Sermons in Symphonies

THE other day, while I was hearing an orchestra play (and watching it work), I found myself rather tritely moralizing that all the world’s a band, and all the men and women merely players; and that many of us who feel ourselves competent to perform upon the first violin may consider ourselves fortunate if we are allowed to play second fiddle.

Does anyone, I wonder, ever think of the home-life of the drummer or of the horn-player? (Perhaps the domestic lives of their wives would even more demand the passing tribute of a tear.) No — as little as of a postman or a railroad conductor, do we think of them as having any private or personal lives of their own. The drummer and the trumpeter exist only to provide a fine sonorous background of sound in an orchestral production, even as the postman and the conductor exist only to deliver our letters and to punch our tickets. The individual is submerged in his profession.

Of foreordained virtuosi in Life’s orchestra, there are but a few; the great majority of us are ensemble players, none of whom seem of any great importance to the general result; yet the power to mar—if not to make—the desired harmony lies with the instrumental Hoi Polloi. Eliminate the sounding brass and tinkling cymbals from an orchestra, and all the charity in the world will not save the piece in which parts have been given to instruments in a great impersonal chorus. Not as individuals, but as members of a massive orchestral unit of sound shall we attain self-expression; yet, if the plaintive piping of the wind inst ruments — nay, even the unmelodious rumble of the kettledrum — does not come in with perfect precision, absolute rhythm, the smoothness of an entire symphony is marred. Of course, no one notices our individual contribution to the general harmony, but let us strike a wrong note, or be heedless of the tempo, and we have importance thrust upon us by a squirming, wincing audience.

It is undoubtedly a very negative rôle that most of us are called upon to play — simply to abstain from doing the wrong thing, and so to detract from the harmony of the whole. We are not even allowed to choose our own instruments. He who would fain take up the Harp of Life, is perhaps given a prosaic trombone. Perhaps Jones may have the Soul of a Soloist, but alas! his technique is such that he must needs play his humble part in the great instrumental chorus where his deficiencies will not be noticed. Smith may seem to play upon a magic flute, so far as purity of tone and correctness of technical skill are concerned; but where is the breath of genius which makes the listener’s heart thrill in sympathy, as the hearts of poets have thrilled to the song of the nightingale? How rare is that Heaven-endowed soul who can exclaim with the simplicity of truth, —

The bitter truth is that few of us live our lives either with technical skill or artistic finish, and that the majority of us will never be heard from individually, save by discords made by unhandy plucking at our harps.

In The Story of an African Farm, a rather colorless character is described by her far more vivid cousin (who could never have played second fiddle to anybody) as being like the accompaniment of a song; and the description often comes to my mind as defining a certain type of person, sympathetic, adaptable, self-effacing, quick to perceive and to respond, never a soloist, but often, as Olive Schreiner’s heroine puts it, ‘far better than the song she is to accompany.’

Of course, the orchestra of sound has one great advantage over the orchestra of life. It has a visible leader, who remembers each obscurest instrument, and signifies — perhaps by a lifted eyebrow, perhaps but by the twiddle of a little finger — that it is time for that small unimportant voice to quaver out the note for the utterance of which he has been created.

As we listen — and perforce contribute — to the symphony of life, it sometimes seems as if we were part of a leaderless orchestra. The air is rent with dissonances — our ears are deafened by cacophonies rather than soothed with melodies. Each little instrument wishes to play a solo, regardless of what other instruments are doing. We are in an orgy of individualism — anarchy, rather than harmony, rules. Terrified and bewildered, whom are we to follow in the adventure of daily life, through dark passages where we are conscious of no leader? If no conductor’s wand dips toward our humble corner, what wonder is it that panic strikes our breasts, and that we utter false notes, out of time and tune, and so contribute to the general pandemonium?

There is just one thing to be done by those unhappy but honest souls (of whom the number does not decrease as the world grows more complex) who cannot be conscious of a leader, visible or invisible. They must fix their eyes on those steadfast companions in Life’s orchestra, who, through their finer sensibilities, are conscious of unheard harmonies, and feel a rhythm of life more true than the beat of any visible baton. To them, heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Their ears are attuned to cadences to which, perchance, our own are deaf. Amid the din and discord of their fellows, these men of true genius play on in ordered beauty and with high authority. Since their power of interpreting so far transcends our own, why may not the vision also be more exalted? We ourselves do not need to see the leader if we are willing to follow those who do; and even Realists must acknowledge that there are some whose inward eyes have sight.

Had there been an orchestra in the Forest of Arden, the moralizing Duke would unquestionably have found sermons in symphonies, instead of in stones, and he might have uttered, through the liquid music of a lute, what I have tried to pound out, with clumsy insistence, on a drum.