Charles Auchester Volume I Part 36

This insignificant episode will prove that Iskar had not grown in my good graces, nor had I acquainted myself better with him than on the first night of my arrival. I knew him not, but I knew _of_ him, for every voice in the house was against him; and he gave promise of no small power upon his instrument, together with small promise of musical or mental excellence, as all he did was correct to caricature and inimitably mechanical. Vain as he was of his playing, his vanity had small scope on that score under that quiet roof shadow, so it spent itself upon his person, which was certainly elegant, if vulgar.

I am not clear but that one of these personal attractions always infers the other. But why I mention Iskar is that I may be permitted to recall the expressions with which our master's guest regarded him.

It was a grieved, yet curious glance, with that child-like scrutiny of what is not true all abas.h.i.+ng to the false, _unless_ the false has lost all child-likeness. Iskar must, I suppose, have lost it, for he was not the least abashed, and was really going to begin upon his porridge before we had all sat down, if Aronach had not awfully, but serenely, rebuked him. Little Starwood, by my side, looked as fair and as pretty as ever, rather more shy than usual. Seraphael, now seated, looked round with that exquisitely sweet politeness I have never met with but in him, and asked us each whether we would eat some honey, for he had the honey-pot before him. I had some, of course, for the pleasure of being helped by him, and he dropped it into my milk in a gold flowing stream, smiling as he did so. It was so we always ate honey at Aronach's, and it is so I eat it to this day. Little Star put out his bowl too. Oh! those great heavy wooden bowls! it was just too much for him, and he let it slip. Aronach was rousing to thunder upon him, and I felt as if the ceiling were coming down (for I knew he was angry on account of that guest of his), when we heard that voice in its clear authority,--"Dear Aronach, do nothing! the milk is not spoiled." And turning all of us together, we saw that he had caught the bowl on his outstretched hands, and that not a drop had fallen. I mention it as ill.u.s.trative of that miraculous organization in which intent and action were simultaneous, the motions of whose will it seemed impossible to r.e.t.a.r.d or antic.i.p.ate. Even Iskar looked astonished at this feat; but he had not long to wonder, for Aronach sternly commended us to great haste in the disposal of our supper.

I needed not urging, for it was natural to feel that the master and his master must wish to be alone,--indeed, I should have been thankful to escape eating, though I was very hungry, that I might not be in the way; but directly I took pains to do away with what I had before me, I was forbidden by Aronach to "bolt."

I lay awake many hours in a vague excitement of imaginary organ sounds welling up to heaven from heaven's under-springs. I languished in a romantic vision of that face, surrounded with cloud-angels, itself their out-s.h.i.+ning light. I waited to hear his footsteps upon the stairs when he should at length depart; but so soft was that departing motion that even I, listening with my whole existence, heard it not, nor heard anything to remind my heart-silence that he had come and gone.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

I think I can relate nothing else of that softest month of summer, nor of sultry June. It was not until the last week I was to change my quarters; but long as it seemed in coming, it came when I was hardly prepared for the transfer. Aronach returned to his stricter self again after that supper, but I felt certain he had heard a great deal after we had left the table, as an expression of softer character forsook not his eyes and smile for many days. I could not discover whether anything had pa.s.sed concerning Starwood, who remained my chief anxiety, as I felt if I left him there alone, he would not get on at all. Iskar and I preserved our mutual distance, though I would fain have been more often with him, for I wanted to make him out. He practised harder than ever, and hardly took time to eat and drink, and only on Sundays a great while to dress. He was always very jauntily put together when we set out to church, and looked like a French manikin. But for his upper lip and the shallow width of his forehead, I thought him very handsome, while, yet so young, he was so; but his charm consisted for me in his being unapproachable, and as I thought, mysterious.

We saw about as little of each other as it was possible to see, living in the same house and dining in the same room; but we never talked at meals, we had no time.

It is but fair to allow myself an allusion to my violin, as it was becoming a very essential feature in my history. With eight hours'

practice a day I had made some solid progress; but it did not convict me of itself yet, as I was not allowed to play, only to acquaint myself with the anatomy of special compositions, as exercises in theory. Iskar played so easily, and gave such an air of playing to practice, that it never occurred to me I was getting on, though it was so, as I found in time. At this era I hated the violin, just as pianoforte students hate the pianoforte during the period of apprentices.h.i.+p to mechanism. I hated the sound that saluted me morning, noon, and night; I shrank from it ever unaccustomed, for the penetralia of my brain could never be rendered less susceptible by piercing and searching its recesses. I believe my musical perception was as sensitive as ever, all through this epidemic dislike, but I felt myself personally very musically indisposed. I could completely dissociate my ideal impression of that I loved from my absolute experience of what I served. I was patient, because waiting; content, because faithful; and I pleased myself albeit with reflecting that my violin--my own property, my very own--had a very different soul from that thing I handled and tortured every day, from which the soul had long since fled. For all the creators of musical forms have not power to place in them the soul that lives for ages, and a little wear and tear separates the soul from the body. As for my Amati, I knew its race so pure that I feared for it no premature decay. In its dark box I hoped it was at least not unhappy, but I dearly longed for a sight of it, and had I dared, I would have crept into the closet, but that whenever it was unlocked I was locked up. The days flew, though they seemed to me so long, as ever in summer; and I felt how ravis.h.i.+ng must the summer be without the town. I wearied after it; and although the features of German scenery are quite without a certain bloom I have only found in England, they have some mystic beauty of their own unspeakably more touching; and as I lived then, all life was a fairy-tale book, with half the leaves uncut. I was ever dreaming, but healthfully,--the dreams forgotten as soon as dreamed; so it chanced that I can tell you nothing of all I learned or felt, except what was tangibly and wakingly presented to myself. I remember, however, more than distinctly all that happened the last evening I pa.s.sed in that secluded house, to my sojourn in which I owe all the benisons bestowed upon my after artist life. We had supped at our usual hour, but when I arose and advanced to salute Aronach as usual, and sighed to see how bright the sun was still upon everything without and within, he whispered in my ear,--an attention he had never before paid me,--"Stay up by me until the other two are off; for I wish to speak to thee and to give thee some advice."

Iskar saw him whisper, and looked very black because he could not hear; but Aronach waved him out, and bade me shut the door upon him and Starwood. I trembled then, for I was not used to be along with him _tete-a-tete_; we usually had a third party present in the company of Marpurg or Albrechtsberger.[17] He went into the closet first, and rummaged a few minutes, and then returning, appeared laden with a bottle of wine and my long hid fiddle-case. Oh, how I flew to relieve him of it! But he bade me again sit down, while he went back into the closet and rummaged again; this time for a couple of gla.s.ses and two or three curious jars, rich china, and of a beautiful form. He uncorked the bottle and poured me, as I expected, a gla.s.s of wine.

It was not the wine that agitated me, but the rarity of the attention, so much so that I choked instead of wis.h.i.+ng him his health, as I ought to have done. But he was quite unmoved at my excitation, and leaned back to pour gla.s.s after gla.s.s down his own throat. I was so unused to wine that the sip I took exhilarated me, though it was the slightest wine one can imbibe for such purpose. And then he uncovered the odd gay jars, and helped me profusely to the exquisite preserves they contained. They were so luscious and delicate that they reminded me of Eden fruits; and almost before my wonder had shaped itself into form, certainly before it could have betrayed itself in my countenance, Aronach began to speak,--

"They pique thee, no doubt, and not only thy palate, for thou wast ever curious. They come from him of whom thou hast never spoken since thy holiday."

"Everything comes from him, I think, sir."

"No, only the good, not the evil nor the negative; and it is on this point I would advise thee, for thou art as inconsiderate as a fledgling turned out of the nest, and art ware of nothing."

"Pray advise me, sir," I said, "and I shall be glad that I am inconsiderate, to be advised by you."

I looked at him, and was surprised that a deep seriousness overshadowed the constant gravity,--which was as if one entered from the twilight a still more sombre wood.

"I intend to advise thee because thou art ignorant, though pure; untaught, yet not weak. I would not advise thy compeers,--one is too young, the other too old."

"Iskar too old!" I exclaimed.

"Iskar was never a child; whatever thou couldst teach him would only ripen his follies, already too forward. He belongs to the other world."

"There are two worlds then in music," I thought; for it had been ever a favorite notion of my own, but I did not say so, I was watching him.

He took from the breast pocket of his coat--that long brown coat--a little leather book, rolled up like a parchment; this he opened, and unfolded a paper that had lain in the curves, and yet curled round unsubmissive to his fingers. He deliberately bent it back, and held it a moment or two, while his eyes gathered light in their fixed gaze upon what he clasped, then smoothed it to its old shape with his palm, and putting on his horn-set eye-gla.s.ses, which lent him an owl-like reverendness, he began to read to me. And as I have that little paper still, and as, if not sweet, it is very short, I shall transcribe it here and now:--

"When thou hearest the folks prate about art, be certain thou art never tempted to make friends there; for if they be wise in any other respect, they are fools in this, that they know not when to keep silence and how. For art consists not in any of its representatives, and is of itself alone. To interpret it aright we must let it make its own way, and those who talk about it gainsay its true impressions, which alone remain in the bosom that is single and serene. If thou markest well, thou wilt find how few of those who make a subsistence out of music realize its full significance; for they are too busy to recall that they live for it, and not by it, even though it brings them bread. And just as few are those who set apart their musical life from all ambition, even honorable,--for ambition is of this earth alone, and in a higher yearning doth musical life consist; so the irreligious many are incapable of the fervor of the few. And the few, those I did exclude,--the few who possess in patience this inexhaustible desire,--are those who compose my world."

"You mean, sir," I exclaimed, so warm, so glowing at my heart, that the summer without, brooding over the blossomed lindens, was as winter to the summer in my veins, so suddenly penetrated I felt,--"you mean, sir, that as good people I have heard speak of the world, and of good people who are not worldly, apart, and seem to know them from each other,--in religion I mean,--so it is in music. I am sure my sister thought so,--my sister in England; but she never dared to say so."

"No, of course not; there is no right to say so anywhere now, except in Germany, for here alone has music its priesthood, and here alone, though little enough here, is reverentially regarded as the highest form of life, subserving to the purposes of the soul. But thou art right to believe entirely so, that, young as thou art, thou mayest keep thy purity, and mighty may be thy aptness to discern what is new to thee in the old, no less than what answers to the old in the new.

"And, first, when thou goest out of leading-strings, never accustom thyself to look for faults or feelings differing from thine own in those set over thee. It is certain that many a student of art has lost ground in this indulgence; for oftentimes the student, either from natural imagination, or from the vernal innocence of youth, will be outstripping his instructors in his grand intentions, and giving himself up to them will be losing the present hours in the air that should be informing themselves, with steady progress, in the strictest mechanical course. Never till thou hast mastered every conceivable difficulty, dream of producing the most distant musical effect.

"But, secondly, lest thine enthusiasm should perish of starvation under this mechanical pressure, keep thy wits awake to contemplate every artist and token of art that come between thee and daylight. And the more thou busiest thyself in mechanical preparation, the more leisure thou shalt discover so to observe; the more serene and brilliant shall thy imagination find itself,--a clear sky filled with the suns.h.i.+ne of that enthusiasm which spreads itself over every object in earth and heaven.

"Again, of music, or the tone-art, as thou hast heard me name it, never let thy conception cease. Never believe thou hast adopted the trammels of a pursuit bounded by progress because thine own progress bounds thine own pursuit. In despair at thy slow induction,--be it slow as it must be gradual,--doubt not that it is into a divine and immeasurable realm thou shalt at length be admitted; and if the ethereal souls of the masters gone before thee have thirsted after the infinite, even in such immeasurable s.p.a.ce, recall thyself, and bow contented that thou hast this in common with those above thee,--the insatiable presentment of futurity with which the Creator has chosen to endow the choicest of his gifts,--the gift in its perfection granted ever to the choicest, the rarest of the race."

"And that is why it is granted to the Hebrew nation,--why they all possess it like a right!" I cried, almost without consciousness of having spoken. But Aronach answered not; he only slightly, with the least motion, leaned his head so that the silver of his beard trembled, and a sort of tremor agitated his brow, that I observed not in his voice as he resumed.

"Thou art young, and mayest possibly excel early, as a mechanical performer. I need not urge thee to prune the exuberance of thy fancy and to bind thy taste--by nature delicate--to the pure, strong models whose names are, at present, to thee their only revelation. For the scapegrace who figures in thy daily calendar as so magnificently thy superior, will ever stand thee instead of a warning or ominous repulsion, so long as thy style is forming; and when formed, that style itself shall fence thee alike with natural and artful antipathy against the school he serves, that confesses to no restriction, no, not the restraint of rule, and is the servant of its own caprice.

"Thou shalt find that many who profess the art, confess not to that which they yet endure,--a sort of shame in their profession, as if they should enn.o.ble _it_, and not it _them_. Such professors thou shalt ever discover are slaves, not sons; their excellence as performers owing to the accidental culture of their imitative instinct; and they are the _ripieni_ of the universal orchestra, whose chief doth appear but once in every age.

"Thou shalt be set on to study by thine instructors, and, as I before hinted, wilt ever repose upon their direction. But in applying to the works they select for thine edification, whether theoretic or practical, endeavor to disabuse thyself of all thy previous impressions and prepossessions of any author whatsoever, and to absorb thyself in the contemplation of that alone thou busiest thyself upon.

"Thus alone shall thine intelligence explore all styles, and so separate each from each as finally to draw the exact conclusion from thine own temperament and taste of that to which thou dost essentially incline.

"In treating of music specifically, remember not to confound its elements. As in ancient mythology many religious seeds were sown, and golden symbols scattered, so may we apply its enforcing fables where the new wisdom denies us utterance, and the nearer towards the expression of the actual than if we observed the literal forms of speech. Thus ever remembering that as the 'aorasia' was a word signifying the invisibility of the G.o.ds, and the 'avatar' their incarnation, so is _time_ the aorasia of music the G.o.d-like, and _tone_ its avatar.

"Then, in _time_, shalt thou realize that in which the existence of music as infallibly consists as in its manifestation, _tone_, and thine understanding shall become invested with the true nature of _rhythm_, which alike doth exist between time and tone, seeming to connect in spiritual dependence the one with the other inseparably.

"In devoting thine energies to the works of art in ages behind thine own, thou shalt never be liable to depress thy consciousness of those which are meritorious _with_ thee, and _yet_ to come before thee. For thou wilt learn that to follow the supreme of art with innocence and wisdom was ever allotted to the few whose labors yet endure; while as to the many whose high-flown perfections in their day seduced the admiration of the myriads to the neglect of the few, except _by_ few, find we nothing of them at present, but the names alone of their operas, or the mention of their having been, and being now no more.

And this is while the few are growing and expanding their fame, as the generations succeed, ever among the few of every generation, but yet betokening in that still, secluded renown, the immortal purpose for which they wrote and died _not_.

"Be a.s.sured that in all works that have endured there is something of the nature of truth; therefore acquaint thyself with all, ever reserving the right to honor with peculiar investigation those works in which the author by scientific hold upon forceful imagination intimates that he wrote with the direct intention to ill.u.s.trate his art, not alone for the love of it, but in the fear of its service.

Thus apply thyself to the compositions of Palestrina, of Purcell, of Alessandro Scarlatti, and the indefatigable Corelli; thus lend thyself to the masterpieces of Pergolesi, of Mozart, and Handel; thus lean with thine entire soul upon the might and majesty of John Sebastian Bach. All others in order, but these in chief; and this last generalissimo, until thou hast learnt to govern thyself."

He paused and stayed, and the summer evening-gold crowned him as he sat. That same rich gleam creeping in, for all the deep shade that filled the heavenly vault, seemed to touch me with solemn ecstasy alike with his words. He was folding up that paper, and had nearly settled it before I dared to thank him; but as he held it out, and I grasped it, I also kissed the ivory of his not unwrinkled hand, and he did not withdraw it. Then I said, "My dear master, my dear, dear Herr Aronach, is that for me to keep?"

"It is for thee," he answered; "and perhaps, as there is little of it, thou wilt digest it more conveniently than a more abundant lecture.

Thou art imaginative, or I should not set thee laws, and implicit, or thou wouldst not follow them."

"I should like to know, sir, whether those are the sort of rules you gave the Chevalier Seraphael when he was a little boy?"

"No, no; they are not such as I gave him, be certain."

"I thought not, perhaps. Oh, sir, how very surprising he must have been when he was so young and little!"

"He did not rudely declaim, thou mayest imagine, at eight years old, and his voice was so modest to strangers that it was hard to make him heard at all,--this it was that made me set no laws before him."

"How then, sir, did you teach him?" was my bolder question.

"He would discourse of music in its native tongue, when his small fingers conversed with the keys of his favorite harpsichord, so wondrously at home there, from the first time they _felt_ themselves.

And in still obedience to the law of that inborn harmony that governed his soul, he would bend his curly pate over the score till all the color fell off his round cheek; and his forehead would work and frown with thoughts strong enough to make a strong man's brain quiver. I was severe with him to save my conscience; but he ever outwitted me, nor could I give him enough to do, for he made play of work, and no light work of play. It was as if I should direct the south wind to blow in summer, or the sunbeams to make haste with the fruit. At length it came to such a pa.s.s--his calm attainment--that I gave him up to die!

He left off growing too, and there was of him so little that you would have thought him one the pleasant folk had changed at birth: bright enough were his eyes for such suspicion. So I clapped upon him one day as he was lying upon a bit of shade in my garden, his cap of velvet tumbled off, and the feather flying as you please, while over the score of Graun he had fallen fast asleep. When I came to him, I thought the little heart-strings had given way, to let him free altogether, he lay so still and heavy in his slumber, and no breath came through his lips that I could see. So I took him up, never waking him, and laid him away in bed, and locked up every staved sheet that lay about, and every score and note-book, and shut the harpsichord; and when at last he awoke, I took him upon my knee,--for it was then he came to my house for his lessons, and I could do with him as I pleased. 'Now,' said I, 'thou hast been asleep over thy books, and I have carried them all away, for thou art lazy, and shalt see them never again, unless thou art content to do as I shall bid thee.'

"Then he looked into my face with his kind child's eyes, and said,--

"'I wish that thou wert my pupil, master; for if so, I should show thee how I should like to be taught.'

"'Well, thou art now very comfortable on my knee, and mayest pull my watch-chain if thou wilt, and shalt also tell me the story of what thou shouldst teach thine old, grand pupil,--we will make a play of it.'