Part 3
Stanley’s feeling about music reminds me of another music-hater at Oxford, the late Dr. Gaisford, the famous Dean of Christ Church. It was he who put my name on the books of “The House,” a very great honour to an unknown German scholar on whom the University, at his suggestion, had just conferred the degree of M.A. What the Dean’s idea of music was may best be judged from his constantly appointing old scouts or servants who were too old to do their work any longer as bedmakers to be singing men in the Cathedral choir. The Dean’s stall was under the organ, and one day in every month, when “The voice of Thy thunder was heard round about, and the lightnings shone upon the ground, and the earth was moved and shook withal,” a certain key in the organ made the seat on which the Dean sat vibrate under him. On that day, before he left the Cathedral, he invariably thanked the organist, Dr. Corfe, for the nice tune he had played.
Music, in fact, was at a very low ebb at Oxford when I arrived there. The young men would have considered it almost _infra dignitatem_ to play any instrument; the utmost they would do was now and then to sing a song. Yet there was much love of music, and many of my young and old friends were delighted when I would play to them. There was only one other person at Oxford then who was a real musician and who played well, Professor Donkin, a great mathematician, and altogether a man _sui generis_. He was a great invalid; in fact, he was dying all the years I knew him, and was fully aware of it. It seemed to be quite admissible, therefore, that he, being an invalid, and I, being a German, should “make music” at evening parties; but to ask a head of a house or a professor, or even a senior tutor, to play would have been considered almost an insult. And yet I feel certain there is more love, more honest enjoyment of music in England than anywhere else.
And how has the musical tide risen at Oxford since those days! Some of the young men now come up to college as very good performers on the pianoforte and other instruments. I never know how they learn it, considering the superior claims which cricket, football, the river, nay, the classics and mathematics also have on their time at school. There are musical clubs now at Oxford where the very best classical music may be heard performed by undergraduates with the assistance of some professional players from London. All this is due to the influence of Sir F. Ouseley, and still more of Sir John Stainer, both professors of Music at Oxford. They have made music not only respectable, but really admired and loved among the undergraduates. Sir John Stainer has been indefatigable, and the lectures which he gives both on the science and history of music are crowded by young and old. They are real concerts, in which he is able to illustrate all he has to say with the help of a well-trained choir of Oxford amateurs. As to myself, I have long become a mere listener. One learns the lesson, whether one likes it or not, that there is a time for everything. Old fingers grow stiff and will no longer obey, and if one knows how a sonata of Beethoven ought to be played, it is most painful to play it badly. So at last I said: “Farewell!” The sun has set, though the clouds are roseate still with reflected rays. It may be that I have given too much time to music, but what would life have been without it? I do not like to exaggerate, or say anything that is not quite true. Musical ears grow sensitive to anything false, whether sharp or flat. But let us be quite honest, quite plain. Is there not in music, and in music alone of all the arts, something that is not entirely of this earth? Harmony and rhythm may be under settled laws; and in that sense mathematicians may be right when they call mathematics silent music. But whence comes melody? Surely not from what we hear in the street, or in the woods, or on the sea-shore, not from anything that we hear with our outward ears, and are able to imitate, to improve, or to sublimise. Neither history nor evolution will help us to account for Schubert’s “Trockne Blumen.” Here, if anywhere, we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven to earth, and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth earthy. Melodies, however, are not of this earth, and the greatest of musical poets has truly said:—
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS I
I am the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance gracefully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work I have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to their thoughts in rhyme and metre. Some of the more honest among them have even gone so far as to confess that their best thoughts had often been suggested to them by the rhyme. Platen may be quite right when he says:
Was stets und aller Orten sich ewig jung erweist Ist in gebundenen Worten ein ungebundener Geist.
(What proves itself eternal in every place and time Is an unfettered spirit, free in the chains of rhyme.)
True, very true. You may get that now and then, but in our modern languages it is but seldom that thought soars up quite free on the wings of rhyme. Many and many a thought sinks down because of the weight of the rhyme, many and many a thought remains altogether unspoken because it will not submit to the strait jacket of the rhyme; many and many a poor thought is due entirely to an irrepressible rhyme; and if some brilliant thoughts have really been suggested by the rhyme, would it not be better if they had been suggested by something else, whether you call it mind or soul? The greatest masters of rhyme, such as Browning in English or Rückert in German, and even H. Heine, often fall victims to their own mastery. They spoil their poems in order to show that they can find a rhyme for anything and everything, however grotesque the rhyme may be. I remember once being bold enough to ask Tennyson what was the use or excuse of rhyme. He was not offended, but was quite ready with his answer: “Rhyme helps the memory,” he said—and that answer was as honest as it was true. But what is useful for one purpose, for the purpose of recollecting, may be anything but useful for other purposes, it may be even hurtful, and in our case it has certainly proved hurtful again and again to the natural flow and expression of thought and feeling.
Nor should I venture to say a word against Platen’s _gebundene Worte_. It was only the very necessity of finding a word to answer to _time_ which led me to speak of chains of _rhyme_. _Gebundene Worte_ are not necessarily rhymed words, they are measured words, and these are no doubt quite natural and quite right for poetry. Metre is measure, and metrical utterance, in that sense, was not only more natural for the expression of the highest thoughts, but was probably everywhere more ancient also than prose. In every literature, as far as we know, poetry came first, prose second. Inspired utterance requires, nay produces, rhythmic movements not only of the voice (song and prosodia), but of the body also (dance). In Greek, _chorus_ means dance, measured movement, and the Greek choruses were originally dances; nay, it can be proved that these dancing movements formed really the first metres of true poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before the Lord with all his might. Language itself bears witness to the fact that the oldest metres were the steps and movements of dancers. As the old dances consisted of steps, the ancient metres consisted of feet. Even we ourselves still speak of feet, not because we understand what it means, but simply because the Greeks and Romans spoke of feet, and they said so because originally the feet really marked the metre.
The ancient poets of the Veda also speak of feet, and they seem to have been quite aware why they spoke of metrical feet, for in the names of some of their metres we still find clear traces of the steps of the dances which accompanied their poems. _Trishtubh_, one of their ancient metres, meant three-step; _Anushtubh_, the later Sloka, meant by-step[1] or Reigen. The last syllables or steps of each line were called the _Vritta_, or the turn, originally the turn of the dancers, who seem to have been allowed to move more freely till they came to the end of one movement. Then, before they turned, or while they turned, they marked the steps more sharply and audibly, either as iambic or as trochaic, and afterwards marched back again with greater freedom. Hence in ancient Sanskrit the end or turn of each line was under stricter rules as to long and short steps, or long and short syllables, whereas greater freedom was allowed for the rest of a line. Thus Sanskrit _Vritta_, the _turn_, came to mean the metre of the whole line, just as in Latin we have the same word _versus_, literally the turn, then verse, and this turn became the name for verse, and remained so to the present day. There is no break in our history, and language is the chain that holds it together. A strophe also was originally a turning, to be followed by the antistrophe or the return, all ideas derived from dancing. The ancient Sanskrit name for metre and metrical or measured speed was _Kh_andas. The verb _Kh_and would correspond phonetically to Latin _scandere_, in the sense of marching, as in _a-scendere_, to march upward, to mount, and _de-scendere_, to march downward, all expressing the same idea of measured movement, but not of rhyme or jingle. These movements were free and natural in the beginning; they became artificial when they became traditional, and we find in such works as the Sanskrit V_ri_tta-ratnâkara, “the treasury of verse,” every kind of monstrosity which was perpetrated by Hindu poets of the Renaissance period, and perpetrated, it must be confessed, with wonderful adroitness.
But I must not tire my friends with these metrical mysteries. What I want them to know is that in the most ancient Aryan poetry which we possess there is no trace of rhyme, except here and there by accident, and that everywhere in the history of the poetry of the Âryas, rhyme, as essential to poetry, is a very late invention. It is the same in Semitic languages, though in Semitic as well as in Aryan speech, in fact, wherever grammatical forms are expressed chiefly by means of terminations, rhyme even in prose is almost inevitable. And this was no doubt the origin of rhyme. In languages where terminations of declension and conjugation and most derivative suffixes have retained a full-bodied and sonorous form, it was difficult to avoid the jingle of rhyme. In Latin, which abounds in such constantly recurring endings as _orum_, _arum_, _ibus_, _amus_, _atis_, _amini_, _tatem_, _tatibus_, _inibus_, etc., good prose writers had actually to be warned against allowing their sentences to rhyme, while poets found it very easy to add these ornamental tails to their measured lines.
There can be little doubt that it was the rhymed Latin poetry, as used in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, which suggested to the German converts the idea of rhymed verses. The pagan poetry of the Teutonic races had no rhymes. It was what is called alliterative. In the German dialects the accent remained mostly on the radical syllable of words, and thus served to shorten the terminations. Hence we find fewer full-bodied terminations in Gothic than in Latin, while in later Teutonic dialects, in English as well as in German, these terminations dwindled away more and more. Thus, we say _Di’ chter_ when the Romans would have _Dicta’ tor_, _Pre’ diger_ for _prœdica’ tor_, _cha’ ncel_ for _cance’ lla_. In order to bind their poetical lines together the German poets had recourse to initial letters, which had to be the same in certain places of each verse, and which, if pronounced with strong stress or strain, left the impression of the words being knitted together and belonging together. Here is a specimen which will show that the rules of alliteration were very strictly observed by the old German poets, far more strictly than by their modern imitators. The old rule was that in a line of eight arses there should be two words in the first and one in the second half beginning with the same letter, consonant or vowel, and always in syllables that had the accent. Here is a line from the old “Song of Hildebrand,” dating from the eighth century:—
=H=iltibraht joh =H=adhubrant =H=iltibraht and =H=adhubrant Untar =h=arjum tuâm, etc. Between =h=osts twain, etc.
Rückert has imitated this alliterating poetry in his poem of “Roland”:—
=R=oland der =R=ies =I=m =R=athhaus zu Bremen =S=teht er im =S=tandbild =S=tandhaft und wacht.
Kingsley has attempted something like it in his “Longbeard’s Saga,” but with much greater freedom, not to say licence:—
=S=caring the wolf cub, =S=caring the horn-owl, =S=haking the snow-wreaths Down from the pine boughs.
But to return to our modern poetry and to the poets whom I have known, and of whom I have something to tell, does it not show the power of tradition if we see them everywhere forcing their feet into the same small slippers of rhyme? And who would deny that they have achieved, and still are achieving, wonderful feats?—_tours de force_, it is true, but so cleverly performed that one hardly sees a trace of the force employed. No doubt much is lost in this process of beating, and hammering, and welding words together (a poet is called a _Reimeschmied_, a smith of rhymes, in German); much has to be thrown away because it will not rhyme at all (_silver_ has been very badly treated in English poetry, because it rhymes with nothing, at present not even with gold), but what remains is often very beautiful, and, as Tennyson said, it sticks to the memory. One wishes one could add that the difficulty of rhyme serves to reduce the number of unnecessary poets that spring up every year. But rhyme does not strangle these numerous children of the Muses, and it is left to our ill-paid critics to perform every day, or every week, this murder of the innocents.
It may not seem very filial for the son of a poet thus to blaspheme against poetry, or rather, against rhyme. Well, I can admire rhymed poetry, just as I can admire champagne, though if the wine is really good I think it is a pity to make it mousseux.
H. Heine, who certainly was never at a loss for a rhyme, writes, at the end of one of his maddest poems, “Die Liebe”: “O Phœbus Apollo, if these verses are bad, I know thou wilt forgive me, for thou art an all-knowing god, and knowest quite well why for years I could not trouble myself any longer with measuring and rhyming words!” And he adds: “I might, of course, have said all this very well in good prose.” He ought to know, but there will not be many of his admirers to agree with him.[2]
I hardly remember having ever seen my father, and I came to know him chiefly through his poetry. He belonged to the post-Goethe period, though Goethe (died 1832) survived him. He was born in 1794, and died in 1827, and yet in that short time he established a lasting reputation not only as a scholar, but as a most popular poet. His best known poems are the “Griechenlieder,” the Greek songs which he wrote during the Greek war of independence. Alas! in those days battles were won by bravery and the sword, now by discipline and repeating guns. These Greek songs, in which his love of the ancient Greeks is mingled with his admiration for heroes such as Kanaris, Mark Bozzaris, and others who helped to shake off the Turkish yoke, produced a deep impression all over Germany, perhaps because they breathed the spirit of freedom and patriotism, which was then systematically repressed in Germany itself. The Greeks never forgot the services rendered by him in Germany, as by Lord Byron in England, in rousing a feeling of indignation against the Turk, and as the marble for Lord Byron’s monument in London was sent by some Greek admirers of the great poet, the Greek Parliament voted a shipload of Pentelican marble for the national monument erected to my father in Dessau.
My father’s lyrical poems also are well known all over Germany, particularly the cycles of the “Schöne Müllerin” and the “Winterreise,” both so marvellously set to music by Schubert and others. He certainly had caught the true tone of the poetry of the German people, and many of his poems have become national property, being sung by thousands who do not even know whose poems they are singing. As a specimen showing the highest point reached by his poetry, I like to quote his poem on _Vineta_, the old town overwhelmed by the sea on the Baltic coast. The English translation was made for me by my old, now departed, friend, J. A. Froude:—
VINETA.
I. I.
Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem From the sea’s deep hollow faintly Grunde pealing,
Klingen Abendglocken dumpf und Far-off evening bells come sad and matt, slow;
Uns zu geben wunderbare Kunde Faintly rise, the wondrous tale revealing
Von der schönen alten Wunderstadt. Of the old enchanted town below.
II. II.
In der Fluthen Schoss hinabgesunken On the bosom of the flood reclining
Bleiben unten ihre Trümmer stehn, Ruined arch and broken spire,
Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken Down beneath the watery mirror shining
Wiederscheinend auf dem Spiegel Gleam and flash in flakes of golden sehn. fire.
III. III.
Und der Schiffer, der den And the boatman who at twilight Zauberschimmer hour
Einmal sah im hellen Abendroth, Once that magic vision shall have seen,
Nach derselben Stelle schifft er Heedless how the crags may round immer, him lour,
Ob auch rings umher die Klippe Evermore will haunt the charmèd droht. scene.
IV. IV.
Aus des Herzens tiefem, tiefem From the heart’s deep hollow Grunde faintly pealing,
Klingt es mir, wie Glocken, dumpf Far I hear them, bell-notes sad and und matt: slow,
Ach! sie geben wunderbare Kunde Ah! a wild and wondrous tale revealing
Von der Liebe, die geliebt es hat. Of the drownèd wreck of love below.
V. V.
Eine schöne Welt is da versunken. There a world in loveliness decaying,
Ihre Trümmer bleiben unten stehn, Lingers yet in beauty ere it die;
Lassen sich als goldne Phantom forms across my senses Himmelsfunken playing,
Oft im Spiegel meiner Träume sehn. Flash like golden fire-flakes from the sky.
VI. VI.
Und dann möcht’ ich tauchen in die Lights are gleaming, fairy bells Tiefen, are ringing,
Mich versenken in den Wiederschein, And I long to plunge and wander free
Und mir ist als ob mich Engel Where I hear those angel-voices riefen singing
In die alte Wunderstadt herein. In those ancient towers below the sea.
That the poet did not consider rhyme an essential element of poetry, he has shown in some of his assonantic poems, such as:
Alle Winde schlafen Auf dem Spiegel der Flut; Kühle Schatten des Abends Decken die Müden zu.
Luna hängt sich Schleier Ueber ihr Gesicht, Schwebt in dämmernden Träumen Ueber die Wasser hin.
Alles, alles stille Auf dem weiten Meer,— Nur mein Herz will nimmer Mit zur Ruhe gehn.
In der Liebe Fluten Treibt es her und hin, Wo die Stürme nicht ruhen, Bis der Nachen sinkt.
Though my father was a great admirer of Goethe, he seems to have incurred his displeasure and to have been brought into personal collision with the grand old poet. Goethe had translated some modern Greek songs; it may be, as my father thought, without having fully mastered the difficulties of the spoken Greek language. My father published a complete translation of Fauriel’s collection of Greek popular poetry,[3] and Goethe did not like comparisons between his work and that of anybody else, least of all of quite a young poet. “Die schöne Müllerin” also may have seemed to Goethe an encroachment on a domain peculiarly his own. In fact, when my father, with my mother, went to Weimar to pay their respects to Goethe, his Excellency was somewhat stiff and cold. My mother, also, had evidently not been sufficiently careful and respectful. She was the granddaughter of the famous pedagogue Basedow, the reformer of national education all over Germany, who had been a friend of Goethe in his youth. Goethe speaks of him in his poem, “Prophete rechts (Basedow), Prophete links (Lavater), das Weltkind (Goethe) in der Mitten.” And he also complains bitterly of Basedow in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” as being never without a pipe in his mouth, and as lighting his pipe with most offensive tinder—_Stinkschwamm_, as Goethe calls it. My mother, when asked by Goethe, “Was für eine geborene” she was (What had been her maiden name?), could not resist the temptation, and replied, laughing: “Your Excellency ought to scent it; I am the granddaughter of Basedow.” Happily my mother was very beautiful, and was pardoned the liberty she had taken. Still, the relations between my father and Goethe always remained rather strained, and all that I find in his album is a medallion portrait of Goethe with the following lines, dated 7th November, 1825:—
Meinen feyerlich Bewegten Mache Dank und Freude kund; Das Gefühl das Sie erregten Schliesst dem Dichter selbst den Mund.
He was on much warmer terms with the poets of the Swabian school, Uhland, Schwab, Justinus Kerner, etc. In the year before his death, 1827, he spent some time with them in Würtemberg, and in many respects he may be reckoned as belonging to their school. The verses which Uhland wrote in my father’s album have often been quoted as a curious prophecy of his early death. It seems that some conversations which he had with the Seherin of Prevorst[4] when staying in Justinus Kerner’s house near Weinsberg, had filled him and his friends with misgivings. Uhland’s lines were:—