hackneyed no matter how many times it is quoted: ‘Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads whichdeclaim against all church music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do embrace it; for even that vulgar and tavern-music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first composer.’
But these mouth-organ strains will make a man neither mad nor merry, nor yet strike in him a deep fit of devotion; but if his ear is like mine, they will make him sink into depression and dye his world a ghastly blue.
It is curious that certain other popular musical instruments seem to have the same characteristics as the mouth-organ. The concertina and the accordion, good friends of the sailor, the lonely Colonist, and rough, kindly fellows the world over, seem to me to possess the same power of transforming all the tunes played upon them into one long wail. I have read about their ‘lively strains,’ but I have never heard them. The sound of a concertina a quarter of a mile away is enough to shake my optimism. An average accordion could turn the Sword Theme from ‘Siegfried’ into a plea for suicide. A flageolet or a tin-whistle has not such a shattering effect; nevertheless, both of them can only give a tune a certain subdued air,which is certainly preferable to the depressing alchemy of the other instruments, but which certainly does not make for liveliness.
The bagpipe, which has been so long the companion of the lonely folk of northern moors and glens, can produce at times a certain rousing martial strain, but, even then, a wailing air creeps into the music like a Scotch mist. Its very reels and strathspeys, which ought to be jolly enough, only sound to me like elaborate complaints against life; their transitory snatches of gaiety are obviously forced. At all other times, the bagpipe is frankly pessimistic, and laments its very existence.
There is probably some technical reason why these instruments produce such doleful tones. Perhaps our sophisticated ears rebel against their peculiar harmonies and discords. But it is certainly curious that mouth-organs, concertinas, tin-whistles, and the rest, so beloved of simple people, should be intolerable to so many of us. Is it that we have no miseries to express in sound? Or is it that our optimism is so brittle that we dare not submit it to the onslaught of this strange music? I do not know.
All that I do know is that at the present moment I am sitting in my armchair beforea bright fire, depressed beyond belief by the sound that floats through my window; while outside, in the cold, there stands a small boy, holding a mouth-organ in his numbed hands and bravely sliding his lips over the cold metallic edges of the thing; and by this time he is probably as gay as I am miserable.
IGNORINGthose musical labourers who are paid so much per hour, at cinemas and dance-halls, to make some sort of rhythmical sound, all pianists, I think, may be divided into four classes. There are, first, the great soloists, the masters, Paderewski, Pachmann, and the rest, who would seem to have conquered all difficulties. With them the piano, a dead thing of wires and hammers, becomes a delicately responsive organism; its hammers are extra muscles, and its strings added nerves, running and leaping to obey every fleeting impulse; their playing is as saturated with personality as their gait or speech. Not so with the members of the second class, which is, to my mind, a dubious fraternity. They may be called the serious amateurs. Very often they take expensive lessons from some professor, who undertakes to ‘finish them off.’ But they never are finished off. The sign and mark of the serious amateuris that he practises assiduously some piece of music, maybe a Chopin study or a Brahms sonata, until he has it by heart; after which he assembles a number of friends (or, more often, new acquaintances), squashes their attempts at conversation, and, amid a tense silence, begins to play—or, as he would say, ‘interpret’—his laboured solo. The fourth class consists of odd strummers, vampers and thumpers; young ladies who play waltzes and old ladies who play hymns; cigarette-in-mouth youths with a bang-and-rattle style of performance; all inexorable, tormenting noise-makers, from those who persist in riveting—rather than playing—Rachmaninoff’s C sharp minor Prelude to those who buy Sunday newspapers in order that they may pick out with one finger the tune of a comic song. All such are the enemies of peace and harmony, and as they cannot be ignored in any other place, here they can be quickly dismissed with all the more pleasure.
It remains now to say something of the third class of pianists, which, if it were reduced to such straits, could count me among its members. To write at some length of one’s own class after perfunctorily dismissing others may seem to savour of egotism, but the truth is, we—I speak fraternally—havebeen so much maligned and misunderstood up to now, we have endured so many taunts in silence, that we have a right to be heard before we are finally and irrevocably condemned.
It is only on the score of technique, the mere rule of thumb business, that we stand below the serious amateurs; we belong to a higher order of beings and have grander souls; in spirit we come nearer to the great masters. The motives of the serious amateur are not above suspicion. In his assiduous practice, his limited repertoire, his studied semi-public style of performance, is there not a suggestion of vanity? Is his conscious parade of skill, taken along with his fear of unknown works, the mark of a selfless devotion to music, and music alone? I doubt it.
But our motives are certainly above suspicion. Music has no servants more disinterested, for not only do we gather no garlands in her service, but daily, for her sake, we risk making fools of ourselves, than which there can be no greater test of pure devotion. We, too, are the desperate venturers among pianists; every time that we seat ourselves at the keyboard we are leading a forlorn hope; and, whether we fall by the way or chance to come through unscathed, the onlyreward we can hope for is a kindly glance from the goddess of harmony.
It is hardly necessary to dwell on the fact that our execution is faulty, that we are humanly liable to make mistakes, seeing that our weaknesses have been for years the butt of musical pedants and small souls. In the dim past we received some sort of instruction, perhaps a few years’ lessons, but being bright children with wills of our own we saw no use in labouring at scales and arpeggios, at the tepid compositions of Czerny, when there were balls to throw, stones to kick, and penny dreadfuls to be devoured. An unlocked door or an open window—and we escaped from the wretched drudgery, thus showing early that eager zest of life which still marks our clan.
Now, it is enthusiasm alone that carries us through. Our performance of any ‘piece of average difficulty’ (as the publishers say) is nothing short of a series of miracles. As we peer at the music and urge our fingers to scurry over the keys, horrid gulfs yawn before us, great rocks come crashing down, the thick undergrowth is full of pitfalls and mantraps, but we are not to be deterred. Though we do not know what notes are coming next, or what fingers we shall use,if the music sayspresto, thenprestoit must be; the spirit of the tune must be set free, however its flesh may be lacerated. So we swing up the dizzy arpeggios as a hunted mountaineer might leap from crag to crag; we come down a run of demi-semi-quavers with the blind confidence of men trying to shoot the rapids of Niagara. Only the stout-hearted and great of soul can undertake these perilous but magnificent ventures.
Unlike the serious amateurs, we do not pick and choose among pieces until we have found one to which we can give the cold glitter of an impeccable rendering. We attend concerts (for, above all, we are the concert-goers and dreamers of dreams, as O’Shaughnessy might have said) and come reeling out, intoxicated with sound; for days we are haunted by a lovely theme or an amazing climax, until we can bear it no longer; we rush off to the music-shops to see if it is possible to capture this new lovely thing and keep it for ever; more often than not we return home in triumph, hardly giving ourselves time to flatten out the music before plunging into the opening bars. Nothing that has been arranged for the piano or that can be played in some sort of fashion on the instrument comes amiss if ithas once aroused our enthusiasm; symphonies, operas, tone-poems, string-quartets are all welcome. Nay, we often prefer the arrangements of orchestral things, for we do not think of the piano merely as a solo instrument; to us it is the shining ivory and ebony gateway to the land of music. As our fingers wander over the keys our great dream-orchestras waken to life.
I believe that at the very end, when the depths of our folly and ignorance are fully revealed, when all our false notes have been cast up into one awful total by the recording angel of music, it will be found that we, the bad pianists, have been misjudged among men, that we, too, have loved and laboured for the divine art. When we file into Elysium, forlorn, scared, a shabby little band, and come within sight of Beethoven, whom we have murdered so many times, I believe that a smile will break through the thunder-cloud of his face. ‘Ach! Come you in, children,’ he will roar, ‘bad players, eh?... I have heard.... Very bad players.... But there have been worse among you.... The spirit was in you, and you have listened well.... Come in.... I have composed one hundred and fifty more symphonies and sonatas, and you shall hear them all.’
IHAVElately received a visit from an old acquaintance who floated in my direction on such a sea of trouble that I have been in low spirits ever since. Moreover, as it was a family affair, I could not interfere in any way, and the knowledge of my own impotence has only increased my depression. My only hope of keeping my thoughts from what is, after all, no business of mine lies in passing on the tale—if such a mournful recital of family dissensions can be called a tale—and thus making others share the burden.
I cannot remember, for the moment, when and where I first met old Tom Cribcrack, my late visitor, but we have been acquainted for a good many years. He must be past fifty now (how the time goes on!), but being a fine upstanding fellow, closely shaved and with his bristly hair always cropped short, he looks considerably younger. His father, a dear old man—I met him once—was in thecoining business in its best days, but such a sedentary occupation did not suit young Cribcrack, and he was soon apprenticed to a successful burglar. In his own way, Tom was an enthusiastic, clever lad, and it was not long before he became an expert craftsman himself. He decided to devote his life to the profession, and though, like other men, he has had his bad times, he has been on the whole a very successful practitioner, respected by all workers in the same field. He has had a good connection, mostly among the upper middle-class, and has always preferred a rather slow but steady run of business to a few brilliant coups; he has kept away from the showy work, and has never had the slightest desire for publicity, which is probably the reason why his name is not so well known to the general public as that of many an inferior craftsman. ‘No fancy work for Tom Cribcrack,’ he has said more than once in my hearing. ‘Punctuality, neat workmanship, despatch—that’s the motto for a man what wants to get on in my line.’ In short, he was a good specimen of the modest self-made Englishman, and is still, to this day, though now subdued in spirit by a great disappointment, as you shall learn.
It was not until Cribcrack was thirty or soand had got on to his feet that he did what most sensible men do sooner or later—he took a wife. This was a Miss Judy Graggins, eldest daughter of ‘Basher’ Graggins, of Cod’s Alley, a well-known character in his day. The result of this happy union was a family of several daughters but only one son, greatly to the disappointment of both parents. Looking back, as Cribcrack pointed out the other day, one cannot help noticing how small things have often an important bearing on the future; for whereas there had been no difficulty about the girls’ names, when it came to naming the boy there was for a time some difference between the doting parents. The father wished to give the boy a plain, sturdy sort of name, Jem or Bill, such as all the Cribcracks had borne; but, greatly to his surprise, his wife, for no apparent reason, but from sheer feminine perversity, would have none of these, and insisted on the child being called Ernest, a name unknown to the Cribcrack family and one which the father himself regarded with the greatest contempt. In the end, the mother’s whim prevailed, and the boy was known henceforth as Ernest Cribcrack.
As might be expected, the advent of a son made a great difference to my oldacquaintance, who, like many other fathers, began to see a fresh purpose in life. His enthusiasm for his professional work was unabated, but his son came to share with it the first place in his thoughts, and it was not long before his one aim was to bring together these two all-absorbing, beloved things, his son and his work. Morning after morning, after the nightly duties were at end, Cribcrack would sit smoking by the fire, watching the sturdy infant at play and dreaming of the time when he could teach the boy all he knew of the ancient craft, and they could go out to work together. Then some day they would be known as Cribcrack and Son to other members of the profession, and in many a tavern some old hand would remark: ‘That was a fine piece of work young Cribcrack pulled off the other night. Just like his father, he is....’
For a time all went well. It was not long before Ernest, a sturdy little boy, would hear of no other calling for his manhood but his father’s profession. On his seventh or eighth birthday he was given the boy’s burglary outfit, and he would play for hours on end with the little jemmy and other implements, under the direction of his delighted parent. At times the boy wouldseem to prefer piracy or even engine-driving, but Tom knew that these were only the vagaries of childhood; the boy would soon see the course before him. Like most fathers, however, Cribcrack never opened out his heart to young Ernest, or Ern’, as he was known to the family. He cherished his dream in secret, and waited for the appointed time to speak, so that the lad might choose for himself. But again, like most fathers, he never doubted that when the moment did come the boy would choose the right course. As time went on, however, Ernest became rather a puzzle. For example, contrary to his father’s expectations, he did not show any particular aversion to ordinary schooling; indeed, he seemed to become fond of it as he grew older. In this, as in some other things, his father, a little uneasy, humoured him, so that at the time when he should have begun his real apprenticeship he was still spending his time with copy-books and geography primers. After all, Tom reflected, the boy was a Cribcrack, and would know where his duty lay.
But when the time came for the father to speak, the great blow fell. Ernest steadfastly refused to follow his father’s profession,and swept aside the career that Tom had marked out for him. Now vehement, now sulky, sometimes tearful, at other times derisive—the boy would be neither persuaded nor bullied into changing his mind. It was not that he loathed the burglar’s ancient craft, but while the father had been dreaming his dreams so, too, he had had his own vision—he would be a clerk, and nothing else would do for him. On his way to school he had seen clerks in their stiff white collars and shiny blue suits, crowding out of their offices at the dinner hour; he had caught glimpses of them as they bent over their ledgers beneath the shaded electric lights; his boy’s heart had been thrilled, and he too had had his dream. It was useless to argue that the Cribcracks had never descended to office stools; that the glamour would soon fade and leave him face to face with cold reality. Ernest had decided that he was meant to be a clerk, and a clerk he would be, however difficult and dangerous the road he must travel.
What more need be said. Cribcrack entreated, reproached, threatened, but all in vain. His great dream was shattered, and, cursing the fateful name of Ernest, he bundled the lad out of his house, and shortlyafterwards came, a broken man, to see me. Ernest, I believe, is now in the office of the Origen Orange-Ale Company, and though he occasionally pilfers a few stamps, there is little of the fine old Cribcrack spirit about him.
WHATa bundle of contradictions is a man! Surely, humour is the saving grace of us, for without it we should die of vexation. With me, nothing illustrates the contrariness of things better than the matter of sleep. If, for example, my intention is to write an essay, and I have before me ink and pens and several sheets of virgin paper, you may depend upon it that before I have gone very far I feel an overpowering desire for sleep, no matter what time of the day it is. I stare at the reproachfully blank paper until sights and sounds become dim and confused, and it is only by an effort of will that I can continue at all. Even then, I proceed half-heartedly, in a kind of dream. But let me be between the sheets at a late hour, and I can do anything but sleep. Between chime and chime of the clock I can write essays by the score. Fascinating subjects and noble ideas come pell-mell, each with itsappropriate imagery and expression. Nothing stands between me and half-a-dozen imperishable masterpieces but pens, ink, and paper.
If it be true that our thoughts and mental images are perfectly tangible things, like our books and pictures, to the inhabitants of the next world, then I am making for myself a better reputation there than I am in this place. Give me a restless hour or two in bed and I can solve, to my own satisfaction, all the doubts of humanity. When I am in the humour I can compose grand symphonies, and paint magnificent pictures. I am, at once, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michael Angelo; yet it gives me no satisfaction; for the one thing I cannot do is to go to sleep.
Once in bed, when it is time to close the five ports of knowledge, most folks I know seem to find no difficulty in plunging their earthly parts into oblivion. It is not so with me, to whom sleep is a coy mistress, much given to a teasing inconstancy and for ever demanding to be wooed—‘lest too light winning make the prize light.’ I used to read, with wonder, those sycophantic stories of the warlike supermen, the great troublers of the world’s peace, Cromwell, Napoleon,and the like, who, thanks to their ‘iron wills,’ could lie down and plunge themselves immediately into deep sleep, to wake up, refreshed, at a given time. Taking these fables to heart, I would resolve to do likewise, and, going to bed, would clench my teeth, look as determined as possible in the darkness, and command the immediate presence of sleep. But alas! the very act of concentration seemed to make me more wakeful than ever, and I would pass hours in tormenting sleeplessness. I had overlooked the necessity of having an ‘iron will,’ my own powers of will having little or none of this peculiar metallic quality. But how uncomfortable it must have been living with these iron-willed folks! Who would want to remonstrate and argue with them? It would be worse than beating an anvil with a sledge-hammer. I must confess that I always suspect the men who boast that they unvaryingly fall asleep as soon as they get into bed—those ‘as soon as my head touches the pillow’ fellows. To me, there is something inhuman, something callous and almost bovine, in the practice. I suspect their taste in higher matters. Iron wills apart, there must be a lack of human sympathy or depth in a man who can thus throw off, withhis clothes, his waking feelings and thoughts, and ignore completely those memories and fancies which