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 ‘music school,’ and towards the end of 1872 he fixed his headquarters there. He still hoped to surmount a mechanical difficulty of execution, due to a certain deficiency of manual power not properly cared for in youth. He also shared the ambition of his Harrow associates to turn their musical powers to social account in efforts towards brightening the joyless lives of the poor. Many hours were accordingly spent day by day over piano or violin. In 1873 he even achieved the composition of what another member of the school describes as ‘a really pretty violin sonatine;’ but the net result of years spent for the most part at Harrow till 1875 was failure to come in any way near to the satisfaction of his personal longings, or the ability to fulfil what he regarded as his social purpose. He next settled in London, and still for several years continued his musical practice under different direction before he lost hope. Ultimately, although till the very end of his life he would resume hard practice at intervals, he recognised that he could not achieve success as a performer on musical instruments.

Meanwhile Gurney's inquisitive spirit was more fruitfully at work. His first publication was an article ‘On some Disputed Points in Music’ in the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ 1876; and from that time, in different periodicals, he gave proof that the strongest feeling for musical effects was consistent with a rigid scientific analysis of their conditions. His studies for some years past in psychology as well as philosophy had prepared him on one side for the work of musical theorising, and from 1877 he attained the no less requisite familiarity with the physics and physiology of sound. The notion of writing a book which should include, with a strict investigation of the musical art, an impassioned plea for its civilising function, seems to have taken shape gradually. ‘The Power of Sound’ was definitely commenced in the middle of 1879, and appeared before the end of 1880. Whether it was that the plan was beyond the grasp of common readers, or that musical experts resented the excess of scientific speculation, or that professional theorists found the exposition over-discursive, the merits of the book were not at once recognised. It stands in truth without a rival in its class, not only for varied interest and philosophic breadth of view, but also for positive scientific insight into some, at least, of the aspects of music. Gurney's own feeling was stronger for melody than for anything else in music; and as melodic charm is that which most directly appeals to the common people, who were to be refined, it was in melody most of all that he sought the secret of its unique power. Of melody, no one else has written with the same penetration. Nor is his treatment less masterly when he deals with the relation of music to the other arts, and more especially poetry, which had hardly less hold upon him than music itself.

Meanwhile, having married (Miss Kate Sibley) in 1877, Gurney was going through the stages of a course of medical instruction, though without any definite view to practice. Medical study, while involving such a general scientific preparation as had become indispensable to him for his musical inquiries, attracted him because of his intense sympathy with all suffering; he also felt the need of a more hopeful occupation than music had proved to him. He studied first in London, chiefly at University College, from October 1877; but, finding the crowded metropolitan classes uncongenial to his mature reflective habit, he moved a year later to Cambridge, where he could learn from friends who understood him. There he followed the regular M.B. course, and had completed two of its three examination-stages before, in the autumn of 1880, he returned to London and entered at St. George's Hospital upon the more strictly professional studies and practical training necessary for the final examination at Cambridge. Early in 1881, however, he found it no longer possible to go on with clinical recording and surgical dressing, and had to remain satisfied with the general understanding of vital processes which he had learned by the way. His medical experience bore immediate fruit in two articles, ‘A Chapter on the Ethics of Pain,’ and ‘An Epilogue on Vivisection’ (1881–2, reprinted in ‘Tertium Quid’), in which a frank recognition of the conditions on which the advance of physiological science and medical practice depends, is tempered with an extremely subtle appreciation of the moral issues involved in experimentation with living animals. Darwin at the time (Life and Letters, iii. 210) declared himself in almost entire agreement with the position taken up by Gurney on the subject, though finding the subtlety carried rather far.

Gurney next entered as a student at Lincoln's Inn in May 1881, and read with a special pleader, afterwards with a conveyancer. His ardour was at first absorbing, but before long he again lost interest. He was now writing freely on topics of philosophy proper (chiefly in the pages of ‘Mind’), his experience of life having turned his thoughts more and more to the general problems of existence. Dominated through his later studies