A MUSICAL LIFE.*

THE only fault we have to find with this volume is that its title is not sufficiently suggestive of its true scope. The actual details of the musical life of the writer—the well-known author of Music and Morals—constitute a comparatively small part of his work, ;which consists chiefly of two distinct elements, —a philosophical and a historical. The rationale of music, its function in developing the emotional life of man, in affording him a medium for the expression of his loftiest and subtlest emotional ideas, in giving him power over others, the place of music in the generale conomy of art, its moral import and pnr- pose, the analysis of its mode of operation in the human soul, —these and other kindred subjects, closely allied for the most part with the theme of the work already alluded to, Music and Morals, are treated of in the philosophical section ; and the historical consists of biographical details of the lives of some of our greatest composers, told in the vividest and brightest way, and lighted 'tip by the evident en- thusiasm of the narrator. Many of these anecdotes derive additional interest from. our receiving them at first-hand, for Mr. Haweis's wide acquaintance with the musical world brought him in contact with such lights of our age as Wagner, Liszt, and Richter. And others, which do not come to us as his own reminiscences—for example, his delightful sketch of the eccentric violinist Paganini—have been carefully selected from authentic sources, and put together with so skilful a hand as to form a very complete and lifelike picture of the subjects whom Mr. Haweis attempts to portray.

Mr. Haweis's thoughts upon the whole rationale of music appeal to us as so entirely true, and are so clearly the result of a lifelong devotion not merely to the art itself, but to the analysis of the true meaning and purpose of music, regarded as a factor in human education and human life, that those who have not lived in a musical atmosphere so long or so exclusively, must necessarily feel in the position of students rather than critics, so far as his general teaching 'goes. Our best plan will be, we think, to extract some of the thoughts which impressed us most in our reading, and to present them to our readers in the author's own words.

Mr. Haweis gets, we think, very near the very root of his subject, when he explains that music is, of all the arts, that which most directly expresses and appeals to emotion. Sculp- ture and painting are expressions of something considerably. wider than mere emotion, and they arouse emotion rather from their resemblance to figures and scenes in human history, than by- their own immediate operation. This is, at all events, true as regards the deeper emotions. The pathos of a picture is due not so much to its perfection as art, as to the pathos of its Subject—that is to say, of the phase of human life it repre- sents. Music, on the contrary, expresses and arouses the deepest, subtlest, and most carefully-ordered and graduated emotions, quite without the assistance of any intervening picture, and without reference to distinct events in human life, by its own immediate agency. It plays on the feelings of a sensitive listener, striking which note it will, piano or forte as it chooses, just as a skilful pianist plays on his instrument. And in doing this it gives us no precisely new knowledge or ex- perience, but we find our own emotions' expressed for us by its 'means.' It.reveals to us capabilities of feeling which were already within us. We are inclined to compare its effect in this respect to that of the Sermon on the Mount, or of others of our Lord's discourses, which are felt by the listener to be the verbal expres, eion of his own anima naturaliter Christiana. Their thrilling effect depends greatly upon this very fact,—that they do not come upon the soul as new doctrine, but as true doctrine,—that * My Musical Life. By the Hey. H. IL Haweis, N.A. London : W. H. Allen and Co. 1884.

is to say, as the most perfect and sublime expression of moral principles which we had already known in our heart of hearts . to be true, but had never explicitly formulated. Let us hear Mr. Haweis on the application of this parallel to music :—

" Expression is the imperative mood of our nature ; without it we wither and pine ; with it we grow, we develop, we soar. Man is essentially a dramatic animal; he is ever seeking to make known what is in him ; he aspires to the true possession of himself. Life becomes more rich when it passes into word and action. Every moment, in proportion as we are truly alive, we are longing to

• manifest ourselves as we can. We are not satisfied till someone else enjoys what we enjoy, knows what we know, feels what we feel ; and the great burden-lifters of humanity are those who have told us the things we knew already, but which we could not express for our- selves. These are the souls that have made our souls wiser.' These are the prophets, and the poets, and the artists,—dear, kindred, world-embracing spirits that give humanity back to itself, and make it doubly worth having by bestowing upon it those memorable and entrancing gifts of expression that on the stretched forefinger of Time sparkle for ever.' "

We wish that we had space to enlarge upon Mr. Haweis's excellent remarks as to the province-of music in regulating and disciplining the emotions. The essential difference, he explains in one place, between a sonata of Beethoven's and the false form and style of the modern Italian music, consists in the fact that the former develops the emotional fabulties in a healthy and natural way, and not by a forced, hothouse growth :— " Listening to a syniphony or sonata of Beethoven's is not a joke ; it is a study, an emotional training. You sit down and listen atten- tively, and the master leads you through various moods ; he elates you and depresses you; your feeling waxes and wanes with various intensities, not spasmodically, but by coherent sequences. You are put through a whole system of feeling, not of your own choosing ; you are not allowed to choose, you are to control yourself here, and expand there ; and at last, after due exercise, you are landed on the composer's own platform, disciplined, refreshed, and - elevated. Although urged here and there, the light rein has been upon you, and the master drives you much in the same way that a skilled charioteer drives a spirited steed. This is the process of all really great music, and the reason why the Italian, as a school—and, indeed, all bad music, Italian or otherwise—is injurious, is because it deals unfairly or untruly with your emotions. .It does not give you a balapced, rational, or healthful sequence of feeling. It is like a melodrama-such as the Bells, which, without any reflection on Mr. Irving's fine acting, we may, however, call a very good melodrama, but of a very bad art sort. It is unlike a play of Shakespeare's. If he has horrors to bring before you, he prepares you for them ; you are not trifled with and exhausted, your qmotions are not whipped and spurred until they almost cease to respond. All bad art trifles with, exhausts, and enervates you ; and music.most of all, because it deals at first-hand with the emotions."

We have never seen this indisputable truth better or more forcibly stated; but we should do justice neither to Mr. Haweis's view nor to the facts of the case, if we did not quote in addition his testimony to the real merits of Italian music, despite its false form, and his statement—the statement of one well quali- fied from his personal knowledge to speak—as to the very real appreciation of its merits which Richter and Wagner had :—

"Yet we must not deny the splendid melodic, and even harmonic, _qualities that are to be -found in the essentially false form and spirit of the Italian opera. It has been too much the fashion of the English Wagnerites to decry Italian musics ; but the German Wagnerite is more liberal and catholic in his appreciation, while Wagner himself was the most liberal and truly catholic musician of them all. He could appreciate every kind of music, and so can those who interpret his beat. I remember, when I was at Naremburg, falling in with Richter, then conductor of the Bayreuth Festival. We were seated in the parlour of a little, old-fashioned German inn, discussing the various schools of music, when I happened to allude to a famous quartet in Verdi's Rigoletto, and to Bellini's Norma, whereupon Richter, the great Wagner disciple—Richter, the conductor of the Bayreuth Festival, the incarnation of the music of the future—sprang up, and lifting high his glass, in honour of the great Italian, exclaiated, • itch ! der Bellini ist ern ganz colossaler We are glad to be able to quote such .authorities, and to -draw attention to this fresh instance of the large-mindedness of true greatness. It has ever seemed to us intolerable that men of sunh genius as Rossini, Verdi, Bellini, and Donizetti should by the disciples of the severer school be contemptuously net aside as writers of "trash." That their aim and their form were not the greatest, most will be willing to allow. 'But they were men of genius, and of original genius ; and as an exhibi- tion of musical inspiration, we should class Rossini's Barbiere far higher than the most carefully elaborated imitation of Wagner which so accomplished a musician as Mr. Villiers Stanford could write ; just as we should consider Mr. Terry a, greater actor than Mr. John Ryder. the one has, in each case, genius, though of a lighter sort; the other, all that can be learnt in a higher department, but without that magic touch which originality alone can give. And it is curious to note that

whilst Wagner and Richter could enjoy and appreciate Bellini, it was reserved for a man who, with all his talent, is generally admitted to have lacked that one gift—spontaneity of inspira- tion—to nickname him "the little shrimp." We speak of the French composer Beilioz.

We should, perhaps, in conclusion, add two words of criticism, one' in praise and one in blame. The fault in the style of the

book—there is, therefore, one fault besides its title—is a certain fitfulness of writing, a habit of abrupt,-transition from one thing to another, which seems to proceed from an intellectual defect for which the author's own phrase, " incoherence of thought," is a good but a too severe name. Still, this defect is perhaps almost inseparable from the highest musical intuition, which seems to see truths so immediately as to render it difficult to

dwell for any length of time on the transition from insight to logi- cal expressiom—which last'is, of course, the only means whereby the seer's perceptions' are revealed to other minds. Our second 'remark is that the writer has a considerable gift of humour,

which much enlivens his pages, and is of the most spontaneous and unforced quality. " In 1861," he writes, " the Parisians showed their taste and chic by whistling Tannhauser off the

stage." .This is a paragraph to itself, being -neither preceded nor folloWed by any comment, and seems to us a delightful bit of irony. Let us quote, in conclusion, the author's account of his visit to the grave of the great Wagner :-

" I follow a stream of people on foot, as they move down the left- hand avenue in the garden of the Nene Schloss, which adjoins Wagner's own grounds. Some are going, some are 'coming. Pre- sently I see an opening in the bushes on my left ; the path leads me to a clump of evergreens. I follow it, and come suddenly on the great composer's grave. All about the green square mound the trees are thick, laurel, fir, and yew. The shade falls funereally across the immense grey granite slab ; but over the dark foliage the sky is bright blue, and straight in front of me, above the low bushes, I can see the bow-windows of the dead master's study—where I spent with him one delightful evening in 1876. I can see, too, the jet of water that he loved, playing high above the hedge of evergreen. It lulls me with its sound. Vahufried, vabnfried !' it seems to murmur. It was the word written above the master's house—the' word he most lovg—the word his tireless spirit most believed in. How shall I render it ? Dream-life, dream-life, earth's illusion of joy !' Great spirit ! thy dream-life here is past, and face to face with truth 'rapt from the fickle and the frail ;' for thee the illusion is vanished ! Mayst thou also know the fulness of joy in the unbroken and serene activities of the eternal Reality !"