SOLACE TO THE SUFFERING. 81 phrase, hath strong imagination, and so potent hath its agency been found in the way of remedial aids and appliances. Great is the solace afforded by music to some that suffer keenly, and suffer unseen. Charles de Bernard says that "pour le cœur privé d'un autre cœur où se puissent verser sa joie et sa peine, lạ musique est un ami qui écoute et répond. Sous les doigts qui l'interrogent, l'instrument reçoit la pression de l'âme souffrante, et s'anime pour la consoler. Le souffle de la douleur errant sur le clavier éveille une harmonie qui la berce et l'endort, ou la distrait par une exaltation passagère." "Give me some music," was the demand of the late Duchess of Orleans, as she neared her end: "music calms my thoughts; it cheats me out of my feelings without doing them violence." The girl-heroine of a popular modern fiction, condemned to perpetual silence in every other tongue, finds in music a new and glorious language. Forbidden to read romance or poetry, she is not forbidden to sit at her piano, songs of Zion in his chamber-raised by many an intervening staircase far above the Temple Gardens, where young students of those times would often pause in their morning stroll, to listen to the not unpleasing cadence, though the voice was broken by age, and the language was to them an unknown tongue," for Granville Sharpe was learned in Hebrew, and claimed to sing and play as David sang and played. 82 MUSIC A SOLACE when the day's toils are over, and the twilight is dusky, in her quiet room, playing dreamy melodies from the great German masters, and making her own poetry to Mendelssohn's wordless songs. "Her soul must surely have shrunk and withered away altogether had it not been for this one resource, this one refuge, in which her mind regained its elasticity, springing up, like a trampled flower, into new life and beauty." To apply the words of one of Goethe's dramatic self-communers— "One pleasure cheers me in my solitude, The joy of song. I commune with myself, Often, here and there, over the wide world, says Balzac, "une jeune fille expirant sous le poids d'une peine inconnue, un homme dont l'âme vibre sous les pincements d'une passion, prennent un theme musical et s'entendent avec le ciel,* ou se parlent à eux-mêmes dans quelque sublime melodie." The "There is a sonata * Or it may be, with Another Place. of Beethoven's (I forget the number)," writes Miss Gwilt in her Diary," which always suggests to me the agony of lost spirits in a place of torment. Come, my fingers and thumbs, and take me among the lost spirits, this morning !"—Armadale, book iv., chap. i. AND A SAFETY-VALVE. 83 (Miss Gwilt, in author of Elsie Venner bids us beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy inner life either in words or song. If she can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her wickedness, he promises us, shall run off through her throat or the tips of her fingers. the last foot-note, is sadly an exception to the rule; a very strong exception indeed, but scarcely strong enough to prove the rule.) Many a tragedy, on Dr. Holmes's showing, finds its peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades and strenuous bravuras; many a murder is executed in double-quick time upon the keys which stab the air with their daggerstrokes of sound. What would civilization, he asks, be without the piano? Are not Erard and Broadwood the two humanizers of our time? Therefore professes he to love to hear the all-pervading tumtum from houses in obscure streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, or even from the "open windows of the small, unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavours; and the flat-patterned woman of brokendown countenance." * "For who knows that Almira, but for those keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides through the meadows by her father's door-or living, with that other current which runs beneath the gaslights over 84 TO THE LAST To the last, and at the last, music has been to many that thing of beauty which is a joy for ever. Sir Philip Sidney was solaced to the last, and at the last, by music,-listening particularly to a strange song which he had himself composed during his illness, and which he had entitled "La Cuisse rompue." Very characteristic was the title Rousseau gave to that century, or thereabouts, of the romances he set to music,-Consolations des Misères de ma Vie. Earl Russell tells us of Thomas Moore that to the last day of his life he would sing, or ask his wife to sing to him, the favourite airs of his bygone days: dying, he "warbled;" and a "fond love of music. never left him but with life." Fiction has its representative men in this line of things. The old German, Joseph Buschmann, in a well-known story, reckons on one kind ministrant to hold his darling musical-box to his ear, when his own strength shall fail him, and his senses be dulled-the box that the hand of Mozart had touched-to hold it "closer, closer always, when Joseph moans for the friendly music he has known from a baby, the friendly the slimy pavement, choking with wretched weeds that were once in spotless flower?"-Elsie Venner, chap. xxiii. * The fatal wound at Zutphen was from a musket-ball which struck him upon the thigh, three inches above the knee. AND AT THE LAST. 85 music that he can now so hardly, hardly hear." To the same author we owe a certain ode on music, one stanza of which is pertinent in this connection impersonated music loquitur: "Still pleased, my solace I impart, Where brightest hopes are scatter'd dead; 'Tis mine-sweet gift !-to charm the heart, Though all its other joys have fled." |