A Creative 'Listener'

THE title of Mr. Schauffler’s article, ‘The Creative Listener,’ in the September Atlantic lent special vividness to a recollection which often recurs to me, bringing with it always the unmarred joy of the incident which gave it birth. Indeed, I found Mr. Schauffler’s entire article illuminated and interpreted by that recollection, and I tell the brief story here, both to support his contention that the creative listener affects his fellow auditors as well as the performers, and to add that those auditors may also keep their ‘inner photograph albums’ of ‘stranger friends.’

Naturally, however, the listener has a less wide opportunity to collect these precious portraits, and it is not strange that I, often going musicless for months at a time and never able to be a listener of any sort more than three or four times in a season, have found but the single face.

I found it some years ago in those topmost seats of Carnegie Hall from which I have heard most of my real music. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, preceded by some Berlioz selections, was the programme. Practically every seat in the house was bought as soon as it was on sale, and this unusual demand had driven up into our eyrie a class of people evidently different from those who usually frequented it. I recognized this fact with some apprehension, uncertain what it might portend. I had taken the measure of the habitual annoyances of the place, although I never became inured to them, and I dreaded the appearance of new ones. Trying to estimate the probabilities, I looked about me more than was my habit.

It was during the Berlioz numbers — described by a flippant but accurate reporter as bearing to the Symphony the relation of ‘a radish to a full course dinner’ — that I first noticed my Listener’s face, a girl’s face. She might have been anywhere from seventeen to twenty-seven years of age, but probably was not far, in eit her direction, from twenty. Her face was thin, almost to the point of sharpness, and a momentary glimpse of it in full showed an irregularity of contour and length of line which, but for the eyes, might have made it almost plain. But the profile, visible across the arc of some dozen seats, had a fragile, vivid beauty, quite independent of its illumination by the music. So illumined, it was arrestingly lovely. The impression it gave of int imate connection with the music cannot be exaggerated. It was the music, or at any rate grew out of the music, and was moulded into a visible transcript of it. Glance when I might in my Listener’s direction, I never failed to find that moment’s music reflected in her face.

In the pause before the beginning of the Symphony she turned quite toward me for a moment, and I noted a certain delicate peculiarity of dress, not in the least suggesting the affectation of the consciously ‘artistic temperament,’ but seeming rather an instinctive expression of individuality.

The experience had been a delightful one, thus far, and I told myself that I would be wise and leave it there. I would not look at her again. The music we were waiting for would be too severe a test. One might feel it, doubt - less, but could one— could any one — look it? No, I would not watch her again. But I did, of course I did, and found no disappointment, but always t he delight that was both surprise and certainty, always the doubled joy of that marvelous reflection. Once, when the mighty music swept me almost beyond human endurance, my alter ego warned me, ‘ Don’t look. You know she can’t do it — don’t look now.’ But even while I dreaded the failure, the flaw in my delight, I could not help one furtive, foreboding glance — a glance which found my Listener’s face hidden behind two slender hands.

After that I feared no more. I gave myself up to the happiness of this rare good fortune, oblivious, for once, of the destructive listeners around me. Let the slim youth with the score rustle his pages over, one by one, beside me. He reached no more than the furthest fringe of my consciousness. Let the bulky individual behind me beat time with a tireless foot. For once he ran no risk of being stabbed with a hat-pin and dropped unobtrusively under the seats till the music was over. They might listen as they pleased. I was listening with ear and eye, I was seeing the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.

It was over at last, and in the slowly converging currents of outgoing audience, I saw my Listener drifting surely to my side. My alter ego took alarm at once. ‘Now, don’t speak to her,’ it pleaded. ‘ Don’t be fool enough to spoil it all. It’s been wonderful, it’s been perfect, but it can’t go on. You ’ll shatter it if you speak. She’ll be shocked or offended or bewildered. And that perfectly nice, conventional, middleaged man and woman with her — what will they think of a stranger speaking to their daughter?’

But my Listener was close enough to touch, and I spoke before I willed it. ‘Will you let a stranger tell you that yours is the only face I ever wished to watch while listening to music?’

Her eyes met mine with swift comprehension, and out of the myriad wrong things she might have said she picked unerringly the one right one. ‘ I have been very happy,’ she told me with lips and eyes.

‘ You have doubled my happiness tonight,’ I answered, dimly conscious of benignant parents in the background, beaming, ‘Yes, isn’t she wonderful?' across the girl’s shoulders. Then the crowd streamed in between us. I never saw her again, but I shall believe anything Mr. Schauffler chooses to tell me about the power of the creative listener.