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The Pleasures of Life

S >> Sir John Lubbock >> The Pleasures of Life




The love of landscape is not indeed due to Art alone. It has been the
happy combination of art and science which has trained us to perceive the
beauty which surrounds us.

Art helps us to see, and "hundreds of people can talk for one who can
think; but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is
poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.... Remembering always that
there are two characters in which all greatness of Art consists--first,
the earnest and intense seizing of natural facts; then the ordering those
facts by strength of human intellect, so as to make them, for all who look
upon them, to the utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful. And thus
great Art is nothing else than the type of strong and noble life; for as
the ignoble person, in his dealings with all that occurs in the world
about him, first sees nothing clearly, looks nothing fairly in the face,
and then allows himself to be swept away by the trampling torrent and
unescapable force of the things that he would not foresee and could not
understand: so the noble person, looking the facts of the world full in
the face, and fathoming them with deep faculty, then deals with them in
unalarmed intelligence and unhurried strength, and becomes, with his human
intellect and will, no unconscious nor insignificant agent in consummating
their good and restraining their evil." [7]

May we not also hope that in this respect also still further progress may
be made, that beauties may be revealed, and pleasures may be in store for
those who come after us, which we cannot appreciate, or at least can but
faintly feel.

Even now there is scarcely a cottage without something more or less
successfully claiming to rank as Art,--a picture, a photograph, or a
statuette; and we may fairly hope that much as Art even now contributes to
the happiness of life, it will do so even more effectively in the future.

[1] Reynolds.

[2] Shakespeare.

[3] Dryden.

[4] Haweis.

[5] Beattie, 1776.

[6] Boswell.

[7] Ruskin.




CHAPTER VI.

POETRY.


"And here the singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead;
The song that nerves a nation's heart
Is in itself a deed."
TENNYSON.




CHAPTER VI.

POETRY.


After the disastrous defeat of the Athenians before Syracuse, Plutarch
tells us that the Sicilians spared those who could repeat any of the
poetry of Euripides.

"Some there were," he says, "who owed their preservation to Euripides. Of
all the Grecians, his was the muse with whom the Sicilians were most in
love. From the strangers who landed in their island they gleaned every
small specimen or portion of his works, and communicated it with pleasure
to each other. It is said that upon this occasion a number of Athenians on
their return home went to Euripides, and thanked him in the most grateful
manner for their obligations to his pen; some having been enfranchised for
teaching their masters what they remembered of his poems, and others
having procured refreshments, when they were wandering about after the
battle, by singing a few of his verses."

Nowadays we are none of us likely to owe our lives to Poetry in this
sense, yet in another we many of us owe to it a similar debt. How often,
when worn with overwork, sorrow, or anxiety, have we taken down Homer or
Horace, Shakespeare or Milton, and felt the clouds gradually roll away,
the jar of nerves subside, the consciousness of power replace physical
exhaustion, and the darkness of despondency brighten once more into the
light of life.

"And yet Plato," says Jowett, "expels the poets from his Republic because
they are allied to sense; because they stimulate the emotions; because
they are thrice removed from the ideal truth."

In that respect, as in some others, few would accept Plato's Republic as
being an ideal Commonwealth, and most would agree with Sir Philip Sidney
that "if you cannot bear the planet-like music of poetry ... I must send
you in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and
never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your
memory die from the earth, for want of an epitaph."

Poetry has often been compared with painting and sculpture. Simonides long
ago said that Poetry is a speaking picture, and painting is mute Poetry.

"Poetry," says Cousin, "is the first of the Arts because it best
represents the infinite."

And again, "Though the arts are in some respects isolated, yet there is
one which seems to profit by the resources of all, and that is Poetry.
With words, Poetry can paint and sculpture; she can build edifices like an
architect; she unites, to some extent, melody and music. She is, so to
say, the center in which all arts unite."

A true poem is a gallery of pictures.

It must, I think, be admitted that painting and sculpture can give us a
clearer and more vivid idea of an object we have never seen than any
description can convey. But when we have once seen it, then on the
contrary there are many points which the poet brings before us, and which
perhaps neither in the representation, nor even in nature, should we
perceive for ourselves. Objects can be most vividly brought before us by
the artist, actions by the poet; space is the domain of Art, time of
Poetry. [1]

Take, for instance, as a typical instance, female beauty. How labored and
how cold any description appears. The greatest poets recognize this; as,
for instance, when Scott wishes us to realize the Lady of the Lake he does
not attempt any description, but just mentions her attitude and then
adds--

"And ne'er did Grecian chisel trace
A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,
Of finer form or lovelier face!"

A great poet indeed must be inspired; he must possess an exquisite sense
of beauty, and feelings deeper than those of most men, and yet well under
his control. "The Milton of poetry is the man, in his own magnificent
phrase, of devout prayer to that eternal spirit that can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire
of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases." [2] And if
from one point of view Poetry brings home to us the immeasurable
inequalities of different minds, on the other hand it teaches us that
genius is no affair of rank or wealth.

"I think of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul, that perish'd in his pride;
Of Burns, that walk'd in glory and in joy
Behind his plough upon the mountain-side." [3]

A man may be a poet and yet write no verse, but not if he writes bad or
poor ones.

"Mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non Di, non concessere columnae." [4]

Second-rate poets, like second-rate writers generally, fade gradually into
dreamland; but the great poets remain always.

Poetry will not live unless it be alive, "that which comes from the head
goes to the heart;" [5] and Milton truly said that "he who would not be
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought
himself to be a true poem."

For "he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to
the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art--he, I
say, and his Poetry are not admitted." [6]

But the work of the true poet is immortal.

"For have not the verses of Homer continued 2500 years or more without the
loss of a syllable or a letter, during which time infinite palaces,
temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not
possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar,
no, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the
originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and
truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledge remain in books,
exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation.
Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still
and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing
infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages: so that if the invention
of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities
from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in
participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified,
which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time and make ages so
distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the
one of the other?" [7]

The poet requires many qualifications. "Who has traced," says Cousin, "the
plan of this poem? Reason. Who has given it life and charm? Love. And who
has guided reason and love? The Will."

"All men have some imagination, but
The Lover and the Poet
Are of imagination all compact.

* * * * *

"The Poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name." [8]

Poetry is the fruit of genius; but it cannot be produced without labor.
Moore, one of the airiest of poets, tells us that he was a slow and
painstaking workman.

The works of our greatest Poets are all episodes in that one great poem
which the genius of man has created since the commencement of human
history.

A distinguished mathematician is said once to have inquired what was
proved by Milton in his _Paradise Lost_; and there are no doubt still some
who ask themselves, even if they shrink from putting the question to
others, whether Poetry is of any use, just as if to give pleasure were not
useful in itself. No true Utilitarian, however, would feel this doubt,
since the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the rule of his
philosophy.

"We must not estimate the works of genius merely with reference to the
pleasure they afford, even when pleasure was their principal object. We
must also regard the intelligence which they presuppose and exercise." [9]

Thoroughly to enjoy Poetry we must not so limit ourselves, but must rise
to a higher ideal.

"Yes; constantly in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really
excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be
present in our minds, and should govern our estimate of what we
read." [10]

Cicero, in his oration for Archias, well asked, "Has not this man then a
right to my love, to my admiration, to all the means which I can employ in
his defence? For we are instructed by all the greatest and most learned of
mankind, that education, precepts, and practice, can in every other branch
of learning produce excellence. But a poet is formed by the hand of
nature; he is aroused by mental vigor, and inspired by what we may call
the spirit of divinity itself. Therefore our Ennius has a right to give to
poets the epithet of Holy, [11] because they are, as it were, lent to
mankind by the indulgent bounty of the gods."

"Poetry," says Shelley, "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering
it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that
it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand
thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as
memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all
thoughts and actions with which it co-exists."

And again, "All high Poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which
contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the
inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a
fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight."

Or, as he has expressed himself in his Ode to a Skylark:

"Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

"Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

"Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view."

We speak now of the poet as the Maker or Creator--[Greek: poiaetaes]; the
origin of the word "bard" seems doubtful.

The Hebrews well called their poets "Seers," for they not only perceive
more than others, but also help other men to see much which would
otherwise be lost to us. The old Greek word was [Greek: aoidos]--the Bard
or Singer.

Poetry lifts the veil from the beauty of the world which would otherwise
be hidden, and throws over the most familiar objects the glow and halo of
imagination. The man who has a love for Poetry can scarcely fail to derive
intense pleasure from Nature, which to those who love it is all "beauty to
the eye and music to the ear."

"Yet Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets
have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling
flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more
lovely." [12]

In the smokiest city the poet will transport us, as if by enchantment, to
the fresh air and bright sun, to the murmur of woods and leaves and water,
to the ripple of waves upon sand, and enable us, as in some delightful
dream, to cast off the cares and troubles of life.

The poet, indeed, must have more true knowledge, not only of human nature,
but of all Nature, than other men are gifted with.

Crabbe Robinson tells us that when a stranger once asked permission to see
Wordsworth's study, the maid said, "This is master's Library, but he
studies in the fields." No wonder then that Nature has been said to return
the poet's love.

"Call it not vain;-they do not err
Who say that, when the poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies." [13]

Swinburne says of Blake, and I feel entirely with him, though in my case
the application would have been different, that "The sweetness of sky and
leaf, of grass and water--the bright light life of bird, child, and
beast--is, so to speak, kept fresh by some graver sense of faithful and
mysterious love, explained and vivified by a conscience and purpose in the
artist's hand and mind. Such a fiery outbreak of spring, such an
insurrection of fierce floral life and radiant riot of childish power and
pleasure, no poet or painter ever gave before; such lustre of green leaves
and flushed limbs, kindled cloud and fervent fleece, was never wrought
into speech or shape."

To appreciate Poetry we must not merely glance at it, or rush through it,
or read it in order to talk or write about it. One must compose oneself
into the right frame of mind. Of course for one's own sake one will read
Poetry in times of agitation, sorrow, or anxiety, but that is another
matter.

The inestimable treasures of Poetry again are open to all of us. The best
books are indeed the cheapest. For the price of a little beer, a little
tobacco, we can buy Shakespeare or Milton--or indeed almost as many books
as a man can read with profit in a year.

Nor, in considering the advantage of Poetry to man, must we limit
ourselves to its past or present influence. The future of Poetry, says Mr.
Matthew Arnold, and no one was more qualified to speak, "The future of
Poetry is immense, because in Poetry, where it is worthy of its high
destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer
stay. But for Poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of
illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the
idea _is_ the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its
unconscious Poetry. We should conceive of Poetry worthily, and more highly
than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as
capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies than those which in
general men have assigned to it hitherto."

Poetry has been well called the record "of the best and happiest moments
of the happiest and best minds;" it is the light of life, the very "image
of life expressed in its eternal truth;" it immortalizes all that is best
and most beautiful in the world; "it purges from our inward sight the film
of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being;" "it is the
center and circumference of knowledge;" and poets are "mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity caste upon the present."

Poetry, in effect, lengthens life; it creates for us time, if time be
realized as the succession of ideas and not of minutes; it is the "breath
and finer spirit of all knowledge;" it is bound neither by time nor space,
but lives in the spirit of man. What greater praise can be given than the
saying that life should be Poetry put into action.

[1] See Lessing's _Laocoön_.

[2] Arnold.

[3] Coleridge.

[4] Horace.

[5] Wordsworth.

[6] Plato.

[7] Bacon.

[8] Shakespeare.

[9] St. Hailare.

[10] Arnold.

[11] Plato styles poets the sons and interpreters of the gods.

[12] Sydney, _Defence of Poetry_.

[13] Scott.




CHAPTER VII.

MUSIC.


"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the
mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life
to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is
good, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but
nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form."--PLATO.




CHAPTER VII.

MUSIC.


Music is in one sense far more ancient than man, and the voice was from
the very commencement of human existence a source of melody: but so far as
musical instruments are concerned, it is probable that percussion came
first, then wind instruments, and lastly, those with strings: first the
Drum, then the Flute, and thirdly, the Lyre. The early history of Music
is, however, unfortunately wrapped in much obscurity. The use of letters
long preceded the invention of notes, and tradition in such a matter can
tell us but little.

The contest between Marsyas and Apollo is supposed by some to typify the
struggle between the Flute and the Lyre; Marsyas representing the archaic
Flute, Apollo the champion of the Lyre. The latter of course was
victorious: it sets the voice free, and the sound

"Of music that is born of human breath
Comes straighter to the soul than any strain
The hand alone can make." [1]

Various myths have grown up to explain the origin of Music. One Greek
tradition was to the effect Grasshoppers were human beings themselves in a
world before the Muses; that when the Muses came, being ravished with
delight, they sang and sang and forgot to eat, until "they died of hunger
for the love of song. And they carry to heaven the report of those who
honor them on earth." [2]

The old writers and commentators tell us that Pythagoras, "as he was one
day meditating on the want of some rule to guide the ear, analogous to
what had been used to help the other senses, chanced to pass by a
blacksmith's shop, and observing that the hammers, which were four in
number, sounded very harmoniously, he had them weighed, and found them to
be in the proportion of six, eight, nine, and twelve. Upon this he
suspended four strings of equal length and thickness, etc., fastened
weights in the above-mentioned proportions to each of them respectively,
and found that they gave the same sounds that the hammers had done; viz.
the fourth, fifth, and octave to the gravest tone." [3] However this may
be, it would appear that the lyre had at first four strings only:
Terpander is said to have given it three more, and an eighth was
subsequently added.

We have unfortunately no specimens of Greek or Roman, or even of Early
Christian music. The Chinese indicated the notes by words or their
initials. The lowest was termed "Koung," or the Emperor, as being the
Foundation on which all were supported; the second was Tschang, the Prime
Minister; the third, the Subject; the fourth, Public Business; the fifth,
the Mirror of Heaven. [4] The Greeks also had a name for each note. The
so-called Gregorian notes were not invented until six hundred years after
Gregory's death. The Monastery of St. Gall possesses a copy of Gregory's
Antiphonary, made about the year 780 by a chorister who was sent from Rome
to Charlemagne to reform the Northern music, and in this the notes are
indicated by "pneumss," from which our notes were gradually developed, and
first arranged along one line, to which others were gradually added. But I
must not enlarge on this interesting subject.

In the matter of music Englishmen have certainly deserved well of the
world. Even as long ago as 1185 Giraldus Cambrensis, Bishop of St.
David's, says, "The Britons do not sing their tunes in unison like the
inhabitants of other countries, but in different parts. So that when a
company of singers meet to sing, as is usual in this country, as many
different parts are heard as there are singers." [5]

The most ancient known piece of music for several voices is an English
four men's song, "Summer is a coming in," which is considered to be at
least as early as 1240, and is now in the British Museum.

The Venetian Ambassador in the time of Henry VIII. said of our English
Church music: "The mass was sung by His Majesty's choristers, whose voices
are more heavenly than human; they did not chant like men, but like
angels."

Speaking of Purcell's anthem, "Be merciful to me, O God," Burney says it
is "throughout admirable. Indeed, to my conception there is no better
music existing of the kind than the opening of this anthem, in which the
verse 'I will praise God' and the last movement in C natural are, in
melody, harmony, and modulation, truly divine music."

Dr. Burney says that Purcell was "as much the pride of an Englishman in
music as Shakespeare in productions of the stage, Milton in epic poetry,
Locke in metaphysics, or Sir Isaac Newton in philosophy and mathematics;"
and yet Purcell's music is unfortunately but little known to us now, as
Macfarren says, "to our great loss."

The authors of some of the loveliest music, and even in some cases that of
comparatively recent times, are unknown to us. This is the case for
instance with the exquisite song "Drink to me only with thine eyes," the
words of which were taken by Jonson from Philostratus, and which has been
considered as the most beautiful of all "people's songs."

The music of "God save the Queen" has been adopted in more than half a
dozen other countries, and yet the authorship is a matter of doubt, being
attributed by some to Dr. John Bull, by others to Carey. It was apparently
first sung in a tavern in Cornhill.

Both the music and words of "O Death, rock me to sleep" are said to be by
Anne Boleyn: "Stay, Corydon" and "Sweet Honey-sucking Bees" by Wildye,
"the first of madrigal writers." "Rule Britannia" was composed by Arne,
and originally formed part of his Masque of _Alfred_, first performed in
1740 at Cliefden, near Maidenhead. To Arne we are also indebted for the
music of "Where the Bee sucks there lurk I." "The Vicar of Bray" is set to
a tune originally known as "A Country Garden." "Come unto these yellow
sands" we owe to Purcell; "Sigh no more, Ladies" to Stevens; "Home, Sweet
Home" to Bishop.

There is a curious melancholy in national music which is generally in the
minor key; indeed this holds good with the music of savage races
generally. They appear, moreover, to have no love Songs.

Herodotus tells us that during the whole time he was in Egypt he only
heard one song, and that was a sad one. My own experience there was the
same. Some tendency to melancholy seems indeed inherent in music, and
Jessica is not alone in the feeling

"I am never merry when I hear sweet music."

The epitaphs on Musicians have been in some cases very well expressed.
Such, for instance, is the following:

"Philips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty power and hapless love,
Rest here, distressed by poverty no more;
Here find that calm thou gav'st so oft before;
Sleep, undisturbed, within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee with a note like thine!"

Still more so that on Purcell, whose premature death was so irreparable a
loss to English music--

"Here lies Henry Purcell, who left this life, and is gone to that
blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded."

The histories of Music contain many curious anecdotes as to the
circumstances under which different works have been composed.

Rossini tells us that he wrote the overture to the "Gazza Ladra" on the
very day of the first performance, in the upper loft of the La Scala,
where he had been confined by the manager under the guard of four
scene-shifters, who threw the text out of the window to copyists bit by
bit as it was composed. Tartini is said to have composed "Il trillo del
Diavolo," considered to be his best work, in a dream. Rossini, speaking of
the chorus in G minor in his "Dal tuo stellato soglio," tells us: "While I
was writing the chorus in G minor I suddenly dipped my pen into a medicine
bottle instead of the ink. I made a blot, and when I dried this with the
sand it took the form of a natural, which instantly gave me the idea of
the effect the change from G minor to G major would make, and to this blot
is all the effect, if any, due." But these of course are exceptional
cases.

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