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RUSKIN'S MUSIC

"It is well known," says a recent newspaper writer, "that Ruskin's ear was as deaf to musical sound as his eye was sensitive to natural beauty." On the other hand, Miss Wakefield, the celebrated singer and the originator of country Musical Competitions, has put together a volume of 158 pages—most of them, certainly, in rather big type—under the title of "Ruskin on Music." The inference, of course, to an unbelieving world is that he wrote about what he did not understand. But Miss Wakefield understands; and she says, "what is to be admired in what he has said of the art is the beautiful way in which its spiritual meaning and teaching have been expressed by him, in the short passages which he has devoted to it, and in which no one has ever excelled him."

For his thoughts on music there is that book to read; but for Ruskin's quest of music, for his lifelong attempts to qualify as a musician, there is nothing to show. The story has not yet been told, because it has little bearing on his life's main work, and—to put it roughly—it is the story of a failure. Perhaps there are admirers who would rather not know about the failure; and yet—you shall judge when you have heard it!

There are still in existence the bound volumes of piano-pieces and operatic songs which he learnt when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. One of these volumes is open on the piano, in our photograph of the Brantwood drawing-room, arranged as it used to be when he strummed a little before dinner and read at the four candles after dinner. Each piece is inscribed by the Oxford music-master with the usual vague respect of Town to Gown in the formula, "— Ruskin, Esq., Ch.Ch." The master does not seem to have known his Christian name, but he evidently dragged him through a great deal of Bellini, and Donizetti, and Mozart; and "forty years on—shorter in wind, though in memory long" Ruskin had a keen recollection of these pieces, and liked to go over them with any young friend, showing how they used to sing "Non piÙ andrai" or "Prendero quel brunettino," with all the flourishes. There are his fingering exercises, as elaborately annotated as all his old books are; he must have spent much time and taken great pains, in those early days, over his music. It was not for want of opportunity, nor for lack of intention, that he did not become a musician.

When he left Oxford he still continued his lessons, especially the singing. I have never heard of his singing in company, but I can hardly doubt that the lessons did much for his voice. Any one who has heard him lecture, or read, or even talk, knows how resonant and flexible it was, and how thoroughly under his command. He had naturally a weak chest; he caught cold easily, and his throat was often affected; but he always, I think, was able to lecture, and his voice was the first thing that attracted an audience. The singing lessons were not without result.

In later years his music-master was George Frederick West, who taught him—or tried to teach him—something of composition. I can remember Mr. West coming to give him a lesson at Herne Hill, but I don't think I was ever present at the ordeal. You can imagine that "Dr. Ruskin," as Mr. West always called him, was a most difficult pupil, wanting at every turn to know why; incredulous of the best authority; impatient of the compromises and conventions, the "wohl-temperirtes Klavier"; and eager to upset everything and start afresh. It is Mrs. Severn who can describe these droll interviews and Mr. West's despairing appeal, "But you wouldn't be ungrammatical, Doctor Ruskin?"

I am not so sure about that; but Mr. Ruskin learnt what he wanted. One thing he could do to perfection. He could easily and readily transpose and copy a song that was too high or too low, and he liked doing so. It does not imply great scholarship, but it is wonderful, as Dr. Johnson said of the performing dog, that he should do it at all. He might have been spending his time to better purpose, you think?

Music lessons went on, at all available intervals, down to the close of his active life. At Sandgate in 1887-88 he was learning from Mr. Roberts. In his lodgings, besides the cottage piano already there, he got a grand piano and a harmonium (the last was afterwards given to a chapel in Coniston), and because he had few chances of hearing music in that retirement, he engaged a young lady professional to play of evenings to himself and the friends who were staying with him.

In his books there are several hard hits at concerts and concert-goers; but just as he wrote against railways and yet, he said, "used them himself, few people more," so he was an energetic concert-goer. On arriving at Paris or any great foreign town his first question was, "What about the opera?" With classical Italian opera he was familiar from his youth up. He loved it, indignant when pestilent modernism hurried the tempo or took liberties with the well-known score. In London he usually had a season ticket for the Crystal Palace concerts—you remember how he abused the Crystal Palace!—and when he was driven away by the "autumn cleaning," a great business in old Mrs. Ruskin's scrupulous housekeeping at Denmark Hill, he would stay at the Queen's Hotel in Norwood, "to be near the Manns concerts."

He has just mentioned Charles HallÉ in "Ethics of the Dust," but in private letters comes out his real admiration of the great pianist. John Hullah was one of his friends; his copy of Hullah's "Manual" is scribbled with devices for simplifying the teaching of the keyboard. Indeed, being as he was a born teacher, and counting as he did music an essential to education, he even taught—or tried to teach—what he knew of it whenever there was a chance. That class of little country girls at Brantwood had to learn music too; it was in his time of failing strength, and the story is tragi-comic; but in such times the real heart reveals itself through all weaknesses, and it was a very kindly and earnest nature that made him write out neat cards of music-lore reduced to its lowest terms for the cottage lasses whose lives he tried to raise and brighten.

It was only on evenings of actual illness or serious trouble that he passed the time without music, and he generally managed to have somebody in the house who could play and sing. One of his admirations was "Claribel" (Mrs. Barnard), whom he met at Jean Ingelow's; she sang her own songs to his great delight. Later, among many, there were the Misses Bateman and Miss Wakefield; in "Joanna's Care" he has told his readers about the charm of Mrs. Severn's singing. And it was not only comic songs and nigger ballads that he would listen to; he liked fun, as his readers ought to know by now, and a good funny song, if the tune was sound, made him clap his hands in a quaint gesture and laugh all over—the more that there was much sadness in his thoughts. I remember Sir Edward Burne-Jones's account of a visit to the Christy Minstrels; how the Professor dragged him there, to a front seat, and those burnt-corked people anticked and shouted, and Burne-Jones wanted to go, and Ruskin wouldn't, but sat laughing through the whole performance as if he loved it. An afternoon, to him, of oblivion to the cares of life; an odd experience; but he would not call it music. "Now let us have something different," he used to say when he had laughed enough.

The old songs were his delight, old English and French and Scotch. German songs, German music, and everything German, except DÜrer and Holbein, he could not abide; German love-songs especially, "songs of seduction," he called them. He would just endure a bit of Swiss carolling, with its breezy reminder of the Alps; but the unlucky individual who tried him with Fesca has cause to remember the event. Haydn and Mozart he classed with the Italians, and Handel with the good old standards; but Mendelssohn was not to be named. Worst of all he misliked execution without feeling: the brilliant young lady pianist had no welcome from Ruskin. Gaiety, or else tenderness, appealed; even among the old songs there were those he cast out of the programme. Of "Charmante Gabrielle" he said once, "it might do when a king sang it."

Corelli was one of his favourite composers; that was another link with "Redgauntlet" and Wandering Willie; and though he was never a collector of rarities as such, he bought all the Corelli he could meet with, as well as various old editions of early music at Chappell's sales.