Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/771

Rh to anybody or nobody. The patent fact that so many women "leave off music" after their marriage is no proof of their skill or no-skill having been attained with ulterior motives: other duties arise and multiply, life has become too hurried and too full of much small business for piano-playing as a duty, and it has never been, like the craft of the true musician, a necessity of nature — very likely not even a recreation.

Then, in spite of the theory that the reason the use of the piano ought to be a principal part of a girl's education is that she may be qualified to make a husband's home happy, most men rather dislike tête à tête musical entertainments where the wife is the solitary performer. They are sleepy, or they are studious, or they want to go away and smoke, or they are critical connoisseurs and do not like the domestic average, or they like the barrel-organ's cheerful and compendious tunes and are worried at the effort of conscious listening required to follow the melody as their divine Cecilia goes on "adding length to solemn sounds." If the husband can sing at all it is another matter, he wants his wife to accompany him, he votes himself musical, the pair practise together. But the majority of husbands do not sing. The proper and charitable feeling when one hears of a woman who before marriage gave up her time largely to practising "leaving off music" after marriage is that of pity for her that she ever was constrained to begin it, or — for perhaps, on the principle that you cannot tell if you can play the flute till you have tried, and to train the ear to some intelligent and pleasurable appreciation of harmony, a rudimentary musical education should be given to all children — the pity for her should only extend to her having been constrained to labor on at an uncongenial and utterly useless occupation. No person in whom any particle of the divine faculty of music had life could, after having attained a mastery over the mechanical difficulties of instrumentation and after having made its exercise a daily habit for years, renounce the habit and forego the mastery. If music had not been alien to the nature, it must have become a second nature. Of course this does not mean that there was a dislike to hearing music, any more than that the absence of the painter's temperament involves a dislike to seeing pictures, but simply that the gifts and predisposition which go to make the musician were wanting, as the soil and climate for azaleas are wanting on Norway hills. In fact the enjoyment of rhythmic sounds is so universal to mankind that, as a general rule, the last thing an unmusical man suspects about himself is that he is unmusical. Once one of the most excruciating and disunited of itinerant bands conceivable out of Hades was jerking through a popular set of quadrilles in a variety of keys and times, when a benevolent and cheerful auditor said to a silent sufferer pacing his garden with him, "Do you like music?" "Yes," was the answer of course, — who would own to being the man that has not music in his soul? — but the "yes" was languid and slow, for the noise the itinerants were making bore the generic name of music, and the thought had arisen, as it must have often arisen to most people, that the tuneful art gives too much pain for too rare a pleasure. "So do I; I delight in it," was the hearty reply, "I do enjoy this now. In fact I am so fond of music that there is no sort I don't enjoy. It gives me the greatest pleasure to hear even a common barrel-organ." Many respectable persons wholly without ear think they are fond of music, on much the same grounds. Some of them regret that they never learned music; some of them have learned it. Only the latter are objectionable in society.

It is a decided alleviation to party-goers in general, and probably to most of the martyrs to music themselves, that the barbarous custom of making oppressed young ladies bestow their vocal or instrumental tediousness on the oppressed company has gone far towards disappearing. The poor girls, called on to air their abilities before a roomful of strangers and indifferent or even hostile acquaintances, and aware from the comments themselves and their intimates pass on the performances of other girls and the manner in which they listen to them that they will have more critics than hearers and that criticism will chiefly mean censure, fall far short of their best where their best would not qualify them to take the places of fourth-rate professionals at public concerts. They have spent weary hours in practising up the song or the nocturne that was to earn the enthusiasm of the enchanted assemblage, and only mortification is the result; the compliments are forced and cold, and the thank-yous that echo the concluding chords are at least as likely to represent gratitude that the process is over as delight in its having taken place. Of the audience, those who understand music have 