No More Learning

Three of the following settings are by Miss Farr, and she accompanies
the words upon her psaltery for the most part. She has a beautiful
speaking-voice, and, an almost rarer thing, a perfect ear for verse;
and nothing but the attempting of it will show how far these things
can be taught or developed where they exist but a little. I believe
that they should be a part of the teaching of all children, for the
beauty of the speaking-voice is more important to our lives than that
of the singing, and the rhythm of words comes more into the structure
of our daily being than any abstract pattern of notes. The relation
between formal music and speech will yet become the subject of science,
not less than the occasion of artistic discovery; for I am certain
that all poets, even all delighted readers of poetry, speak certain
kinds of poetry to distinct and simple tunes, though the speakers may
be, perhaps generally are, deaf to ordinary music, even what we call
tone-deaf. I suggest that we will discover in this relation a very
early stage in the development of music, with its own great beauty, and
that those who love lyric poetry but cannot tell one tune from another
repeat a state of mind which created music and yet was incapable of the
emotional abstraction which delights in patterns of sound separated
from words. To it the music was an unconscious creation, the words a
conscious, for no beginnings are in the intellect, and no living thing
remembers its own birth.

I give after Miss Farr's settings three others, two taken down by Mr.
Arnold Dolmetsch from myself, and one from a fine scholar in poetry,
who hates all music but that of poetry, and knows of no instrument that
does not fill him with rage and misery. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, when he
took up the subject at my persuasion, wrote down the recitation of
another lyric poet, who like myself knows nothing of music, and found
little tunes that delighted him; and Mr. George Russell ('A. E. ') writes
all his lyrics, a musician tells me, to two little tunes which sound
like old Arabic music. I do not mean that there is only one way of
reciting a poem that is correct, for different tunes will fit different
speakers or different moods of the same speaker, but as a rule the more
the music of the verse becomes a movement of the stanza as a whole,
at the same time detaching itself from the sense as in much of Mr.
Swinburne's poetry, the less does the poet vary in his recitation.
I
mean in the way he recites when alone, or unconscious of an audience,
for before an audience he will remember the imperfection of his ear in
note and tone, and cling to daily speech, or something like it.

Sometimes one composes to a remembered air. I wrote and I still speak
the verses that begin 'Autumn is over the long leaves that love us' to
some traditional air, though I could not tell that air or any other on
another's lips, and _The Ballad of Father Gilligan_ to a modification
of the air _A Fine Old English Gentleman_. When, however, the rhythm is
more personal than it is in these simple verses, the tune will always
be original and personal, alike in the poet and in the reader who has
the right ear; and these tunes will now and again have great beauty.


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.