The Old Music-School
By A. L. ROWSE.
FOR this early hour of the summer afternoon, a magic quiet has descended upon the stilled and sleepy room. Like Matthew Arnold, of whom I think, perambulating the class-rooin, reading poems out of a book while the scholars are bent over their examination task ; like Yeats, an old grey-haired senator walking up and down between the benches where the school- -children are congregated, watching ; so I sit here at the long table in the music-school, alone with all the desks and faces.
Outside, the enchantment of the bells of Oxford in summer has fallen upon the streets and green gardens 'of the city. All we that pass are borne down beneath the sounding waters. -Time's tide sweeps by ; no less -inevitably, more felt, for the illusion given, that this one moment is eternal. The noises of the city are caught up and cherished and given beauty, as if they too should not perish ; the horn of a passing ear, _bringing back the snowy squares of Munich one February night ; the quick ring of a bicycle ; the rich " gulge- gulge " of sparrows in the eaves, that I shall ever associate with school on hot summer afternoons_ from childhood. But above all, the bells ; fragile but immutable ; eloquent of what victories, what past devotions ; quintessence of all that remains when we are gone out of the lovely world.
And all around the room there are the pale faces of the dead men who were here before us, looking out from their picture-frames ; all of them looking down upon me with concentrated gaze, as if in accusation that there arc others who have come and taken their familiar places.
There is Matthew Lock, a beautiful face, dark and oval, with high arched brows that are ever so little haughty. He seems not jealous that I am here, but looks with surprise that he has vanished out of the world. He looks not dead, but with loving patient eyes with the consciousness of sorrow in their hazel lights, looking a little away from us, as if observant of all that passes, yet greeting rather some friend whom we, ontside his time and state, • cannot see. Two dark soured faces of the seventeenth century peer direct from the canvases -at -me: Christopher Simpson and Thomas Blagrave. • Who were they, I wonder ? The one a narrow wizened little man, Puritan and sober-sides, a little like Governor Winthrop, with neat tassels at the throat, drawing together the pointed collar. The other jaundiced, supercilious, puffy about the .eyes ; a pertinaeeous, a perhaps unsuccessful University politician.
Here is William Gregory, iron-grey, with-grey suspicious eyes and eyebrows puckered. But Of what is he So Suspi- cious? He has his -hand upon his heart. One imagines him to have been a high-stoniached man, perhaps purse- proud. There in the dark of the corner is Orlando Gibbons in his flowered satin gown. And then the delightful Henry Lawes :
"Harry whose tuneful and well measued Song First taught our English Musick how to span Words with just note and accent."
He looks jovial enough, though with a querulous upward turn of the eye-brow ; in- his hand, a scroll of music for a Canon a ire voci ; Regi Regis, Regi Regis, Reguin arcane cano. How devoted they were to the fatal Stuarts, these .musicians ; some of them, masters. of the King's music, ate the bread of exile ; others, when the call came, entered the field, like William Lawes, whose portrait too is here, looking so much younger than his brother whose elder he was ; for death came early upon him in the field, and left him for ever young. When he was killed, in the One of the Civil War, the King, it is said, had a, particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living and commonly called "the Father of Musick." , There he is, so sombre and dusky in the shadow of the sweeping Stuart hat, one can hardly make him out ; only an angle of the lace collar, slashed sleeves, the canvas darkened IT age. .
• In the centre there is the best 'portrait of:them all : a brilliant Elizabethan picture of John Bull,- the Court musician, -as bright now as the day it was painted. The portrait says, .an-no aetatis suae 27; in. the year 1589. There he is; as -if time had stayed him just at ,my. time of life ;- had laid a finger upon him, and stillcd.the tide of the ceaseless unchanging waters; and there h3 is, a vouthful-Elizabethan face, long and ridged, auburn hair and candid narrow brow, neat sparse beard and delicate lined lips. But the main feature of the face, the cold grey eves, full of the awareness of death. He looks so still ; changeless amid all that changes. He must have charmed his contemporaries and been beloved by them.. The painter, painting him in the year after the Armada, in- scribed around the finished picture :
"The Bull by force In field sloth raigne But Bull by skill Good Will doth gaine."
Dr. Burney is there too ; and Dr. Croft : good stout eighteenth-century faces, more content, something more placid ; certainly less pathetic, less remote, but no less protestant against the ravages of time.
Last of all, among all these musicians, one who was but Ii musician and painter ; and prided himself upon his mastery of the twin arts. For he has painted himself as an artist, holding brush and palette ; and on the table by him he has a roll of music, inscribed in a clear and lovely Caroline hand, " Canon a 8 in ye 5th and 6th.- There are the notes, in an old notation, hard to follow ; and with the words :---But the words express the universal theme, they say in the accent of their time what all these dead men if they had voices would say from the dark canvases :
" Thus. thus. at last wee tnult ileduriA To nakcd 'Karnes and dust."
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