LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MRS. WATTS HUGHES'S " VOICE-FIGURES."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOE."1 SIR,—Mrs: Watts Hughes's Home for Little Boys at Islington is known to many. Mr. Augustus Birrell's lecture on Gibbon in aid of its funds, delivered in February last at Westminster, and again last summer at Islington, was heard by many. The Home is one for the most homeless of little street-urchins, the children chiefly of criminals ; a home to eat and to sleep in, to play and to sing in, during all the hours of the twenty-four when they are not learning their lessons at the School-Board schooL At once on entering it, you feel that the judgment guiding the arrangements belongs to one or more friends of these little boys who put real heart into the business of making them happy and good ; the kind of personal interest which can be traced in the management of all institutions of the kind which can be called, in the widest and truest sense, suc- cessful. But beyond this there is a touch of fairy-land about this Islington Home which is quite unique. Instead of blinds or curtains drawn across the lower panes of the windows, there are wonderful designs in colour ; strange, beautiful things— suggesting objects in Nature, but which are certainly neither exact repetitions nor imitations of anything in Nature. They are more like, perhaps, what a dream might make out of the impressions left by Nature,—perfectly drawn designs of shell- like forms, photographically precise renderings of shapes of which the exact originals were never seen by human eye on sea or land ; such things as "Alice in Wonderland" might have come upon, had she tumbled down to the bottom of the sea• There are trumpet and snake-like forms twisted and involved in complicated curves, impelled on to the glass seemingly by the force of a power like that which impels and sculpts the boiling wreaths of steam out of the funnel of a gasping engine. Pictured on the glass, they are rendered into the most elaborate and perfectly drawn perspective, each curve coloured and toned with gradations as subtle as any shell or petal of flower could be. Each foreshortened form of shell, trumpet, and snake is barred across by an infinity of lines, sometimes merely surrounding the forms by straight lines, at other times rippled in wavy lines ending at the edge by the daintiest of goffered frills. Across these lines will have been impelled on some of the glasses, other lines taking a contrary direction, the two sets in crossing each other forming a perfect honeycomb pattern. Most strange and suggestive, indeed, are those window-panes which the little boys at the Islington Home have to look through. They see weird caverns at the bottom of the sea full of beautifully coloured fancy sea- anemones and mussel-shells, headless snakes and fairy cups, and mossy entanglements of bud and leaf-like form; all seemingly vital, with the same laws of growth as those which inspired the creation of the designs in Nature which they suggest. The special force of nature which produced them is Mrs. Watts! Hughes's voice. These are some varieties of her "voice-figures." There are other classes which resemble more distinctly flowers.
I, with other friends, have been fortunate enough to see all the different classes of figures produced more than once, and will try and describe shortly what we saw when those classes of figures were produced of which there are specimens now being exhibited at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition. First, for the daisy-like figure, of which there are examples in a case at the New Gallery, Mrs. Hughes prepares a paste of flake-white powder-colour and water, and into a metal tube turned up at the end she inserts a ring resembling a table-napkin ring, over one end of which is stretched a thin membrane of India-rubber. The tube being inverted at the end, while singing through it, she looks straight down on the india-rubber disc. She covers this disc with a little water, and then taking up some of the flake-white paste with a penknife, she adds it to the water, which floats it all over the disc. She then sings into the tube a low note of her voice,—a note not very loud, but firm and wilfuL The effect on the paste is immediate. Tiny globules are thrown up into the air above the disc, and sputtering and leaping all alive with the motion caused by the vibrations of her voice, crowd into the centre of the membrane, making a little round heap like the centre of a daisy. Mrs. Hughes then alters the character of the note she is singing, though not its pitch. Instead of the note of firm, peremptory character, she sings a very sustained and insidious sound. Then, from the round centre of white paste will fly out, at unequal distances, little tentative star- like jets. Sometimes two or three such furtive attempts at a start will have been made, when suddenly a perfect and symmetrical row of petals will start out and create with the centre a lovely little, exquisitely finished, daisy-like form. Sometimes even three rows of petals will be the answer to the song-note, whereas at other times the one row will be imperfect, and will require singing in again to the centre before a perfect regular row produces itself. The- pansy form is produced somewhat in the same way as the daisy, but more water is put on the disc in proportion to the paste, and the note is altered and sung differently, only as Mrs. Watts Hughes knows how to alter and sing it. It must be remembered that it is no ordinary voice or singing which creates these figures. Those who have had the happiness to hear Mrs. Hughes sing parts of Gliick's " Orphee," or Pergolesi's " Stabat Mater," and last, not least, her own national Welsh air, " The Ash-Grove," must realise that there are very few even among the greatest singers who can rival her in the science of using the vocal organ in all its infinite delicacies, intricacies, and distinctions, and who can express pathetic and dramatic emotion with as much power and beauty.
For the singing of the shell and trumpet-like figures, Mrs. Hughes also prepares a paste with powder-colour and water ; but instead of the flake-white, she uses prussian- blue, madder-lake, or any other colour which she has found, by its weight and character, will respond to the vibrations of her voice, and will work easily on the glass and membrane,. She rubs the membrane over with this paste, and likewise the piece of glass on which she is going to sing the figure. For a small piece of glass she will use an inverted tube, as in the production of the floral forms, and will move the glass rapidly round on the disc of india-rubber, while she sings a firm, sustained, but short note. It is the work of a second,.
and we see on the glass one of the strange nameless forms. Should the glass be too large to hold in the hand,. then Mrs. Hughes uses a straight tube, and sings a note while moving it round or along the glass.
What it all means, no one, least of all Mrs. Watts Hughes, pretends to be able to explain. These voice-figures are facts which it is to be hoped science may be able, sooner or later, to•
explain. Every year more and more curious developments of these facts are created, and all whom they interest must wish Mrs. Watts Hughes may be able to continue working at them. Any day she may sing some fresh wonder which may facili- tate the work of science, and lead to a fuller under- standing of them. Meanwhile, we must go on wondering- why these vibrations of the voice should lead to the formation of designs so nearly the copy of flowers and ferns and trees and shells.
But no explanation is needed to make us enjoy the beauty of these voice-figures. Artists to whom they have been shown are enthusiastic in their admiration of them. They are- particularly artistically interesting in one way. The old saying attributed to Titian, " Colour is quality," is by them amply exemplified. Most of these voice-figures have been sung in the most ordinary colours ; but the exquisite perfection and finish of the designs, and the subtle toning, shading, and gradation which the singing gives to this ordinary powder and water, produces a quality and beauty of colour which might be a lesson to any painter. If " colour is quality," what then is quality ? Is it not the suggestion of life and growth ? Why have some works of art that sense of life, and others, on the contrary, the sense of death—of finality —an absence of any power of suggestion to the mind to go on working beyond what is actually before the eye ? In the actual manipulation of the colour, is it not the touch that suggests mouvement, that gives quality to the work of a real artist's painting? The touch not tightly restrained within hard and defined outline, but thrown loosely on to the canvas.
with a grace of unasserted security as to being in the right place, though suggesting a power of motion—a thing of life, and not of death—so, in the voice-figures, this "quality" which gives us such beautiful colour, is it not the result of the suggestion of the force of motion which the figures give us P' And more than this ; do they not suggest that many more- things in the world about us may have been created by sound?' If one woman's voice can sing such strange and beautiful designs, what may not other sounds have created P What may they not be now creating around us P—I am, Sir, &c.,
EMILIE ISABEL BARRINGTON.
Melbury House, Kensington.
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