MUSIC, MORALS, AND MOONSHINE

Southland Times, Issue 23948, 14 October 1939, Page 10

MUSIC, MORALS, AND MOONSHINE

(SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE SOUTHLAND TIMES)

By

F. SINCLAIRE

“The man that hath no music in himself . ... ” There is no need to

continue the quotation. We all know what that kind of person is fit for. And there the mattei - might have been allowed to rest. It was Bishop Warburton who stirred up all the trouble. In his edition of Shakespeare, published somewhere about the middle of the eighteenth century, Warburton saw fit to underline his author’s sentiment in a note. “The thought here,” said the bishop, “is extremely fine.” Then the storm burst. Six words of prose did what six lines of poetry had failed to do. Sleeping dogs were roused. The bishop had sounded the tocsin of war, and for about half a century editors, commentators, scholars and arbiters of elegance raged furiously together in the cockpit of footnotes and on the wider battlefield of dissertations and prefaces, debating the question whether Shakespeare’s thought was really so extremely fine after all. Another of Shakespeare’s editors, Steevens, opened for the negative. His note was less concise and dogmatic than the bishop’s, and required a long paragraph for its leisurely malice. Steevens will have none of “this capricious sentiment of Shakespeare’s.” The passage in question is neither pregnant with moral truth nor poetically beautiful. It has merely had the fortune to be repeated by those whose “inhospitable memories” refuse to entertain worthier matter by “vacant fiddlers and coxcombs in music.” Warburton might have added that Peachum and his light-fingered “gentlemen” (in “The Beggars’ Opera”) were accomplished musical amateurs.

NOT FOR GENTLEMEN Steevens, it will be allowed, has scored. But he has not finished yet. He clinches his argument by an appeal to high and well-bred contemporary authority. “Music,” writes Lord Chestesfield in a letter to his son. “puts a gentleman into a very frivolous and contemptible light, brings him into a deal of bad company and takes up a great deal of time which might be better employed.” After that, it might have been thought there was not much more to be said. But a poet was yet to enter the lists. The Rev. Mr Pye, Poet Laureate, came down pretty firmly on both sides of the question. His opinion anticipated that of the more modern wit who confessed that he would rather hear Offenbach than Bach often. Music, thought Mr Pye, was a good thing, an excellent good thing, but for his part he felt one could have too much of a good thing. “I confess that even I, who would almost as soon stand up to my neck in water as sit out a concert, should have no great opinion of the man who was dead to the effect of a pathetic song, set to a simple melody.” Admirable Pye! If we do not nowadays read your poetry, we might do worse than emulate your honesty. O si sic omnes! And as to the more positive side of your remark, was it not the custom of Squire Western, every afternoon when he was drunk, to have his daughter play and sing to him? Which proves that the Squire’s heart was in the right place. HOBBY WITHOUT HORSE Yet Mr Pye’s trumpet gives forth an uncertain note. He has moved a sort of amendment on behalf of the man that hath a little—but not too much—music in himself. But a debate which the negative team had opened with such spirit could not decently be allowed to close with such a weak concession. The last word came fittingly from one of the ancient seats of learning. "Music,'’ said a Cambridge don, “is a very good thing for a man who can’t afford to keep a horse.” The saying is unfortun-

I ately anonymous. Perhaps the philosoI pher to whom we owe it was a younger brother of the nobleman in Disraeli’s novel, who declined to join an excursion to the Holy Land, on the ground that there is positively no sport in that country. If one may venture to adjudicate on this debate, it seems to me that the Noes have it, and that the dogmatism of Shakespeare and Warburton is less convincing than their opponents’ appeal to fact. I know that Shakespeare has many supporters among his fellow poets. That irritable and self-assertive race, ready as they are to cry up their own wares, generally display a strange and puzzlingly abject humility in their reference to the sister art. Before the musician they stand abashed, like Mark Antony in the presence of Caesar. Perhaps it is only another case of “omne ignotum pro magnifico.” But then, one or two at least of our great poets have been accomplished musicians. Perhaps, then it is merely that one gentleman knows another, or—to put the same thing more vulgarly—that dog does not eat dog. But the matter passes my comprehension, and I leave it to the psychologists. What surprises me, is I review the debate, is that the anti-episcopal party should have failed to play some of their best cards. It was all very well to quote Lord Chesterfield, but why did they not bring forward a professional musician to support him? Music, said his lordship, brings a man into a deal of bad company. But the same opinion had already been expressed more tersely and forcibly by the elder Mozart, when he described the world in which he earned his living as “the hell of music.”

LET THE JEW STAND FORTH And since Peachum of “The Beg-' gar’s Opera” had been cited as a witness, why did no one think of bringing forward Shylock out of the very play in which the offending lines occur? The Warburtonians might indeed have made something of Shylock’s dislike for drums and fife bands. Whether that dislike places him outside the musical pale, musicians must decide. And anyhow, the argument cuts both ways. The unmusical Shylock may not have been a good man. But he was not half as consummate a villain as the musical lago. My reason for bringing in Shylock is that the lines about music are spoken by his son-in-law, Lorenzo. They are part of the syllabus of lecturettes which that extremely musical young man delivers to his runaway bride as the two walk or sit in Portia’s moonlit garden at Belmont. What he means, of course, is to assert the moral superiority of people—himself, for instance—who are musical, temperamental, and generally arty. Now it is just on that point that I should like to hear the opinion of his father-in-law. The old gentleman would very likely see things in a drier light than moonshine. lie had reason to know something of musical souls. He had paid for that experience to the tune —the expression seems apt enough—of two sealed bags of ducats, together with the ring which was a keepsake from his dead wife—which ring his daughter (she was never merry when she heard sweet music) had since exchanged for a pet monkey. Shylock, I say, would not have seen eye to eye with these bright young folk on the subject of monkeys and music, nor of treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

SHAKESPEARE, TONGUE IN CHEEK?

And Shakespeare himself—what did he think about it all? Was he of Lorenzo’s party, or of Shylock’s? To the romantic reader the question will seem preposterous. But Shakespeare was not so romantic as some of his readers. He

was a little in Shylock’s line himself. He lent money, and took good care to get it back. In the words of his biographer, “he stood rigorously by all his rights in his business relations.” With such a man, a prospective borrower would not have ingratiated himself by proposing as security a passionate love of music. Like Hamlet, the poet would have asked for grounds more relative. To him, business was business. Some day, perhaps we shall have a learned and unreadable book proving that Shylock is Shakespeare. (There is an M in Macedon, and there is an M in Monmouth.) I do not myself go so far. But I should be even sorrier to suppose, with Warburton that the voice of Lorenzo is the voice of Shakespeare. Such identifications violate the most elementary lessons of interpretation. I do not believe, and I should be sorry to believe, that in those lines about music the poet is unlocking his heart. But if he was, he was slandering by anticipation some of his most devoted servants and admirers—Johnson, to whom music was only a disagreeable variety of noise; Lamb, who never succeeded in mastering the tune of the National Anthem; Tennyson, tone-deaf, who on his deathbed called for a volume of Shakespeare, and died almost in the act of reading one of the songs in “Cymbeline.” Shakespeare-Lorenzo would banish from the. company of honest men three at least of the most honoured names in our literature. I prefer to believe that Shakespeare wrote sometimes with his tongue in his cheek. What happened, on this hypothesis, would be something like this. .When Shakespeare dismissed Shylock in the fourth act, he had done with the only man in the play. No other character was real enough to interest him as a dramatist. He had still a fifth act to provide out of material for which he cared nothing. Clearly it was a case for writing down to the taste of his audience, for finding out moonshine, for indulging the Marlowe, the Tennyson, and the Barrie he contained within himself, for amusing himself by purveying a few hundred lines of “charm,” made up of scraps of classical mythology, wordmusic, and sentimentality. With his divine fluency and his easy-going artistic conscience—or, if you like, his good-natured contempt for his audience —the task was easy. BLOWING THE GAFF So it may have been. So I hope it was. But I confess to doubts. “The Merchant” is a comparatively early play. The man who wrote it had not yet completely emancipated himself from the cant of art. There was a time, it would seem, when he was fairly contented to inhabit his circle in the hall of art. But in that world of grease paint and wooden daggers, of squeaking boys and Bohemians and demi-reps, of vanities and jealousies and tavern brawls, he was never quite at his ease. In one of his earliest comedies he had dared to take the whole race of poets, tie them up in a single bundle with lovers and lunatics, and dismiss the lot as victims of illusion. In the same comedy he had laid hands on one of those pretty classical love-stories which were part of the contemporary poetical stock in trade, and turned it into a piece of buffoonery. The appearance of Shylock is an even more striking signal of approaching emancipation from the world of pretty make-believe into the more bracing air of reality. But Shakespeare has not yet escaped. In “The Merchant” he seems to stand, like the young Keats, between t\vo worlds. There is Shylock; but there are also the caskets and the rings, the moonlight and music. The time has not yet come to pack up for Stratford, dig in as a man of property, forget the theatre, and leave his own plays to be rescued, seven years after his death, by the chance offices of others. So Shakespeare gave his audience a fifth act after their heart’s desire. But he did not omit to take his revenge. By a stroke of irony so quiet and unobtrusive that it escaped not only his first audience but most of his readers to this day, he wrote those lines about music, and embodied them in a dialogue between Lorenzo, red-handed from his bride-stealing stratagems and his ducat-

stealing spoils, and his monkeyfancying bride. Thus did the gentle Shakespeare blow the gaff on the cant of music. The. cant of poetry was to receive his attention presently. But that is another chapter.