MU S IC .

THE UNMUSICAL WORLD.

OUR neighbours across the border have an excellent phrase to express persons who have no ear for music. They call them " timmer-tuned "—i.e., timber-tuned. The phrase is to be found in Galt, where we read, " I canna even sing ballots, for Heaven in its displeasure made me wi' a timmer tune" (The Last of the Lairds), and again in Moir's Mansie Wanda, "the old flute would not do unless some of us were timber-tuned." Whether to be born " timmer-tuned " is really a sign of Heaven's displeasure is at least an arguable question. Some of the best, the wisest, and the most joyous of men have laboured under this drawback. Of Lamb, the classic instance, we shall say more presently. But another great and kindly

humorist, Sydney Smith, was similarly disqualified. Indeed, there is a story, which we have not been able to verify, of his once saying that he never had seen " a more degrading spec- tacle than that of five hundred people fiddling away about the children of Israel." As against this unsubstantiated anecdote it is only right to quote the saying recorded in his Life (vol. i.

p. 442), " If I were to begin life again, I would devote much time to music. All musical people seem to me happy ; it is the most engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion." This is a noble tribute, though the generalization is perhaps too sweeping when one thinks of the loneliness of Beethoven, the early and tragic ends of Mozart and Schubert, of Schumann and Hugo Wolf.• But Sydney

Smith was probably not thinking of great composers, but of enthusiastic amateurs—people like George Grove, for instance, to whom music was an unmitigated source of delight. Other eminent unmusical people will readily recur to our readers. Dean Stanley was a case in point ; another was Dean Farrar. He had an admirable voice for reading or speaking—deep,

mellow, and clear—but he was entirely without a musical ear. When the organist of a great church, where he was going to preach for the first time, told him that his voice would carry best if he could pitch it on the note of C sharp, he was grateful for the hint, but pathetically confessed his absolute inability to act upon it. There are many cases of people with fine speaking voices who cannot sing, and con- versely fine singers have occasionally harsh speaking voices. In this context, too, one may note the case of poets who have music in their souls, though they know nothing about the technique of the art, can neither sing nor play, never go to a concert, and are unable to tell good music from rubbish. Thus we have the curious anomaly of Browning, an intelligent, accomplished, and enthusiastic amateur of music, writing far less musical verse than Tennyson or Swinburne, who knew practically nothing about it. The only music Coleridge cared for was that of the voices of Nature, or the simplest tunes. His feeling towards organized music is passionately expressed in the " Lines Composed in a Concert-Room " :—

" Nor cold, nor stern, my soul ! yet I detest

'].'hose scented rooms, where. to a gaudy throng, Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast In intricacies of laborious song. These feel not Music's genuine power, nor deign To melt at Nature's passion-warbled plaint ; But when the long-breathed singer's uptrilled strain Bursts in a squall—they gape for wonderment." Rather did be ask, "from this heartless scene released" to bear "our old musician, blind and gray. . . . His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play," or Edmund breathing "in his flute sad airs, so wild and slow," or Anne singing "some ballad full of woe." What critics call the " art-forms " of music did not appeal to Coleridge. ' The only other specific reference to an instrument that we can recall in his poems is

the famous allusion to the "loud bassoon" in The Ancient Mariner, in which the descriptive epithet is singularly ill-

chosen. And that recalls the curious combination of "harp, violin, hasstion " in the band of musicians at the dance in Tennyson's Maud.

Musician-poets, or poet-musicians, are not a numerous stock.. Where the balance is best maintained, as in the case of Moore,. the achievement is not on the highest level. As for Wagner, it. is extremely hard for any non-German to estimate the quality of his verse ; for a Wagnerite it is probably impossible. But.. some guidance may be gained from the German wit who placed Wagner above Goethe and Beethoven on the ground that he was a greater composer than Goethe and a better• poet than Beethoven. Painters are perhaps more interested in music than poets. That is to say they more commonly fre- quent the concert room and the opera. Leighton was not only a lover but a patron of music ; Mr. Sargent is known to be an expert pianist, and the omniscient Professor Hubert von Herkomer, R.A., has perpetrated operas. This, however, is a thing that may happen to any one, even a Grand Duke. 'But' to go back to Lamb his case stands apart from that of all other unmusical men of letters in that lie was not merely indifferent but antipathetic to the blandishments of music. In the famous "Chapter on Ears" he thinks that sentiment..

ally he was disposed to harmony :—

"But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising ' God Save the King' all my life ; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners ; and am not arrived, they toll me, within ninny quavers of it. . . . Scienti- fically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken pains) what a note of music is ; or how one note should differ from another: . . . While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by mis- nomers."

To the soothing, elevating, refining influences of music he was entirely uninripressible ; indeed, he expressly declares that he had received " a great deal more pain than pleasure from this

so cried up faculty." Yet he was " constitutionally suscep- tible of noises " ;—

" A carpenter's hammer, on a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness, But those unconnected,. unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. . . . I have sat through an Italian Opera till for sheer pain, and inex- plicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which i was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of.. endless, fruitless, barren attention !"

When he sat at an oratorio be fancied himself "in some cold theatre in Hades," and, above all, "those insufferable con- certos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension." Lamb was not content with immortalizing his antipathy to music in prose. He has recorded it in the delightful "Free Thoughts on some Eminent. Composers " ;—

" Some cry up Haydn, seine Mozart, Just as the whim bites. For my part, I do not care a farthing candle •

For either of them, or for Handel.

Cannot a man live free and easy, Without admiring Pergolesi !

Or thro' the world with comfort go That never heard of Doctor Blow !

So help me God, I hardly have ;

And yet I eat, and drink, and shave,

Like other people, (if you watch it,) And know no more of stave and crotchet Than did the un-Spaniardized Peruvians; Or those old ante-queer-Diluvians That lived in the unwash'd world with Jubal, Before that dirty Blacksmith Mimi, By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at,

Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut. I care no more for Cimarosa

Than be did for Salvr.tor Rosa,

Being no Painter; and bad luck Be mine, if I can bear that Gluck !

Old Tycho Brahe and modern Herschel Had something in them ; but who's Puree' Fh Tho devil, with his foot so cloven, For aught I care, may take Beethoven;

And, if the bargain does not suit,

ra throw him Weber in to boot!

There's not the splitting of a splinter

To clime 'twixt him last flamed, and Winter..

Of Doctor Pepusch old queen Dido

Knew just as much, God knows, as I do.

I would not go four miles to visit Sebastian Bach—or Batch—which is it? No more I would for Bononcini. As for Novelle and Rossini,

I shall not say a word about [to grieve] 'em, Because they're living. So I leave 'em."

Yet, though Lamb hated music, he loved the family of Novello. The above verses were written for the entertain- anent of his great friend, Vincent Novello, and Mary Lamb (or Charles Lamb impersonating her, as Mr. Lucas thinks) appended the following postscript to the verses in Novello's album :- " The reason why my brother's so severe, Vincentio, is—my brother has no ear And Caradori her mellifluous throat Might stretch in vain to make him learn a note. Of common tunes he knows not anything, Nor 'Rule, Britannia' from 'God Save the King.'

He rail at Handel I He the gamut quiz I'd lay my life he knows not what it is.

His spite at music is a pretty whim— Ho loves it not, because it loves not him."

Clara Novello has told us in her autobiographical remi- niscences that he once asked her not to make that d—d noise when she was singing ; but that she did not love him .any the less for his outspokenness. She could well afford to be generous—even if it had not come naturally to her—in view of the charming tribute he paid her in the lines " To Clara Novello " :- " The Gods have made me most unmusical, With feelings that respond not to the call Of stringed harp or voice—obtuse and mute, To hautboy, Brickbat, dulcimer, and flute ; King David's lyre, that made the madness flee From Saul, had been but a jew's-harp to me: Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars, Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars ; I hate those trills, and shakes, and sounds that float Upon the captive air ; I know no note, Nor ever shall, whatever folks may say, Of the strange mysteries of Sol and Fa ; I sit at oratorios like a fish Incapable of sound, and only wish The thing was over. Yet I do admire, O tuneful daughter of a tuneful sire, Thy painful labours in a science which

To your deserts I pray may make you rich

As much as you are loved and add a grace To the most musical Novello race.

Women lead men by the nose some cynics say ; You draw them by the oar—a &Heater way.

No, the real enemies of musics are not honest unmusical people like Charles Lamb. The summer lightning of his wit has not tarnished a leaf of the laurel crowns of the "Eminent Composers," about whom he discoursed so irreverently. Music can only be damaged by had musicians, or by those who love tier not wisely, but too well, or by those pseudo-devotees who are extraordinarily successful in dissembling their affection.

Music is still habitually wounded in the house of her friends by people who go to musical parties, knowing what they have to expect, and who yet talk loudly through the programme, even when distinguished musicians are performing. They thus kill two birds with one stone by showing disrespect for

the art and discourtesy to the artist. The opera-going public, again, includes a large percentage of people who go not so much to hear the music as to see and to be seen. In this context we may be allowed to tell an old story which has recently been revived in the following form. A benevolent enthusiast took a young female relative to hear Faust, but so continuous was her conversational obbligato that the poor man hardly

beard a note of Gounod's genial score. However, at the close the young lady declared that she had enjoyed herself enor- mously, and then, added, "I see they are going to do Tannhauser on ThUrsday. Couldn't you take me to that P" Her uncle paused a moment, and then replied, " Yes; I haven't