No More Learning

Whenever I spoke of
my desire to anybody they said I should write for music, but when
I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did their
natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered,
or it was drowned in another music which I did not understand. What
was the good of writing a love-song if the singer pronounced love,
'lo-o-o-o-o-ve,' or even if he said 'love,' but did not give it its
exact place and weight in the rhythm? Like every other poet, I spoke
verses in a kind of chant when I was making them, and sometimes, when
I was alone on a country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting
voice, and feel that if I dared I would speak them in that way to
other people. One day I was walking through a Dublin street with the
Visionary I have written about in _The Celtic Twilight_, and he began
speaking his verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have
the inner light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after
him even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after
poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that he
had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked somebody
who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a violinist,
to write out the music and play it. The violinist had played it,
or something like it, but had not written it down; but the man with
the wind instrument said it could not be played because it contained
quarter-tones and would be out of tune. We were not at all convinced
by this, and one day, when we were staying with a Galway friend who is
a learned musician, I asked him to listen to our verses, and to the
way we spoke them. The Visionary found to his surprise that he did
not make every poem to a different tune, and to the surprise of the
musician that he did make them all to two quite definite tunes, which
are, it seems, like very simple Arabic music. It was, perhaps, to some
such music, I thought, that Blake sang his _Songs of Innocence_ in Mrs.
Williams' drawing-room, and perhaps he, too, spoke rather than sang. I,
on the other hand, did not often compose to a tune, though I sometimes
did, yet always to notes that could be written down and played on my
friend's organ, or turned into something like a Gregorian hymn if one
sang them in the ordinary way. I varied more than the Visionary, who
never forgot his two tunes, one for long and one for short lines,
and could not always speak a poem in the same way, but always felt
that certain ways were right, and that I would know one of them if I
remembered the way I first spoke the poem. When I got to London I gave
the notation, as it had been played on the organ, to the friend who has
just gone out, and she spoke it to me, giving my words a new quality by
the beauty of her voice.


III

Then we began to wander through the wood of error; we tried speaking
through music in the ordinary way under I know not whose evil
influence, until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms
that were so often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm
of the verse and the tune and rhythm of the music.
Then we tried,
persuaded by somebody who thought quarter-tones and less intervals
the especial mark of speech as distinct from singing, to write out
what we did in wavy lines. On finding something like these lines in
Tibetan music, we became so confident that we covered a large piece
of pasteboard, which now blows up my fire in the morning, with a
notation in wavy lines as a demonstration for a lecture; but at last
Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our first thought. He made us a beautiful
instrument half psaltery half lyre which contains, I understand, all
the chromatic intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he
taught us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes.

Some of the notations he taught us--those in which there is no lilt, no
recurring pattern of sounds--are like this notation for a song out of
the first Act of _The Countess Cathleen_.

It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most
reasonable way to write it, for it would be below the stave on the
treble clef or above it on the bass clef. The central line of the stave
corresponds to the middle C of the piano; the first note of the poem
is therefore D. The marks of long and short over the syllables are not
marks of scansion, but show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or
linger over.

[Illustration: Music]

Impetuous heart, be still, be still;
Your sorrowful love may never be told;
Cover it with a lonely tune
He who could bend all things to his will
Has covered the door of the infinite fold
With the pale stars and the wandering moon

One needs, of course, a far less complicated notation than a singer,
and one is even permitted slight modifications of the fixed note when
dramatic expression demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The
notation which regulates the general form of the sound leaves it free
to add a complexity of dramatic expression from its own incommunicable
genius which compensates the lover of speech for the lack of complex
musical expression. Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is
like the variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech
of Milton, or anything that is formless and void from anything that has
form and beauty. The orator, the speaker who has some little of the
great tradition of his craft, differs from the debater very largely
because he understands how to assume that subtle monotony of voice
which runs through the nerves like fire.

Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on the
Psaltery, if one is sufficiently practised to speak on it without
thinking about it one can get an endless variety of expression. All
art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an
interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an
asceticism of the imagination. But this new art, new in modern life
I mean, will have to train its hearers as well as its speakers, for
it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is accustomed
to, and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon learns
to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in
the expression of eyes. Modern acting and recitation have taught us
to fix our attention on the gross effects till we have come to think
gesture and the intonation that copies the accidental surface of life
more important than the rhythm; and yet we understand theoretically
that it is precisely this rhythm that separates good writing from
bad, that it is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense
literature.