referred to Mr. Froude's account of Henry VIII., and hoped that when his own life came to be written the task might fall to one who should show the same skill in placing virtues in the most favourable light they could sustain, and in extenuating faults and misdemeanours, which had been displayed by their distinguished guest. At a public dinner at which some allusion had been made to his poetry, he said that he never knew of more than two poems which had been of any use to anybody; one of these was "A rainbow in the morning is the sailor's warning; a rainbow at night is the shepherd's delight;" and the " and the other was "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November," &c.

I have omitted one ingredient in the reputation of Mr. Bryant in America; there was in it something of Franklin. He was a man of rules, an early riser, and very nearly a vegetarian. Having been often asked as to the methods by which he had accomplished so much, he gave to the world the hygenic and literary regulations which he had observed throughout his long life. He had always much to say against affectation and against modern extravagance of living. He thus figured to the younger generation as the representative of old-fashioned New England sagacity and simplicity.

I have given but a very slight sketch of Mr. Bryant's poetical works. I might have quoted from a class of poems, such as The Burial of Love and The Paradise of Tears, in which is shown, under the form of allegory, his retentive grasp of important spiritual abstractions. He has passion; he has also pathos and pity, often of a stern and remote kind. There is, on the other hand, in his

works a want of that generous and quick sympathy, the effect of which on the reader is so large a part of the pleasure of poetry. It seems to me that this want limits even his remarkable gift for describing nature. But the excellence of that description is nevertheless so great that it must make his poetry a permanent part of English literature. His verse has the trait of flashing upon the pleased eye successive images of the mountain solitude, the forest depth, and the "mid-sea brine," and of surprising the mind with the sudden movements of a harmony which is now sweet and solemn, and now deliberate and lofty. Those who do not already know his poetry should read, besides the poems to which I have referred, The Evening Wind, the Indian poems, and others written in youth. It is true that the poet was able to sustain to a remarkable degree in his later works the pitch of excellence which he had reached in his earlier ones. But I think the early poems are better. The figure of The figure of the young village lawyer, living in the midst of that ancient and secluded New England world which has so long disappeared, and giving his whole mind to nature, must be an interesting one. But the poems upon nature written in later life are still very perfect. The poet had in his early days received so strong a bent towards nature, he had in a few short years accumulated such a store of experience of her, that to the end of his life he was able to return to country scenes and to describe them with the same accuracy of perception and the same sense of their pervading spirit which he had possessed in his youth.

E. S. NADAL.

It is very seldom that a distinguished artist has produced anything like a connected body of criticism on the subject of his art. And this is hardly matter for surprise, since not only is the imaginative faculty wholly distinct from the analytical, but imaginative activity is of an exceptionally engrossing kind; so that in the intervals of actual creation an artist will be naturally exercised in storing materials for his own purposes rather than in undertaking a new and special kind of intellectual labour. Even in the arts of poetry and painting, which are grounded everywhere on truth and nature, and on a feeling for the connections of the visible and the spiritual world,-where therefore the relation of the artist to his environment and his fellows might seem tangible and direct, the greatest masters have often been men who worked with little self-consciousness and no sense of a special aim or mission, but simply followed out an irresistible inward impulse, not knowing that their natural vision was revelation and interpretation for the world. In many cases indeed this simplicity of nature seems naturally bound up with the special kind of creativeness; and a realisation of it might often give pause to the ingenuity which is so ready to obscure the direct self-luminous beauty of art. If anything could have stifled Shakespeare's genius, it would have been a prophetic vision of German commentaries: and Mozart's account of the way in which his tunes came to him, when he was comfortable and thinking about nothing after a good dinner, or lying happily in bed, involves a fact known to every one who

Music and Musicians, Essays and Criticisms, By Robert Schumann. Translated and Annotated by Fanny Raymond Ritter. London: W. Reeves, 1877.

has ever made a melody, but wholly ignored by those who are perpetually haunted by the spectre of some hidden meaning.

Modern life, which has fostered self-consciousness and introspection in many directions, doubtless furnishes examples of artists who have ventured on the perilous path of analysis: but the results hardly seem to establish for the criticism of a creator any special claim to clearness and acumen. Wordsworth, for instance, whose best versification has probably never been surpassed in natural magic, ponderously argues for the value of metre on the extraordinary ground that its regularity, and our sense of having come across it on less exciting occasions, introduce what he calls "an intertexture of ordinary feeling," which dilutes and relieves the discomfort we might experience from the poet's more painful images. And Reynolds's written views about art, with the sentence that, "in painting, as in poetry, the highest style has the least of common nature," are sufficient to prove, in Mr. Ruskin's words, "how completely an artist may be unconscious of the principles of his own work, and how he may be led by instinct to do all that is right, while he is misled by false logic to say all that is wrong."

Nevertheless there is such obvious interest in learning what views men of special capacity have held as to their own work and that of their predecessors and contemporaries, that all records and traditions bearing on the subject have been eagerly noted and repeated. Indeed chance incidents and remarks may often throw a light and reveal a truth where more deliberate criticism might fail. And for this sort of anecdotic interest music seems to present special opportunities. It differs from the arts of the study

and the studio in enlisting for its presentment large bodies of artists, among whom a special esprit de corps may be expected to spring up, and an interesting and peculiar life and language to develop itself. But on the more serious side too music might at first sight seem to present a special claim to criticism, whether connected or fragmentary, from its own votaries. For it is supposed to be so mysterious an art, and so technically abstruse, that none but professors of it can know exactly what they are at, and be justified in speaking authoritatively on the subject: those who can write fugues must, it is thought, be in some way able to expound them. And this view is worth considering in relation to the reviews of Schumann's, of which an English translation has lately appeared. If the result of his work to some readers is disappointment, if they leave the book with a feeling of having been more amused and charmed than illuminated and instructed, they may perhaps be led to find the reason rather in the subject than in the treatment. At any rate they will find here little trace of the windy speculations with which music, from its inward character and the impossibility of confronting what people choose to say about it with external realities, has been so specially deluged. Schumann was that rare exception, a sound critic as well as an inventor; and brought to his task knowledge, penetration, enthusiasm, and humour of a really high order, combined with such modesty that any one who read his book without knowing his name would perceive indeed that he could use words with singular subtlety and charm, but would never guess that he was one of the greatest of musicians.

It will be necessary then to examine more closely what it is which in the ordinary view is expected from a critical survey of music. In the current notions on the subject two fundamental fallacies are prominent. the first place it is imagined that science, the knowledge of the laws of

In

vibration, and the physiology of the ear, has in some way explained music : whereas all that it has done is to explain the material of music. Science explains the gradual adoption of a certain system of notes, giving admirable scope for the variety of proportional forms of which music consists, and assigns reasons why some of these notes, sounded simultaneously, are concordant and others discordant but in this direction it does not get beyond the bare and wholly unemotional elements, the bricks out of which melodic and harmonic forms are built. Nor does a wider view of the nervous system and of the power of association do more than throw some light on the broad effects of ordered sound and of quick and slow rhythms on the organism: the actual definite effect on us of this or that musical form as it is evolved before our ears-technically a series of time and pitch relations, æsthetically a free form charged with divine vitality-is no more explained by physiological facts than the effect of a drawing of Leonardo is explained by the natural actions of the eye in following straight lines and curves.

The second fallacy is at the opposite pole from this, and consists in mistaking secondary, momentary, and accidental suggestions of music for its true essence and the primary source of its creator's impulse. This fallacy appears in another form when people who derive true healthy pleasure from some compositions and some parts of compositions, but find others above their heads, suppose that a more gifted or more cultivated faculty would reveal some symbolic purpose and meaning, that it would show them different things, instead of the same things better and more of them. Instead of sticking to the music and asking "What does it say?" to which a few more hearings might give them the answer, they look outside and ask "What does it mean?" and feel sure the composer could have told them. Now, as a matter of fact, certain people are so constituted that musical

forms which strike themselves and others as beautiful are continually occurring to them, coming as it were unbidden and demanding expression; and a great natural facility in arranging and developing these melodic and harmonic strains, so as to build them into an organic work, is commonly connected with the gift of originating them; though composers have differed greatly in the ease with which the mere mechanical work of setting and interweaving their combinations has been done. The delight is so strong and the impulse so overpowering that all sweet and noble emotion is likely, in one thus gifted, to connect itself intangibly with the prominent train of ideal conceptions. He is a man as well as a musician, has a nation as well as an art, and his forms will sometimes seem to spring up clothed with human attributes, reflecting, as we may believe, their magician's mood. Under special conditions and for special purposes (as in song-writing) he may even consciously turn his musical faculty into a special vein, as of tenderness, or sportiveness, or solemnity; or he may lovingly or humorously connect some musical product with the outward occurrence or the inward vision which, acting through hidden channels, may have stimulated his fancy and led him to his natural mode of expression and relief. Without conscious aim, again, if he sit down to his piano at one of those times when there is a sense of pause in the more vigorous pulses of life, he is more likely to fall into a melancholy and rhythmically quiet andante than into a tumultuous presto; and conversely, when a mood of confidence reflects the exhilaration of joyful surroundings, the humour of the moment may flash forth in more impetuous strains.1 But it is evident that such

1 For instance, Schumann tells how a composer had been haunted, while writing, by the image of a butterfly floating down a brook on a leaf, with the result that his composition was characterised by a kindred simplicity and tenderness. Very likely it was, but Schumann would not have denied that in the range of

incidental cases belong, for the most part, to the slighter category of musical sketches and impromptus, not to works of prolonged labour and elaborate construction. And it is a simple matter of evidence that the power of creating beautiful music is quite independent of a conscious sense of these interactions, and of any prior and external aim or standpoint.

In the loose, confused verbiage with which music is overflooded, it is often difficult to make out whether it is objects and scenes, or moods and sentiments, that the composer is supposed to have aimed at depicting; but at all events something or other is supposed to be there, consciously and purposely embodied. Nor is it impossible that in some cases the composer himself may have been so deceived; for a person quite unused to psychological analysis may easily get confused between the immediate cause and the actual result of his artistic impulse. But whatever be his subjective state of mind, he is able to delight the world only through the welling-up in his mind of forms of objective and self-evident beauty, which may dimly reflect nationality and temperament, but which convey by themselves no tangible reference to experience or environment or external conceptions of any sort, and are in a quite unexampled degree the simple result of his own organism. When once he is engrossed in his work these musical ideas will have it all their own way, and in proportion as the world is genuinely delighted, will it trouble itself little about ulterior suggestions. With respect to objects and scenes, any one in listening to a symphony may invent his own phantasmagoria, and the doing so may be as interesting to some people as it is superfluous to others. As to moods and sentiments,

music a hundred equally simple and tender compositions might be found, written by writers who, as it happens, had not any particular vision floating before their eyes; and in conceding this, he would concede all for which I am contending.

when we have once thrown aside (as by the evidence in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand we must throw aside) the notion of even the loosest suggestion of special external circumstance, then the idea of sitting down to depict a rapid succession of describable moods, unsupported and unjustified by any nucleus or guide of tangible subject-matter, falls hopelessly to pieces; and those who imagine they dignify music by calling it a reflection of life, forget that neither does life consist in pitching oneself without rhyme or reason from one definable mood into another, and would be very unpleasant if it did. The series of musical forms, musically apprehended, was no more conjured up to express this or that sentiment than a tree grew to express greenness. And we surely have only to look to perceive that the impression derived from vividly-enjoyed instrumental music is not often, even for so much as a few bars, a recognisable sentiment, and is never essentially that, but rather is like a revelation of self-evident though quite indescribable truth and significance. Nothing is so tantalising as the attempt to analyse the lines of feeling produced by beautiful music: the problem is as hopelessly complex on the psychological as we have seen it to be on the physiological side. A score of emotions seem pent up and mingled together and shooting across each other triumph and tenderness, surprise and certainty, yearning and fulfilment; and all the while the essential magic seems to lie at an infinite distance behind them all, and the presentation to be not a subjective jumble but a perfectly distinct object. Nor can even such general descriptions as are in some cases possible be considered as necessarily and intrinsically true for instance, the bass figure in the adagio of Beethoven's B flat symphony, which Schumann considers humorous, seems to me quite tremendous in its earnestness; and again, the first movement of Schubert's trio in the same key, described by

Schumann as "tender, girlish, confiding," has always represented to me the ne plus ultra of energy and passion, the opening subject especially seeming to demand a tremendousness of ictus which makes all earthly performance appear inadequate. But of course it would be meaningless to say that girlishness, or tremendousness, or any other abstraction was what the movement was written to express : such qualities are not the result of any conscious direction of the faculties, but are simply inherent in forms which present themselves to the composer as independent and ultimate phenomena: and in the working up of these there is a considerably larger proportion than is commonly supposed of semi-mechanical skill, acquired by sound musical education, not inspired by views of the universe.

It will now perhaps be tolerably clear that "a code of musical æsthetics," such as the translator of the book before us has imagined to be discoverable in Schumann's writings, is something of which it is very hard to see the meaning or see the meaning or the possibility. Here at all events we shall search for it in vain. Schumann had far too strong a grasp on reality, and too much capacity for interrogating his own experience as a composer, not to perceive how inexplicable and ultimate to our faculties are the beauties of melodic and harmonic forms. He sighs over the hopelessness of demonstration in musical matters. "Science," he says, "fights with mathematics and logic; poetry wields the golden, decisive spoken word; other arts have chosen nature, whose forms they borrow, as their judge: but music is an orphan, whose father and mother none can name; and perhaps in the mystery of her origin lies half her charm." Accordingly his treatment of works and performances, where it is not purely technical, consists of spirited and sympathetic descriptions, with no sort of reference to underlying principles, physiological or psychological. His position as regards verbal readings