The Contributors' Club

WHAT is the best thing to do with the mind when listening to music ? " Do nothing with it,” some one may reply ; “ let it take care of itself.” But this implies a mistaken idea as to its ways. It seldom does, in point of fact, take care of itself. It is bound to follow the successive suggestions either of certain outside impressions, or of certain inner impressions which also had originally an external source. One may as well choose a little among these. Surely we might better direct the mental panorama by some voluntary choice than to have it directed by the accidental sight of a grotesque face in the audience, or the odd bowing of some one of the second violins. Does it make the sailing of a summer sea any the less idly luxurious to touch the helm lightly from time to time ?

Now there are several ways open to choice in the management of the mind’s delicate steering apparatus, on such an occasion as the hearing of fine music. The worst way, no doubt, is to gaze fixedly at the performers, and so let the eye cheat the ear out of half its enjoyment. This is the besetting temptation of the “ distinguished amateur,” who is inclined to give his whole attention to the visible handling of whatever instrument he himself may happen to play. At a recent concert I noticed that my neighbor riveted his interest, during a whole splendid movement of the symphony, on the agile gymnastics of one of the double-basses. But this is not so ill-advised as the trick some people have of staring at a singer, and even with an opera-glass, during a whole song. What can they carry away in the memory but a visual image of a wonderful openness of countenance, a kind of labio-dental display ?

I have always liked to close my eyes during any passage of orchestral music to which I wished to lend special attention. It is surprising what sensitiveness and grasp this instantly gives to the auditory power. Sometimes, in a dark corner under the gallery, one may indulge himself in the luxury. But on Kant’s immortal doctrine that one should do only those things which all may do, this closing of the eyes at a concert hardly seems proper in the body of the house. Would it not look queer if we all sat that way ? (“ Look queer to whom, if everybody’s eyes were shut ? ” Well, to the gentlemanly ushers ; and the reporters, whose eyes are always open; and the cornet and the bassoon, in their lucid intervals.) It is not necessary, however, actually to close the outward eye. We may select some peg on which to hang it, so to speak, where no distracting image will interrupt our reverie. The middle of the back of some quiet person in front of us will generally do. Or we may happen to have that convenient faculty, possessed by so many, of fixing the bodily eye on a given point, while the mind’s eye is gradually withdrawn leagues and leagues behind it.

There are two opposite ways, in particular, open to the mind for its excursions during music. It may either let itself become engaged in dreams of one’s own personal destiny, memories of the past, fantastically intermingled, or dreams of “ what hath never been, and what can never be; ” or it may go out of itself into the life-dramas of others. Which is the better way? For example, in listening to one of those orchestral duets of Rubinstein’s, one may either disregard the composer’s indication in the title, weaving his own personal episodes at will from the changes of the chords; or he may occupy his imagination with the relations of the suggested Toreador and Andalouse; or he may hear only the far-off voices of well-known mortals and their perplexing fates ; or, finally, the music may but breathe an ethereal essence of human life universal, too elusive for any individual incarnation. The question is like that which confronts the poet: Shall he sing his own joys and woes, or shall he create exterior dramatic idyls? Shall he follow the method of Byron, or of Browning ?

“ I am never merry,” said Jessica, “ when I hear sweet music ; ” and her Lorenzo was no philosopher, and could give but the shallowest explanation of the fact. Rossetti’s Monochord, if she could have waited so long for it, might have helped her to a better one : —

No doubt it is the first instinct, with all of us, to let the “ eternal passion, eternal pain,” of great orchestral music interweave themselves with the past, the possible, or, more often, the dear impossible, of our personal life-story. We are, for the time being, subjects of what Rossetti has noted, in his own private copy of the poem from which I have just quoted, as “that sublimated mood of the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems, as it were, to oversoar and survey it.” But would it not be nobler in the soul if its survey were wider ? Would it not be better for the will, in its renunciation and vows of service, that these inchoate worlds of musical harmony, these swaying tides of mysteriously organizing sound, an audible chaos of multitudinous emotions over which a creative breath is hovering and calling life, with all its tragedies and comedies, into being, should be identified to the imagination with the fates of other men than ourselves ?

There are persons, I am beginning to discover, who have but a very imperfect power of visual imagination. An intimate friend writes me, after only three years of separation, “ I have completely forgotten you. Or, rather, I remember nothing but you, and not at all your outward aspect. Face, form, manner, have altogether faded, and cannot by any effort of will he recalled.” But I can shut my eyes and see this friend — form, features, color, a hundred particular ways of gesture and manner — more distinctly than any photograph could possibly present him. I could draw his profile on this paper; not composing it, but simply tracing it from my mental image, as if it were a silhouette laid down and followed mechanically with the pencil.

Those of us who possess this common enough power might at least always give some fitting mise en scène to a symphony, removing it from its incongruous situation in an ugly hall packed with monotonous rows of frivolous bonnets and sand-papered heads. We do not need Wagner’s aid to obliterate the musicians and fill the stage with impressive scenery. In a moment, at will, we are reclining in a stately pine forest on a solitary mountain-side. Behind us tower great crags with fluted columnar front, like nature’s organ-pipes. Below and to the left hollows a piny gorge, blue with misty depth, up whose slope, from round the mountain’s enormous flank, swells the sound of falling torrents. Beyond the granite ridge to the right goes down a broken foot-path to a hidden valley, where some momentous human passionplay begins now to be enacted.

Or we are drifting on the ocean, and a storm is subsiding. All night we have driven before the tempest, and now at the first glimmer of dawn we strain our sight into the darkness, and listen for the roar of breakers. Suddenly the sound of all sweet and powerful instruments rises and mingles, as if from the very depths of the rolling sea. Have the forces of nature become audible in their battling together ? Or have we drifted into the midst of a strife of mortal destinies, and is this the prelude to a mighty drama of the nations on the shores of some new world ?

— Some competent person should write an essay on the bright side of human ignorance. That ignorance has its bright side might perhaps he established on a priori grounds, since it would seem a kind of blasphemy to suppose that anything so natural and universal could be altogether a curse. A condition into which we are all born, and out of which the best of us can never escape, must somehow be advantageous ; unless, indeed, this world does really belong to the devil, — an hypothesis which I, for my own part, steadfastly refuse to entertain, in spite of the theories of some of my brethren and the practices of others.

But without going into such profundities (leaving questions of this sort for the competent essayist aforesaid), it is open to the least discerning of us to see that much of the interest of human life, no matter how commonplace, is dependent upon the element of uncertainty. It may fairly be accounted one of the few compensations of extreme poverty that the most trivial and prosaic details — the question of to-morrow’s dinner, even — must often be attended with something of that peculiar relish which nothing but the feeling of suspense can produce, and which more fortunate persons are fain to seek in trials of skill or in games of chance. To take a very different illustration, what would village or club gossip be worth if we knew the exact truth about our neighbors ; if we could no longer surmise, put this and that together, and draw our own inferences?— inferences not highly valuable for their truth, it may be, but interesting for their diversity and originality. What we all crave is a problem on which to exercise our ingenuity. We inherit a passion for riddles, and spend our days in solving them. Indeed, throughout the course of our intellectual development we are simply handed on, as we may say, from one class of enigmas to another, while others and still others stretch away before us in endless progression.

Amid the numerous attempts which have been made to define concisely the distinction between ourselves and our four-footed relatives, it seems strange that no one has ever hit upon this : Man is the only animal that loves a puzzle.

It is this liking for a doubt, this appetite for the mysterious, which makes, in great part at least, the fascination of novels. What are four or five hundred pages of moderately good print when a plot is to be unraveled ? How nimbly do we turn the leaves as curiosity pricks us on, chapter after chapter, till a sound of marriage bells announces the longdesired consummation ! Herein, also, is to be found the peculiar attractiveness of new stories, as compared with older and possibly better ones. We are already in the secret of Henry Esmond ; the book is a guessed conundrum, as it were (I speak as a — novel - reader) ; now for the latest “ Henry ” or “ Lucy,” the narrative of whose love affairs is just off the press.

It is abundantly affirmed, I am aware, that the new fiction is intrinsically superior to the old; but on that point I must confess to a measure of skepticism. Perhaps I am not an unprejudiced judge ; at my time of life it may be expedient to make some allowance for early prepossessions. At all events, the claim of the moderns has before now put me in mind of one of Charles Lamb’s whimsicalities. Somebody had boasted rather loudly of being a matter-of-fact person (realistic, as the present word is), when Lamb gave a sudden twist to the conversation by remarking, — no doubt in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, — “ Now, I value myself on being a matter-of-lie man.”

Probably most of us have some time or other tried to imagine how it would seem to know everything. For one, however, I am bound to admit that I have never been able to gain any very clear conception of such a state. It is impossible for me to conjecture what it would be like to know all about myself, even, letting alone the remainder of the world. Yet why do I speak with this meaningless limitation ? For of course I could not understand all about myself without possessing the same comprehensive acquaintance with everything else. Perfect knowledge of myself must of necessity include perfect knowledge of all with which I am in any sort of relation. In other words, — and to make the statement general,—it is only omniscience that knows everything about anything.

And if I really did know everything! Should I not forthwith begin to bewail the loss of my former estate ? With no longer anything before which I could stand in awe ; with nothing to pique the curiosity, nothing to be studied ! Would not such a condition be like reading the same old novel over and over, — yea, like downright stagnation and death, — to a creature who had once tasted the delights of growth and acquisition ?

And yet, could one know everything without knowing the feeling of ignorance and the pleasures of research ? Here we are getting lost, as we always must when we seek to compass the infinite. Speculations like these are vain ; some will perhaps call them sacrilegious. Let us keep within bounds, and, meanwhile, await the coming of the better equipped author whose good offices in this matter we bespoke at the outset.

— There are two insuperable objections, in my private and heretical opinion, to the so-called “ reformed ” spelling. One is that it would increase the already too great similarity in words. Syllables that are at present identical only to the ear would then become alike to the eye also. Now the true theory of a visible and audible language demands that the symbols of ideas should differ as much as the ideas. Rite, right, and write are three wholly distinct ideas, and their symbols ought to be correspondingly distinct. In the natural and undisturbed development of a language they would differ both to ear and to eye; but our present tongue is the result of confusing influences, and the sounds of our speech have been allowed in many instances to lose their differentiation. The eye, however, being a more intellectual organ than the ear, has refused to permit the visible symbols to break down into this indistinguishable similarity. If we cannot have every idea represented by a different symbol to the ear, at least let us not throw away, at the command of a false notion, whatever difference remains to the eye. Mete, meat, meet; night and knight; sight, site, cite ; mind and mined; aisle and isle ; by, bye, buy ; sent, scent, cent; sell and cell; wait and weight ; all and awl, and a great number of other such pairs or triplets, would lose what little is left of their individual identity. Depend upon it, this difference of spelling has not been a result of accident. It has been retained because of a felt instinct of the usefulness of keeping things separate in appearance which are separate in fact. Any one who has dabbled in phonography knows that the fatal defect of all short-hand systems of writing, for any but those who make a long-continued specialty of their use, is the extreme similarity of the signs, especially when combined in words and phrases. The advantage of our alphabet lies in the ingenious diversity of its forms, enabling the eye to seize on the special characteristic of each letter, even in hurried script. This is the secret of its having been retained unchanged through so many generations of men.

My second objection to phonetic spelling is that it would petrify any language in the forms which it happened to have at the moment of adopting the “ reform. " Now I feel sure, whatever certain eminent philologists may say, that the language-making instinct is by no means extinct in us. So far as the iron grip of the dictionaries will let it, language tends to move and change. And this, too, not at hap-hazard, but in obedience to a felt congruity between sound and sense. One or two examples are as good as a hundred to illustrate this. Why do children, and all persons not standing in awe of the dictionary, incline to say tinny or teeny, for a minute object, instead of tiny, if not that the littleness of the sound is more suited to the littleness of the thing ? And why do so many persons show a reluctance to pronouncing the o in the name of the Deity short, as in dog or fog ? If a fixed phonetic spelling, backed up by all the power of the more and more tyrannical dictionaries, is allowed to paralyze all the instincts of growth and change in the language, throwing it into a dead and fossil condition before its time, there will be no longer possible such progress as, for example, that from the old English ic to the modern I. Ic was too insignificant a sound for the whole weight of the first person, and that, too, in its nominative case of willing and acting. The idea needed (and once had) a more fitting sound-symbol, and at last found it again in this noble vowel, a compound whose first tone is ah, that broadest and fullest utterance in any language.

— The consequences of unguarded and over-hasty speech are a matter of common lament; the mischief of repressed and laggard speech is of another sort, less obvious, less widely deplored, but none the less real. An odd, smileand-tear-compelling volume will be that entitled Humor and Pathos of the Unsaid, even if it comes to be written. Somewhere among its visionary pages I seem to see a text that originally fell from the lips of an old friend of mine, who is in her ninetieth year. Having written a letter at her request, I laid down the pen, remarking, “ I have told J — all the things we said in our pleasant talk of him.” " Is that all ? ” she inquired, in a tone plaintive and reproachful. “ You should have told him the things we meant to say.” These words have since gathered a significance never dreamed of in their first utterance. To my mind they embody a very subtle kind of regret and self-dissatisfaction which we all at times feel, yet are at a loss to characterize. Why, as soon as a friend has withdrawn his presence, do we begin to see so many lost opportunities in the conversation we have just had with him ? Why do we, in dramatic retrospect, set ourselves to round out every elliptical construction, to reduce to devout simplicity every possible ambiguity in our speech, to enrich every feeble or halting expression thereof, and so (in dramatic retrospect) arrive at a better understanding, fuller and sweeter confidences, stronger assurances of faith and loving service ? Poor, tardily ingenious Soul, why said you not the thing you meant to say, — the word that would have conciliated one inestimably dear, who now, for lack of that word timely uttered, pursues estranged ways ?

Our grief for the dead has perhaps no keener edge of pain than that which cuts with the recollection of foregone privileges of communication. Had we but said this or that, which, surely, we wished to say, and had they but left us the comfort of their responses !

Even as regards the minor concerns of our social life, some regret of this sort is perpetually turning a thorn in our consciousness. The apt rejoinder, the happy acknowledgment of a favor received, the graceful word that would have relieved an awkward situation, have a singular trick of coming postfact to the exigency.

“ Beware of Had I wist,” advises an old-time writer. Of all our resident genii or visiting spirits, there is not another so eloquent, so plausible, so torturous as the Angel of the Afterthought, — an incomparable illustrator and teacher of amenities, tact, appeal, and mastery. “ All these things which I have told you,” observes the gently derisive angel, " are the things you ‘ meant to say ’ ! ”