BOOKS.
MUSIC AND MANNERS.*
Is it savours not a little of sacrilege to criticise the utterances of a writer who boasts "a somewhat exhaustive acquaintance with European despots," and who, on the showing of his title-page, is a Commander of five and a Knight of two distinguished foreign Orders, Mr. Beatty-Kingston has himself furnished us with the fullest justification of this proceeding by the scathing terms in which he denounces the Germans for their "greedy worship" and ostentatious display of such "baubles" The ohild of musical parents, who taught him to sing before he could speak, and to play before he could spell (vide preface), gifted, moreover, with a preternaturally acute ear, enabling him to detect deflections of eighths of a tone with unerring certainty, Mr. Beatty-Kingston has not only been con- tinually brought into contact with musicians and music- lovers ever since the days of his early boyhood, but as a resident and war correspondent during a sojourn of above twenty years on the Continent, he has been trained in that great school of journalism whose watchword is,—" Expand !" He is a journalistic gladiator of the first rank, who, as Professor Nettleship happily remarked of Virgil, disdains to say a plain thing in a plain way. Take, for example, the following elegant periphrasis, used to imply that a certain Indian version of " God Save the Queen " was none other than "the tune the old cow died of." "To me," says Mr. Beatty-Kingston, " it appears the sort of tune eminently calculated to produce a lethal effect upon ` milky mothers.'" A skilful worker in that polyglot mosaic apparently deemed indispensable by all who appeal to fashionable readers, he is not above extending a kindly patronage to the dead as well as to the living languages. Rather than employ the cumbrous compound "not-to-be-forgotten," he airily inserts the phrase baud obtiviseari. Again, the awkwardness of the expression ferce natures is entirely obviated by regarding it, not as a genitive, but a nominative plural= wild beasts (Vol. II., p.23); while the substitution and expansion involved in Mr. Beatty-Kingston's variations upon the phrases more Anglico and ex-officio—to wit, mode Anglicano and virtute officierum—are cal- culated to scarify the feelings of a scholar, or as he would pro- bably put it, to exercise a lethal effect upon all wearers of moth- eaten mortar-boards. Elsewhere be speaks of "a few of the more emotional peripetia of Johann Strauss's early career," betraying here, as in other passages, a fondness for " the excellences of the plural ;" such as the early grammarians so highly appreciated in classical authors. But it is in feats of expansion in the vernacular, as well as in the ingenuity with which he dodges the repetition of the same word in successive sentences—the bugbear of the English journalist—that Mr. Beatty-Kingston shines so con- spicuously as a stylist. He does not speak of a man's birth, but his "genetic arrangements." Such homely words as " hares " and " horse " are disguised in Latin garb—lepores and equus —lest their iteration should jar on the fastidious ear. The best examples of his skill, however, occur in his handling of names of places or people. Thus the Parisians become "the Lutetian public ;" the Prussians, "the Bornssians," " the eons of Almayne," or "the children of Tent ;" Berlin, "the ursine city," "the city of the little Bear," or "Athens on the Spree." Roumania is similarly alluded to as the "sweet and lovely country "—scamps tsecira si frumoosa—and the feelings of the writer of this review on encountering this periphrasis for the third time in the compass of twenty pages are quite indescribable. Equally exasperating is the patronising or familiar tone adopted in the author's allusions to his eminent acquaintances,—" dear old Moltke," " dear old Cipriani Potter," " poor Harry Arnim," —and the laborious—or "meticulous," as he would probably say —attention paid to irrelevant details out of deference to that craving to know not only what people say and do and think, but what they eat and drink and how they are clothed. For instance, it is not enough to tell us that Volkmann was smoking, but we must needs be informed that the cigar was a "powerful Partagas." The fact that Epstein, the pianist, dressed very • Music and Manners Personal Reminiscences and Sketches of Character. By W. Beatty-Kingston. 2 vols. London : Chapman and Hall. well does not suffice, bet the name of his tailor is added. This practice reaches its climax in a chapter beaded " Adelina Patti at Home," in which we can say, without hesitation, that Mr. Beatty-Kingston beats Dr. Engel on his own ground. Should Madame Patti's castle ever come into the market, these pages will prove invaluable to intending purchasers, for fixtures, as well as moveables, are catalogued with the minutest care. Nothing is forgotten ; the number, and in some cases the names, of her servants ; the price paid by Madame Patti for her " orchestrion ;" the contents of her jewel-cases and autograph- book; when and where meals are served to her guests, and of what these "ineffable repasts " consist,—all these things, and more also, are included under the elastic title of Music. We will give only one quotation from this chapter, but it is a gem : —"No sojourner under Madame Patti's roof can fail to observe with pleasure how devotedly she is served by all her dependants. On her part, she treats them more like friends than like mere domestics. Their' ordinary' is as plentiful and succulent as her own ; good sound claret is supplied to them is discretion during every week-day dinner, and champagne on Sundays."
Valuable and interesting as the foregoing facts—and others of a more purely culinary character—will doubtless prove to the earnest musical reader, they are perhaps eclipsed by another passage, recording an episode on which Mr. Beatty-Kingston evidently dwells with fond recollection, for he has repeated it with slight variations in another chapter. During his sojourn in Vienna, Mr. Beatty-Kingston enjoyed the intimacy of Her- beck, the eminent conductor, his last meeting with whom is thus pathetically described :-
" I spent one long, never-to-be-forgotten evening with hint in his mansion near the sky, talking over old times and friends, playing with him four-handed arrangements of his later concerted works and listening to all but impossible feats on the pianoforte by Epstein and Toseffy, whom he had invited to meet me. It was late séance; supper—the chief plat of which, I remember, was roe- venison and cranberry-jam—lasted unusually long, and tho post- camel palaver (as usual with P.F. illustrations) still longer. About 2 we took our leave, and little SosEffy, an inveterate converter of night into day, dragged me all to an extra ante-meridianal cafe, where he insisted upon playing we a match at billiards (Kegelspiel) for two bumpers of hot egg-punch ! I never again saw Von Herbeek. Not long after that memorable evening—at once a joyons and mourn- ful souvenir—he died somewhat unexpectedly, and was followed to the grave by the elite of Viennese musical and artistic society." (Vol. I., p. 21.)
Mr. Beatty-Kingston is apparently quite serious, otherwise we might be tempted to compliment him upon having shown how admirably qualified he would be for compiling the memoirs of a musical Barry Lyndon. The whole scene might have come straight out of one of Thackeray's burlesques. The second version, given on p. 239 of the same volume, is hardly so happy as the first ; for although the ingredients of the egg-punch are speci- fied, and the hour of the match is advanced from 2 to 4 a.m., the stakes are reduced from two bowls to one.
It will be impossible to give a better instance of the futility of the author's method in dealing with the individualities of eminent musicians, than by referring our readers to the picture he draws of Johannes Brahms. That method, as our readers will have already ascertained, is to attach an inordinate im- portance to externals,—to elevate the hospitality of a prima donna, the "succulence" of her servant's "ordinary," or the magnificence of her panires, into so many artistic merits. Brahms is not the possessor of a splendid castle ; he cannot dis- pense princely hospitality, nor seat two hundred people in his dining-room; his bearing may be dictatorial, and his manners unrefined. But, granting the accuracy of Mr. Beatty- Kingston's portraiture, we assert that it is entirely beside the mark. Musicians—and for them these chapters were intended in the first instance—do not love Beethoven's music a whit the less because his manners at table were probably worse than Dr. Johnson's ; and those who recognise in Brahma his greatest living intellectual descendant, will not abate their enthusiasm one jot for all the stress that Mr. Beatty-Kingston lays upon the coarse and boorish traits of his personality. In a later chapter the writer speaks in the highest terms of Brahma's powers as an interpreter of Beethoven's music ; but this tardy praise is powerless to efface the disagreeable and misleading impression which an average reader, not specially interested in Brahma's music, will derive from these pages. A similar pro- cess, if applied to Beethoven, would, no doubt, yield similar results; but we ask,—Is it legitimate ? On the other hand, there is an ample fund of harmless and humorous anecdote connected with Brahma untouched by Mr. Beatty-Kingston, and which
shows him in a very different light. Take, for example, what is perhaps the best of the many stories of the ingenuity shown by him in evading a request to play in private, which relates how, striking C in the bass and C sharp in the treble, and hammering away at these two notes for some time, he appealed to the company how he could possibly play on a piano so terribly out of trine !
When the most liberal deductions have been made for the glaring faults which thickly bestrew the pages of these two stout volumes, the book still remains enormously superior at all points to the _Reminiscences of Dr. Engel recently reviewed in these columns. And as this is but negative praise, we feel it our duty to record the pleasure and amusement with which we have read certain portions of Mr. Beatty-Kingston's work. In the chapter on Wagner, in particular, he drops his turgid and facetious style, and discourses intelligently and sympathetically about that much-abused composer. Wagner's attitude towards the ultra-Wagnerites is well brought out by the help of judicious extracts from the Reminiscences of Franz Dinucker; and an interesting letter of Wagner's, setting forth some of his principles of composition as illustrated in the opera of Tannlaiuser, is here published for the first time. Other letters and characteristic anecdotes are quoted with excellent effect to rebut the charges of ingratitude, jealousy, and vanity so often brought against him. The chapter describing and contrasting the attitudes of the different European audiences contains much interesting reading, the illustrations of the irrepressibility of provincial Italian opera-goers being especially diverting. Again, the pleasant picture which Mr. Beatty-Kingston gives us of the Prussian Officers' Orchestral Union, and of music-halls as they exist in Germany, are calculated to awaken feelings of mingled envy and admiration. We should like to add also that we endorse the writer's very effective plea in favour of an increase in the quantity and quality of open-air music in our great towns. But perhaps the best thing in the book is the account given, under the heading "Straussiana," of the adventures of the " Walzer-Koenig," when, as a young fellow of nineteen, he took a scratch orchestra on a tour through Transylvania and Ronmaaia. Alter countless mishaps, Strauss and his followers found themselves in a neighbourhood infested with brigands :—
" It was resolved to purchase weapons at the sacrifice of two violins, in exchange for which they managed to obtain a few old rusty pistols, but no ammunition. These were distributed amongst them by Strauss, who, however, kept three for himself, sticking them in his belt, where they imparted to him a highly impressive air of robber-chieftainship. His trombone-player, one Seidl, a man of exceptional thew and sinew, scornfully rejected the pistol tendered to him, remarking that ' he would back himself to settle any ten bandits of the whole neighbour. hood with his trombone.' So formidable was the appearance of the Strauss cohort, numbering thirty-four ferocious musicians, that the peasants of the villages on their road Lied or bid themselves as they approached, taking them for brigands of the deepest dye: and between Kympena and Pleeeti, a real robber band which chanced to encounter them took to its heels, pauic.atricken, in the full belief that a rival association had come down the mountain-aide in overwhelming force for the purpose of putting an end to local enterprise."
The contents of the second volume, illustrating the "Manners" of various Continental nations, need not detain us long. Mr. Beatty-Kingston dilates upon the Viennese thirst for pleasure, the gastronomic delinquencies of the German race, their inborn craving for " honorific distinctions," Christmas usages in Prussia, and a variety of similar topics, after a fashion that is occasionally interesting, but too often aggravatingly facetious. He seems to know that English readers vaguelyexpect to find Spaniards dirty, Italians gesticulators, French people frivolous, and Germans stolid,—and so, therefore, he describes them. But if English people were described after the same method—according to Con- tinental prejudices—they would habitually sell their wives at Smithfield, trail a " bonle-dogue " after them, and say nothing but " Goddam " and " rosbif." It is not too much to say that in no Italian society would such a scene be enacted as that which Mr. Beatty-Kingston relates as having occurred at Rossi's villa. An Italian of the upper class is more studiously composed in his de- meanour than even an Englishman. One might, of course, witness such a scene outside a Neapolitan wine-shop ; but it is just as absurd to say that such behaviour is characteristic of an Italian salon, as to say that the language of Billingsgate is characteristic of an English drawing-room. Mr. Beatty-Kingston exaggerates wildly, notably in his remarks on Spain as to officials, and in treating of Bucharest as to roads; but his exaggeration is not amusing. We cannot help noticing also, that when quoting— often at considerable length—the remarks which eminent
personages have addressed to him, he has unconsciously im- parted to them the peculiar features of his own diction. The chapter on "Madame Patti at Home" is paralleled by a chapter on Boni, the eminent actor, Rossi's dogs forming an effective pendant to Madame Patti's parrots.
It only remains for us, in conclusion, to attempt in brief compass to give our readers some faint notion of Mr. Beatty- Kingston's incomparable audacity as a word-coiner. That end, perhaps, may be best achieved by stringing together some of his choicest efforts in the form of a general summing-up of the chief demerits of his method. Let us, then, declare our conviction, —That to the musically proclivions his modius sperm, though replete with supernacular funniments and functioning with lethal regularity, will hardly prove relishable. His dictional delicts will grate upon the auricular sensitiveness of Procrustean purists, while the exaggerative emphasis which accrues in his treatment of all comestible or bibulous paraphernalia percutates the gentle reader, in Transatlantic parlance, as a veritable admonition to adders. [We plead guilty to the invention of modims sperm—which is, after all, as good Latin as genus loci, a favourite expression of the author's—and dictional. All the other novelties, without exception, will be found in the pages of Music and Manners.]
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