Various

Mr. Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don’t want it—the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an important article. You need not look at pictures or statues, Mr. Lang contends; you need not even read poetry, if you “hate poetry and painting,” like George II. But you must often listen to music whether you will or not. There is no escape from it any more than from the influenza. Mr. Lang no doubt speaks chiefly for himself. Nature, as he frankly admits, has not made him musical; and though he can stand “Will ye no come back again?” and “Bonnie Dundee,” Wagner and Chopin say absolutely nothing to him. In any case, he is somewhat astray in declaring that literary men dislike music. Even Johnson, who is generally quoted as among the music-haters, and who, as we all know, called music “the least disagreeable of noises,” even he was at the worst only insensible to the charms of the art. He once bought a flageolet—that he never made out a tune is no matter—and Burney, the musical historian, says that six months before his death he asked to be taught “at least the alphabet of your language.” Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music of his country, and, like Congreve’s Jeremy, had a “reasonable ear” for a jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent Novello’s house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ and listen to his daughter’s singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they ever hear music or not. But look at the number of authors who have explicitly declared their delight in music. De Quincey was one; Browning was another. Did not Goldsmith play the flute, and Milton amuse himself with the organ? Rogers loved a barrel organ to distraction, and Ruskin went into mild raptures over Halle’s playing of Thalberg’s “Home, sweet home.” Burns and Hogg scraped on the fiddle, and Shelley strummed on a guitar, now on the Bodleian at Oxford. Moore sang Irish songs, Tom Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him; and if Shakespeare wasn’t musical he ought to have been considering the way in which he has spoken of the man who “hath no music in his soul.” In short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other people—some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.

To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged it would be somewhat difficult to say. That he was musical at all will probably be regarded as a revelation to most people; and indeed it is only since the recent publication of his correspondence that even the elect have realized the full extent of his musical tastes and accomplishments. That he took at least a mild interest in music might have been inferred from various allusions to the art in his tales and essays. In “The Wrong Box,” for example, we have the humorous situation where the young barrister pretends that he is engaged on the composition of an imaginary comic opera. It is in the same story, again, that there occurs a veritable “locus classicus” on the art of playing the penny whistle, and the difference between the amateur and the professional performer. Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that instrument. “The young of the penny whistler,” as he puts it, “like those of the salmon, are occult from observation.” He endows David, his forbear at Pilrig, with a musical ear, for the Laird received David Balfour “in the midst of learned works and musical instruments, for he was not only a deep philosopher, but much of a musician.”

It is, however, needless to dwell upon these vague impersonal references to music when so much that is directly explicit on the subject is to be found both in the Vailima letters and in the latter correspondence. Miss Blantyre Simpson, who knew Stevenson in his early days, says that he had not much of a musical ear, and had only a “rudimentary acquaintance” with “Auld Lang Syne” and “The Wearing of the Green.” It is clear that he improved as the years went on, but his family seem always to have regarded his musical accomplishments with something like scorn. In 1874, when he was 24, he was at Chester with his father, and the verger was taking the visitors round the cathedral.

“We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them with, I dare-say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me. ‘Ah,’ says he (the verger), ‘You’re very fond of music.’ I said I was. ‘Yes, I could tell that by your head,’ he answered. Then my father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger so distressed and shaken in the foundation of his creed that, I hear, he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was something in my face, and wanted to know what it was if not music.”

The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular case. “I have,” he said, “no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.” Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him; but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it “fascinates me like a tune.” Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is “useful for only two things—a yacht and a string quartette.” In his younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was “terribly excited” over HalÉvy’s “La Juive,” so much so indeed that he had to “slope” in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside, so he went into a “bierhalle” and brooded for nearly an hour over his glass. “An opera,” he mused, “is far more real than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all—an opera—would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I don’t know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall—imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!” Here, as some one has remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man—the tinsel and the humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real.

That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural, but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far. When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that “I write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano until I go to bed.” At this time the whistle was Osborne’s instrument. “You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!” Stevenson exclaimed to his father, “Dear powers, what a concerto! I now live entirely for the piano; he for the whistle; the neighbors in a radius of a furlong and a half are packing up in quest of better climes.” By his own confession, it was a case of picking out the melody with one finger! In the matter of musical arrangements he proclaims himself a purist, and yet, with charming inconsistency, announces that he is arranging certain numbers of the “Magic Flute” for “two melodious forefingers.” Clearly, it does not say much for Mr. Henley’s powers as a virtuoso that Stevenson should have “counterfeited his playing on the piano.”

But Stevenson’s particular instrument was the flageolet, the same that Johnson once bought. Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised instrument. “Played on my pipe,” “took to tootling on the flageolet,” are entries which constantly occur, the context always making it clear that “pipe” is synonymous with flageolet. “If I take to my pipe,” he writes on one occasion, “I know myself all is over for the morning.” Writing to Mr. Colvin in June, 1891, he says:—“Tell Mrs. S. I have been playing ‘Le Chant d’Amour’ lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new, when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence.” Generally speaking, Stevenson “tootled” by himself; but now and again he took part in concerted music with Osborne and Mrs. Strong. One day he makes music “furiously” with these two. A day or two later he writes:—“Woke at the usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the evening—to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me—my flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it, and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job—the thing dissolves into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the springs shoving different ways—it took me till two.” However, he got over his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. “In the evening our violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up at nine.” It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice, Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. “Even my clumsinesses are my joy,” he said—“my woodcuts, my stumbling on the pipe.”

But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at one time quite ousted the flageolet. “I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle,” he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in 1888. “We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I have always some childishness on hand.” To play a bass of any kind on a tin whistle must indeed have been “no joke.” But the instrument appears to have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” When he sent the manuscript for publication he could not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he tentatively fixed on “The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c.” Then he thought of a variation—“Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers,” and directed that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or “a sheaf of ’em.”

But Stevenson was more than a player of music: he actually tried his hand at composition! In one letter of the year 1886 he sets down in musical notation from memory a part of a dance air of Lully’s. About the harmony, which he has evidently made himself, he talks quite learnedly. “Where I have put an A,” he says, “is that a dominant eleventh or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity) I have always to babble questions; all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever.” A few months later and he had composed his Opus 1. He called it a Threnody, and he sent it for criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in the art. Some plain talk on the part of the cousin apparently followed, for we find the composer urging certain points in self-justification. “There may be hidden fifths in it,” he says, “and if there are it shows how damn spontaneous the thing was. I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody which was poured forth like blood and water on the groaning organ.” There was the true composer, putting down his inspiration as it came to him, and allowing it to stand as it was in defiance of all rule! Nothing daunted, he made another attempt. “Herewith another shy,” he said, “more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the damn bareness of the base, it looks like a real piece of music from a distance. I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time. The base was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, and may God have mercy on their souls.” That is too characteristically charming to be spoiled by comment.

J. C. H.

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Stevensoniana

The Bankside Press
M. F. MANSFIELD, 14 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK

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NOT I,
And Other POEMS,
BY
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Author of
The Blue Scalper, Travels
with a Donkey, etc.
PRICE 8d.
BLACK CANYON
or
Wild Adventures in the
FAR WEST
A
Tale of Instruction and Amusement
for the Young.
BY
SAMUEL OSBOURNE
ILLUSTRATED.
Printed by the Author.
Davos-Platz.

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THE PENTLAND RISING
A PAGE OF HISTORY
1666
‘A cloud of witnesses ly here,
Who for Christ’s interest did appear.’
Inscription on Battle-field at Rullion Green.
EDINBURGH
ANDREW ELLIOT, 17 PRINCES STREET
1866

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NOTICE
OF A
NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT
FOR LIGHTHOUSES.
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
From the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts,
Vol. VIII., 1870-1871
EDINBURGH
PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY
1871