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I have no ear -
Mistake me not, reader, -- nor imagine
that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages,
hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes
to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. --
I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with
those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for
his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious
labyrinthine inlets -- those indispensable side-intelligencers.
Neither have I incurred, or done any
thing to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which
constrained him to draw upon assurance -- to feel "quite
unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I
thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is
it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be.
When therefore I say that I have no
ear, you will understand me to mean -- for music. -- To
say that this heart never melted at the concourse of sweet sounds,
would be a foul self-libel. -- "Water parted from the
sea" never fails to move it strangely. So does "In
Infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord
(the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentle-woman
-- the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation -- the
sweetest -- why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S----, once the
blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple who had power to thrill
the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats;
and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that
not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing sentiment,
which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature
quite, for Alice W----n.
I even think that sentimentally I am
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 yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it.
Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached.
I am not without suspicion, that I have
an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in
my wild way on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while
he was engaged in an adjoining parlor, -- on his return, he was
pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!"
On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat
an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions
had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched a superior
refinement, soon convinced him that some being, -- technically
perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common
to all the fine arts, -- had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny,
with all her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited
from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration,
and not with any view of disparaging Jenny.
Scientifically I could never be made
to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music
is; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices
can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough
bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh
and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of
the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my
ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of.
I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio
stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa,
Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton. It is hard to
stand alone -- in an age like this, -- (constituted to the quick
and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily
believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon
the gamut) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the
magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial
stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. Yet
rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must
avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than
pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. I am constitutionally
susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in 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. The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring
stripes, while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive.
It will strive -- mine at least will -- 'spite of its inaptitude,
to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon
hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for
sheer pain, and inexplicable 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! I
take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life
sounds; -- and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my
paradise.
I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's laughing Audience!) immoveable, or affecting some faint emotion, -- till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that --
-- Party in a parlour,
All silent, and all damned!
Above all, those insufferable concertos,
and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter
my apprehension. -- Words are something; but to be exposed to
an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying, to lie
stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted
effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an
interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling,
and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames,
and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book,
all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent
extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable
rambling mime -- these are faint shadows of what I have undergone
from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental
music.
I deny not, that in the opening of a
concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable:--
afterwards followeth the languor, and the oppression. Like that
disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy,
described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches
-- "Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given,
to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water,
by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and
pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania,
and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight
to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting
an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly
imagine, they act, or that they see done. -- So delightsome these
toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without
sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical
meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be
drawn from them -- winding and unwinding themselves as so many
clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the scene
turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations
and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing
but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus
pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise
them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually
suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague
of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing
some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no
labour, no persuasions they can avoid, they cannot be rid of it,
the cannot resist."
Something like this "scene-turning"
I have experienced at the evening parties, at the house of my
good Catholic friend Nov--; who, by the aid of a capital organ,
himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room
into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into
minor heavens*.
[Footnote] * I have been there, and still would go;
Tis like a little heaven below.--Dr. Watts
When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some five and thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension -- (whether it be that, in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings --or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) -- a holy calm pervadeth me. -- I am for the time
--rapt above earth,
And possess joys not promised at my birth.
But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive, impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly," -- still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps,I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end; -- clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me -- priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me -- the genius of his religion hath me in her toils -- a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous -- he is Pope, -- and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too, -- tri-coroneted like himself! -- I am converted, and yet a Protestant -- at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person -- I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus -- Gog and Magog -- what not? -- till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and, a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faint and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant- countenanced hosts and hostess.
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