the reason may lie in some other starting-point not explicitly stated. Originality, again, is one of the stumbling-blocks of criticism. How far does it reside in the spirit of the music only, and how far can it be pronounced to exist or to be lacking on the strength of considerations of form, idiom, and other tangible features? Some writers seem to be swept off their feet as soon as in any music they discover "something never done before." Others see vitality in stuff which to others is a mere collection of commonplaces. The problem of originality, perhaps the weightiest in the matter of all art-criticism, and particularly difficult to solve with regard to music, remains to the present day the most obscure. It seems as though on that vital issue the last say remains with opinion, despite the efforts of the many who would have it otherwise. Perhaps so. The critic's object, as I am trying to show, is not to enforce the solution which he desires, but to discover, so far as lies in his power, which solutions are admissible, and which are justified. He must try, firstly, to disengage facts, and then to perceive their actual, not merely potential, significance. If he finds that a musician resorts to new means, he must seek for the thing signified, and not rest content with having discovered what he takes to be a sign. Those new means may be the outcome of genuine creative imagination, or they may be mere fabrication. From the moment when the critic realises that his decision on such points and perhaps on ninety-nine points out of every hundred-is, in a measure at least, arbitrary, and open to confutation, he will proceed with due caution, and beware lest he be carried away by a hasty impulse. And the careful testing to which he will submit every link in the chain he forges will insure that honesty and consistency which should be his ideal. F THE MUSICAL INSPIRATION OF SHELLEY By ANDRE COEUROY EW authors have stirred both critics and commentators in the same measure as Shelley to the making of musical comparisons. His best interpreter, M. Koszul,1 analyzes with refined sensibility the poet's song, that trembles "with vibrations so tenuous or so high that it sometimes seems to overpass the gamut of our ecstasies." And did not Shelley himself say: "I am a harp responsive to every wind, the scented gale of summer can wake it to sweet melody, but the rough, cold blasts draw forth discordances and jarring sounds"? Hence, he is one of those whose poems have most frequently tempted, if not inspired, the musician. It would be a considerable task, and one of pure erudition, to draw up a list of the composers who have succumbed to his allurements3-short poems, fragments of "Laon and Cythna," scenes from "Prometheus" (to which C. H. H. Parry provided a musical commentary in 1881); nothing has escaped, and even Shelley's own son set to music the "Hymn of Pan." All great poets are subjected to these assaults. But it is not always the music that best interprets the musicality of their souls; for the soul of music is in the verses themselves, and, even more than in these verses, in the inspiration which dictated them. I Seldom is a poet a profound musician. Shelley was no more so than his contemporary Lamartine, and far less so than the German romanticists. Towards the close of his brief existence he avowed to Gisborne that his ideas of music were "gross." Some years before, about 1813, as a frequenter of the drawingroom of Mr. Newton, whose wife was one of Dussek's favorite A. Koszul, "La Jeunesse de Shelley" (Bloud et Cie, 1910), p. 2. To that end it would suffice to run through the catalogue of the British Museum containing the "first lines" of each poet. M. Koszul, who sought to institute a beginning for researches in this matter, tells me of five composers of the poem "My Soul is an Enchanted Boat," four of "Rarely, rarely comest thou," and similarly of others. The name that appears to recur the oftenest is that of Dolores (the pseudonym of Elizabeth Dickson) from 1859 onward. pupils and often made music with the violinist Salomon, Shelley, instead of listening (so Miss Newton narrates), preferred to tell, in some corner, stories about the were-wolf to the children of the house. His own musical inventiveness (if we may believe Peacock) did not go beyond a monotonous chant of "Yahmani, Yahmani," with which he lulled the little girl presented him by Harriet Grove. Somewhat later (about 1817) he attended the artistic and would-be esthetic foregatherings of Hazlitt and Keats at Leigh Hunt's, where music was much to the fore; they played Handel, Mozart, and Arne (who, for all his great lyric works, survives only in his melody "Rule, Britannia"). Vincent Novello, who was then introducing Haydn's masses into England, was also to be seen there, and Holmes, a poet endowed with rich musical talents, the future author of a life of Mozart. Music pursued Shelley into Italy; in 1818 he made the acquaintance of Mrs. Gisborne, marvelously gifted in all branches of art (with Jeremy Bentham she played duets for piano and violin); three years thereafter he associated with Edward and Jane Williams, and the latter played ravishingly on the harp and guitar. These simple instruments, wherefrom melody flows without a complicated harmonic embellishment, were those which Shelley best understood, together with vocal melody-a trait common to all romanticists. The works of his early youth already accede to the music of feminine voices a place of privilege. In his romance "Zastrozzi," written at the age of sixteen, the sweetness of Matilda's voice softens the heart of the cruel Verezzi. Then the changing years added abundantly to the store--all the women whose friend Shelley became enchanted him with their voices. That of Harriet, his first love, was "suave" when she sang the old-time Irish melodies. Mary Godwin, who succeeded her, sang "with a marvelous voice," though untrained. Another friend, Claire, who is perhaps the one whom Shelley designates in the celebrated poem by the name of Constantia,1 possessed, according to her Italian teacher, Carri, a voice “like a string of pearls." Still later, Jane Williams sang Indian airs for the poet's inspiration. And many a time did he hearken, during his journey in Switzerland, to the songs of the vine-dressers, monotonous melodies that it is sweet to hear in the silence of evening.2 'Such is M. Koszul's opinion. F. Rabbe believes Constantia to have been Miss Clermont, the friend of Byron and mother of Allegra. 2Cf. In a letter to Gisborne (June 18, 1822): “You know my gross ideas of music, and will forgive me when I say that I listen the whole evening on our terrace to the simple melodies with excessive delight." For all the poets of romanticism there outflows from these voices, as from a well-regulated sluiceway, the joy of love. Here they bathe in all tranquillity, and strike their attitudes. But Shelley ignores these scholastic attitudes, these literary poses that threw such discredit on the theme in the course of the nineteenth century. The love that sounds in his voice is the first echo of the music in Shelley's soul, wherein that love was to find so many. At the age of seventeen he loves Harriet, and already he evokes the enravishment of "music's most impassioned note, on which Love's warmest fervours float." It is the music, the songs that Harriet sang, that will live forever in his remembrance. When their amour came to an end in 1813, Captain Kennedy saw Shelley, in the house which sheltered his youthful flame, several times at the piano, playing with an awkward finger a very simple and sweet tune, “which, no doubt, she who was his first love loved to play to him," the tune that Harriet once taught him: a well-known tune Which in some dear scene we have loved to hear, Plaintive regrets, repeated in the “Stanzas-April, 1814": Thy remembrance, and repentance, and deep musings are not free A plaintive "memory of music fled"-a music to be revived by the voice and the guitar of Jane; Jane, the “magnetic lady” to whom he dispatches a poem accompanied by a note bearing the wish that "this old melancholy song may accord with some of these melodies": The keen stars were twinkling, And the fair moon was rising among them, Dear Jane! The guitar was tinkling, But the notes were not sweet till you sung them 1 "Eyes: A Fragment" (included in the Esdaile MS. book). "Hogg, "The Life of P. B. Shelley," Chap. XXX. "Queen Mab," II, 172. "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." "The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient," 1822. The selfsame accents wherewith this feminine vision embellishes itself ring athwart "The Revolt of Islam," in which an apparition lovely as the morning utters a melody which "might not belong to earth." Thus beginneth the ecstasy-by the voice that sings. The listening soul of the poet soars aloft; it flees across space in search of a supreme love; it is the purest and deepest emotion, wherein the being dissolves at the very moment when it attains its loftiest stature. TO CONSTANTIA, Singing Thus to be lost, and thus to sink and die, Perchance were death indeed!-Constantia, turn! In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie, Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn Between thy lips, are laid to sleep; Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour, it is yet, And from thy touch like fire doth leap. Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet, Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget! A breathless awe, like the swift change Unseen, but felt in youthful slumbers, Wild, sweet, but uncommunicably strange Thou breathest now in fast ascending numbers. The cope of heaven seems rent and cloven By the enchantment of thy strain, And on my shoulders wings are woven, Beyond the mighty moons that wane Upon the verge of Nature's utmost sphere, Till the world's shadowy walls are past and disappear. Her voice is hovering o'er my soul-it lingers My heart is quivering like a flame; As morning dew, that in the sunbeam dies, 'From the short poem "To Jane." |