66 "ETHIOPIAN SERENADERS." against any one who admires these tunes, and she declines to play them to me." Lady Ellesmere replies that she can well imagine he does admire these "tunes," as he calls them; and that certainly it is worth her while to get up Beethoven for him, when an Ethiopian melody satisfies him quite as well. But even Sir John Ellesmere, one hopes and believes, would at any rate decline to pay the street performers of his favourite strains.* To him, 66 * One of Hogarth's biographers, well qualified to sympathize with his Enraged Musician, freely own to a horror of Ethiopian serenaders," whose battered white hats, and preposterous shirt collars and cravats, and abnormal eye-glasses, as well as whose bones, banjos, and "hideous chants" he holds in abhorrence. He sighs for an hour of despotism that he might have those sooty scamps put under the pump, scrubbed clean, set in the stocks to dry, scourged, clad in hodden gray, and then set to break stones instead of rattling bones, and to pick oakum instead of strumming catgut. Unbounded is his invective (which we are for applauding to the echo) against the fellows who, willingly and of malice aforethought, blacken their faces and hands, and, in a garb seemingly "raked out of the kennels of Philadelphia and the niggers' dram-shops of the Five Points at New York,” arm themselves with the musical instruments of pagan savages, repair to a place of public resort, and there, for hire and gain, "howl forth by the hour together outrageous screeds of dissonant cacophony, with words couched in a hideous jargon that Bosjemen would be ashamed of, and baboons disdain to imitate. . . . These fellows prance and yell in public thorough IN THE QUIET STREET. 67 studying to-morrow's briefs, the sooty choristers who wield banjo and bones would surely be undesirable company. What must the periodical fares, and are rewarded with coppers by the unthinking and the vulgar." In another of his books this writer owns to remembering, with much inward trouble, that he had in public committed himself more than once in favour of street music-laughing at the folly of putting down bagpipes and barrel-organs by Act of Parliament; and he essays to resign himself to the axiom that the few must always suffer for the enjoyment of the many; that the sick, the nervous, the fastidious, and the hypochondriacal are but drops of water in a huge ocean of hale, hearty, somewhat thick-skinned and thick-eared humanity; of robust folk who "like the noisy vagabonds who are my bane and terror in the quiet street, and admire their distressing performance."-Quiet street, quotha? There revel the murderers of sleep, the banded destroyers of peace of mind, the solitary singer “singing for the million," in Hood's sense of the phrase; for Hood has himself sung to some purpose his story of how "in one of those small quiet streets, where Business retreats, to shun the daily bustle and the noise the shoppy Strand enjoys, but Law, Joint Companies, and Life Assurance find past endurance,—in one of those back streets to peace so dear," he heard one day a ragged wight begin to sing with all his might, 'I have a silent sorrow here." "The noise was quite appalling, And was in fact Only a forty boatswain power of bawling. And doors against the persevering Stentor,- 66 68 COMPOSERS AND CLAMOUR. presence of such a crew be to a sensitive composer of crotchets and quavers? How does M. Stephen Heller feel, when their clamour overtakes him in the midst of a Rêverie, surpassingly delicate and refined? How relishes M. Gounod their accompaniment to an opening theme of his? or Sir Sterndale Bennett their interposition of discord to his placid harmonies? or Mr. Macfarren their boisterous obbligato to one of his ballad strains? If Longfellow's artist pines for the revival of an ancient law which forbade those who followed any noisy handicraft from living near literary men, still more earnest and interested is his plea that musical composers, poor and hard beset, and who, moreover, are forced to coin their inspiration into gold, to spin out the thread of life withal, should be allowed to apply this law in their favour, and banish out of the neighbourhood all ballad singers and bagpipers. What, he asks, would a painter say, while transferring to his canvas a form of ideal beauty, if you should hold up before him all manner of wild faces and ugly masks? But then he might shut his eyes, and in this way, at least, quietly follow out the images of fancy. Whereas in the case of brass bands, and the like, "cotton in one's ears is of no use, one still hears the dreadful massacre. And then the idea, the bare idea, 'Now they are going to sing-now the horn strikes up,' STOPPING A STREET-BAND. 69 is enough to send one's sublimest conceptions" whither one would not. are asked to pay for!* And this sort of thing you Dr. Holmes may well be, * Many a weakly goodnatured man pays very much in the spirit and with the sense of the clown in Othello, when the musicians have duly exercised their wind instruments in front of the castle : 'Clo. Masters, here's money for you; and the General so likes your music, that he desires you, of all loves, to make no more noise with it. "I Mus. Well, sir, we will not. " 'Clo. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again: but, as they say, to hear music the General does not greatly care. "I Mus. We have none such, sir. Clo. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away. Go; vanish into air; away." 66 Othello, Act iii., Sc. 1. This sort of Ite, missa est, is of a sort with that of the Princess Augusta addressed to Madame d'Arblay's little boy, when the royal family were making much of him, and plying him with toys. Princess Elizabeth now began playing upon an organ she had brought him, which he flew to seize.‘Ay, do! that's right, my dear!' cried Princess Augusta, stopping her ears at some discordant sounds: 'take it to mon ami, to frighten the cats out of his garden."" A very legitimate use of the instrument in general,-if only one could frighten the cats without torturing humanity at the same time. All our sympathies are with Matthew Bramble, “starting and staring, with marks of indignation and disquiet," at the sudden burst of sound from one street band-and with his peremptory message to another, to silence those dreadful blasts." And even with Sheridan's Don Jerome, complaining from his open window, 66 "What vagabonds are these I hear, Fiddling, fluting, rhyming, ranting, Piping, scraping, whining, canting?" 70 BRASS-BAND MAL-PRACTICE. and does well to be, sore on that sore point, in his Music-Grinders, where, after describing the approach of the troublers from afar, getting nearer and nearer, till you hear a sound that seems to wear the semblance of a tune, as if a broken fife should strive to drown a cracked bassoon, and nearer, nearer still the tide of "music" seems to come, with something like a human voice, and something like a drum, the while you sit in agony, until you ear is numb, listening in your own despite to performers whose mission it seemingly is "to crack the voice of Melody, and break the legs of Time;"-after thus picturing the performers and the performances he continues "But hark! the air again is still, the music all is ground, And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound; It cannot be,—it is,—it is,—a hat is going round ! 66 And with Anstey's fractious old gouty peer, protesting against the fiddlers come hither to make all this rout," with their vile "squeaking catgut that's worse than the gout." And with Hook anathematizing a brass band with those terrible wind instruments, which roar away in defiance of all rule, except that which Hoyle addresses to young whist players when in doubt-trump it." And with Ben Jonson's Morose, excruciated by conspirators against his peace, who hire musicians to strike up all together, so that he feels himself their anvil to work on; they grate him asunder. "Mor. They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen throats." |