Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843. Various
firmly compressed, eyes fixed in a stony gaze on the orchestra, whence issued by turns groans, shrieks, and screams, from sundry foully-abused instruments of music; accompanied by equally appalling sounds from flat, shrill signorinas, quavering to distraction, backed by gigantic "basses," (double ones surely,) who, with voices like the "seven devils" of the old Grecian, bellowed out divers sentimentalisms about dying for love, when assuredly their most proximate danger was of apoplexy.
Well, the affair came to an end, as, it is to be hoped, will every other evil in this wicked world; in a spasm of thankfulness we extricated ourselves from the crush, and reached our home, where, under the genial influence of quiet and a cup of coffee, we can afford to laugh at the past, (our own vehement indignation included,) and ruminate calmly on the "how" and the "why" of the nuisance, which appears to us as well worthy of being put down by act of parliament, as the ringing of muffin bells and crying "sweep!"
It is a perfect puzzle to us by what process the standard of music has become so lowered, as to make what is ordinarily served up under that name be received as the legitimate descendant of the harmony divine which erst broke on the ear of the listening world, when "the morning stars sang together;" and, in the first freshness of its creation—teeming with melody—angels deigned to visit this terrestrial paradise, nor turned an exile's gaze to that heaven whose strains were chanted in glad accordance with the murmuring stream, and music of the waving forest—which, in its greenness and beauty, seemed but "a little lower" than its celestial archetype, for
"Earth hath this variety from heaven."
(Blessings on the poet for that line! We have a most firm belief in Milton, and receive his representations of heaven as we would those of a Daguerreotype.)
But it is even so. There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and this entrancing art, it seems, has taken it; sorely dislocating its graceful limbs, and injuring its goodly proportions in the unseemly escapade. There—we have played over a simple air, one that thrills through our heart of hearts; and as the notes die on our ears, soothing though the strain be, we feel our indignation increase, and glow still more fiercely against this—music, as it is by courtesy called, for Heaven knows it has no legitimate claim to the name!—till it reaches the crusading point, and we rush headlong to a war of extermination against bars, rests, crotchets, quavers—undaunted even by "staves," and formidable inflated semibreves.
We hate your crashing, clumsy chords, and utterly spit at and defy chromatic passages from one end of the instrument to the other, and back again; flats, sharps, and most appropriate "naturals," splattered all over the page. The essential spirit of discord seems let loose on our modern music, tainted, as it were, with the moral infection that has seized the land; it is music for a democracy, not the stately, solemn measure of imperial majesty. Music to soothe! the idea is obsolete, buried with the ruffs and farthingales of our great-grandmothers; or, to speak more soberly, with the powdered wigs and hoops of their daughters. There is music to excite, much to irritate one, and much more to drive a really musical soul stark mad; but none to soothe, save that which is drawn from the hiding-places of the past.
We should like to catch one of the old masters—Handel, for instance—and place him within the range of one of our modern executioners, to whose taste(!) carte-blanche had been given. We think we see him under the infliction. Neither the hurling of wig, nor yet of kettle-drum, at the head of the performer, would relieve his outraged spirit: he would strangle the offender on the spot, and hang himself afterwards; and the jury would, in the first case, return a verdict of justifiable homicide, and, in the second, of justifiable suicide, with a deodand of no ordinary magnitude on the musical instrument that had led to the catastrophe.
There is no repose, no refreshment to the mind, in our popular compositions; they are like Turner's skies—they harass and fatigue, leaving you certainly wondering at their difficulty, but, as certainly, wishing they had been "impossible." There is to us more of touching pathos, heart-thrilling expression, in some of the old psalm-tunes, feelingly played, than in a whole batch of modernisms. The strains go home, and the "fountains of the great deep are broken up"—the great deep of unfathomable feeling, that lies far, far below the surface of the world-hardened heart; and as the unwonted, yet unchecked, tear starts to the eye, the softened spirit yields to their influence, and shakes off the moil of earthly care; rising, purified and spiritualized, into a clearer atmosphere. Strange, inexplicable associations brood over the mind,
"Like the far-off dreams of paradise,"
mingling their chaste melancholy with musings of a still subdued, though more cheerful character. How many glad hearts in the olden time have rejoiced in these songs of praise—how many sorrowful ones sighed out their complaints in those plaintive notes, that steal sadly, yet sweetly, on the ear—hearts that, now cold in death, are laid to rest around that sacred fane, within whose walls they had so often swelled with emotion! Tell us not of neatly trimmed "cemeteries," redolent of staring sunflowers, priggish shrubs, and all the modern coxcombry of the tomb; with nicely swept gravel walks, lest the mourner should get "wet on's feet," and vaults numbered like warehouses, where "parties may bring their own minister," and be buried with any form, or no form, if they like it better. No, give us the village churchyard with its sombre yew-trees, among which
"The dial, hid by weeds and flowers,
Hath told, by none beheld, the solitary hours;"
its grassy hillocks, and mouldering grave-stones, where haply all record is obliterated, and nought but a solitary "resurgam" meets the enquiring eye; its white-robed priest reverently committing "earth to earth," in sure and certain hope "of a joyful resurrection" to the slumbering clay, that was wont to worship within the grey and time-stained walls, whence the mournful train have now borne him to his last rest; while on the ivy-clad tower fall the slanting golden beams of an autumnal sun, that, in its declining glory, seems to whisper of hope and consolation to the sorrowful ones, reminding them that the night of the tomb shall not endure for ever, but that, so surely as the great orb of day shall return on the wings of the morning to chase away the tears of the lamenting earth, so surely shall the dust, strewed around that temple, scattered though it may be to the winds of heaven, "rise again" in the morning of the Resurrection, when death "shall be swallowed up in victory."
"'Tis fit his trophies should be rife
Around the place where he's subdued;
The gate of death leads forth to life."
But we are wandering sadly from our subject; it is perhaps quite as well that we have done so, for we should have become dangerous had we dwelt much longer on it. We were on the point of wishing (Nero-like) that our popular professors of the tuneful art had but one neck, that we might exterminate them at a blow, or hang them with one gigantic fiddle-string; but now, thanks to our episode, our exacerbated feelings are so far mollified, that we will be content with wishing them sentenced to grind knives on oil-less stones with creaking axles, till the sufferings of their own shall have taught them consideration for the ears of other people.
But music, real music—not in the harsh, exaggerated style now in the ascendant, but simple, pure, melodious, such as might have entranced the soul of a Handel, when, in some vision of night, sounds swept from angelic harps have floated around him, the gifted one, in whose liquid strains and stately harmonies fall on our ravished ears the echoes of that immortal joy—such we confess to be one of our idols, before whose shrine we pay a willing, gladsome homage; though now, alas! it must be in dens and caves of the earth, since modern heresy has banished it from the temple of Apollo.
See how Toryism peeps out even in the fine arts! Even did we say? They are its legitimate province; "The old is better," is inscribed in glowing character on the portals of the past. Old Painting! See the throbbing form start from the pregnant canvass—the "Mother of God" folding her Divine Son to her all but celestial arms—the Son of God fainting beneath a load of woe, not his own. Old Poetry! Glorious old Homer, with his magic song; and sturdy,