No More Learning

NOTE BY FLORENCE FARR.

I made an interesting discovery after I had been elaborating the art
of speaking to the psaltery for some time. I had tried to make it
more beautiful than the speaking by priests at High Mass, the singing
of recitative in opera and the speaking through music of actors in
melodrama. My discovery was that those who had invented these arts
had all said about them exactly what Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and Mr. W.
B. Yeats said about my art. Anyone can prove this for himself who
will go to a library and read the authorities that describe how early
liturgical chant, plain-song and jubilations or melismata were adapted
from the ancient traditional music; or if they read the history of the
beginning of opera and the 'nuove musiche' by Caccini, or study the
music of Monteverde and Carissimi, who flourished at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, they will find these masters speak of doing
all they can to give an added beauty to the words of the poet, often
using simple vowel sounds when a purely vocal effect was to be made
whether of joy or sorrow. There is no more beautiful sound than the
alternation of carolling or keening and a voice speaking in regulated
declamation. The very act of alternation has a peculiar charm.

Now to read these records of music of the eighth and seventeenth
centuries one would think that the Church and the opera were united in
the desire to make beautiful speech more beautiful, but I need not say
if we put such a hope to the test we discover it is groundless. There
is no ecstasy in the delivery of ritual, and recitative is certainly
not treated by opera-singers in a way that makes us wish to imitate
them.

When beginners attempt to speak to musical notes they fall naturally
into the intoning as heard throughout our lands in our various
religious rituals. It is not until they have been forced to use their
imaginations and express the inmost meaning of the words, not until
their thought imposes itself upon all listeners and each word invokes a
special mode of beauty, that the method rises once more from the dead
and becomes a living art.
It is the belief in the power of words and the delight in the purity of
sound that will make the arts of plain-chant and recitative the great
arts they are described as being by those who first practised them.




_THE WIND BLOWS OUT OF THE GATES OF THE DAY. _[A]

FLORENCE FARR.


The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away,
While the fairies dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milkwhite feet in a ring,
Tossing their milkwhite arms in the air
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair
And even the wise are merry of tongue.
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say,
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lovely of heart must wither away.




_THE HAPPY TOWNLAND. _[D]

FLORENCE FARR.


O Death's old bony finger
Will never find us there
In the high hollow townland
Where love's to give and to spare;
Where boughs have fruit and blossom
at all times of the year;
Where rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
An old man plays the bagpipes
In a gold and silver wood;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.

Chorus.

The little fox he murmured,
'O what of the world's bane? '
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
But the little red fox murmured,
'O do not pluck at his rein,
He is riding to the townland
That is the world's bane. '

FOOTNOTE:

[D] The music as written suits my speaking voice if played an octave
lower than the notation. --F. F.




_I HAVE DRUNK ALE FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE YOUNG.