No More Learning

SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY.


I

I HAVE always known that there was something I disliked about singing,
and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand
why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken
with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for
its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people
to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend,
who was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed
instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and
has spoken to me some verses from Shelley's _Skylark_ and Sir Ector's
lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the _Morte d' Arthur_ and
some of my own poems. Wherever the rhythm was most delicate, wherever
the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most beautiful, and yet,
although she sometimes spoke to a little tune, it was never singing,
as we sing to-day, never anything but speech. A singing note, a word
chanted as they chant in churches, would have spoiled everything; nor
was it reciting, for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of
song, using the instrument which murmured sweetly and faintly, under
the spoken sounds, to give her the changing notes. Another speaker
could have repeated all her effects, except those which came from her
own beautiful voice that would have given her fame if the only art that
gives the speaking voice its perfect opportunity were as well known
among us as it was known in the ancient world.


II

Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp,
as I imagined Homer to have spoken his, for it is not natural to enjoy
an art only when one is by oneself. Whenever one finds a fine verse
one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble
and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover
by beloved. Images used to rise up before me, as I am sure they have
arisen before nearly everybody else who cares for poetry, of wild-eyed
men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in
many-coloured robes listened, hushed and excited. 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.