'WTxG -,0' ■ '<*» 4> ><•*' -,«^, , .,-4^. 5 I * ""^ .[)4^^^ l^k^r-l^jm. LIBRARY UJVIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN AND OTHER TALES ^ r l Til TI' A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN AND OTHER TALES Jo ^Y J. H. SHORTIIOUSE AUTHOR OF 'JOHN INGLESANT,' 'siR I'ERCIVAL,' ETC. ILontiou MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NKW YORK 1888 All riffhls rtsei-'fd r4a TO THE HON. IIALLAM TENNYSON THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED, WITH SINCERE REGARD, C () N T E N T S PACE A Teacher of the \'iolin . . . . i The Marquis Jeanne Hvacinthe de St. Palaye i 17 The Baroness Helena von Saarfelo 185 Ellie : A Story of a Boy and (".iri, . . 281 An Apologue ....... 307 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN B A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL When, in the year 1787, I entered, at the age of nineteen, the university of the kingiy city of Wenigstaat, I was, no doubt, a very fooHsh young man, but I am perfectly certain that I was not a fool. I suffered not only from that necessary disease which from the very nature of existence it is impossible for a young man to escape, the regarding of life from his own standpoint, as a man on first coming into a brilliantly lighted and crowded room must of necessity, for a few moments, be conscious of the varied scene (jnly as it strikes himself; A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN but I was also to some extent subject to that fatuity which haunts some young men, the forming of opinions and the giving audible expression to them. Notwithstanding all this, I was at the same time conscious of such a crowd of ideas, actuated by such ideas, and stirred to the depths of my being by the emotions and results which these ideas wrought upon me, that looking back with the impartiality which the lapse of thirty years eives even to the review of one's self, I feel perfectly confident that I was not a fool. I shall, I fear, have to describe at some length how I came to be what I was, but I will be as short as I can. My history would be worth nothing in itself, but it is interwoven closely with that of some others whose per- sonality seems to me well worthy of record. I was the eldest son of the pastor of the little village of Waldreich in the wooded mountains of Bavaria. Though my father A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN had a large family, and his cure was only a village one, he was not so poor as most of his order, for he had a little private income de- rived from houses in Bayreuth : my mother had also some little money of her own. My father was a man of a singular patience and quietude of conduct. He divided his time between cultivatinof his little cfarden and orchard, and preparing his sermons with elaborate care. When, in after years, I became possessed of many of these beautifully written discourses, I was amazed at the patience, care, and scholarship expended upon these addresses to a few peasants, most of whom fell asleep during the time of hearing. I believe that my father's sole relaxation and indulgence consisted in [joring over an old folio Terence which he possessed, and wliic h, shielded amidst the mysteries of a dead Ian guage, he could read in perfect security, with- out fear of scandalising his Hock. Indeed it A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN is possible that they regarded it as a work of deep theology, and perhaps they were right. The little village of Waldreich lies imme- diately at the foot of the wooded hills. We ascended from the garden and croft of the pastor's house straight into the fir-woods and the oak-dingles that led up into the mysterious and wild heights above — into the mists and cloud-shadows — into a land of green moun- tain-woods rising against blue skies — a land of mist and rain-showers, of the tints of rain- bows spanning the village, and of coloured prisms of light stealing down crag and forest- dingle — a land of rushing streams and still, solemn, dark lakes — a land of castles upon distant peaks and of the faint smoke of charcoal-burners on the hillsides. Through all the varied changes of the day in this romantic land, from the cheerful dawn, loud with the song of birds and the lowing of cattle, to the solemn evening stillness, I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIxN^ passed the first few years of my life. The scenes around him penetrated into the boy's being and formed his nature. However, I have no wish to become wearisome in describins: all these influences and these results minutely. There is one influence, however, which must be dwelt upon if the story is to be told at all, for it was the leading influence of my life — the influence of sound. From a very little child I was profoundly impressed by the sounds of nature : the rushing water, the rustling oaks, the sighing and moaning wind down the mountain-valleys spoke to me with distinct utterance, and with a sense of mean- ing and even of speech. These sounds were more even than this : they became a passion, a fascination, a haunting presence, and even a dread. I can give one instance of this. Below the village and parsonage house, where we lived, was a beautiful meadow on the banks A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN of the swift windino- river. This meadow was my greatest delight as a little child. At the lower end was a mill, and a mill-pool and race ; and around the edges of the pool beds of flags had planted themselves for ages, forming a thick phalanx of waving pointed leaves. Nothing could exceed the fascination this sight had for me, not only when the yellow flowers mingled with the green stately leaves, but at other times of the year when I listened hour after hour to the whispering murmur through the innumerable lances of the reeds. But to reach this meadow it was necessary to pass a row of vast, lofty, straggling trees (I suppose some species of poplar), and no words can describe the terror which the same wind, which delighted me so much in the gentle murmur of its reed- music, inspired me with when heard through these lofty swaying branches. I often, even in those early days, wondered why the music A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN of the wind through the green rushes on the water's edge should have thrilled me with cheerfulness and joy, while the same wind wailing through the branches of the great trees high above my head crushed me with an unspeakable horror and dread. Doubt- less in this latter was the sense of vastness and unapproachable height, infinite as it seemed to a little child — the touch, even, of the infinite must ever, it would seem, be appalling to man. It was in this way and by these experi- mental methods that I began so early to recognise the mysterious connection that exists between sound and human fcellnof. Down the long winding oak-dingles, ])e- tween the liigli cliffs and the wooded slopes of the hills, there came to me as a little child whispers and murmurs of flrfams and stories of which at that time I knew nothing, and lo which I could give in those early days no lo A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i intelligent voice or meaning. But, as I grew in years and listened to the talk of nurse and peasant, and of village lads and children, and heard from them the legends of elf-kings and maidens and wild hunters of the forest, weird and fantastic indeed, yet still strangely in- stinct with human wants and hopes, I began to connect such sympathy, felt then, as it seemed, for the first time, with human life in all its varied aspects, and stories of human loves and joys and terrors, with these sounds of nature, the sweeping wind through wood. I use these last words advisedly because, even in those earliest days, it seemed to me that all sound that was of spiritual import was in some hidden sense the product of the wind and of wood. There was a wailino- of the wind at night through the crevices of the high-pitched roof and the panelled walls of the old parsonage that thrilled me as with I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN n a message from on high, but this was still wind and wood. But where the wind had no part, where it was not sound so much as noise, in the clanging of metal upon metal. in the inarticulate screaming of senseless creatures, the terror that I had felt in the wailing wood, — that terror that had still some- thing in it of the higher life and hope, — was turned into the mere panic of despair. I distinctly remember that I had these feelings as a child ; but, since those days, I have pleased myself in finding that the great Goethe shared with me my dislike to the continuous barking of a dog. ' Annihilation,' he said one day, in conversation with the Legaiionsrath Falk, ' is utterly out ot th(- question ; but the possibility of being caught on the way by some more powerful, and yet baser monas, and subordinated to it — that is unquestionably a very serious consideration ; and I, l(jr my jjart, have never been able 12 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN l entirely to divest myself of the fear of it. At this moment a dog was heard repeatedly barking in the street. Goethe sprang hastily to the window and called out to it : * Take what form you will, vile larva, you shall not subjugate me.' A gallant boast but an in- effectual one ! Noise, especially if continued on one note, deadens and destroys the soul, the life of the mind within the brain. The constant reiteration of one note will drive a man mad, just as the continual fall of a drop of water upon the same spot of the head will cause madness and death. You may prove this on the violin. Whereas if you laid your head down in the meadow by the river on the long grass, there came to you in the whisper- ing wind something like the sea-murmurs that live within the shell — tidings of a delicate life, news of a world beyond the thought of those who merely haunt the palaces of earth. These two, tlie murmur of the wind A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 13 through grass and the whisper within the shell, are perhaps the most delicate sounds that Nature can produce : was it possible that I should find in art something more perfect still? In this passion for sound, in which I lived as in a paradise, it may be asked, Where did music find a place ? The music that I heard in my childhood was not of the best class ; and perhaps this might be the reason that musical sound rather than music seemed to haunt those hours of child- hood, for among the untutored sounds of Nature there are, now and again, musical notes of surpassing beauty. Among the wailing sounds of the wind that haunted the high-pitched roof above the boarded ceiling of our bedroom, there was one perfect and regular note. It never varied, excei)t in loudness according to the force of the wind. This n(jte, in its monotony, had an ciuhraliing effect upon my imagination. 1 had once 14 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I associated certain thoughts with its message : no doubt the continued association of ideas of recollected imagery would explain the rest. The wandering musicians that played in the court-yard on summer evenings upon hautboys and fiddles no doubt reached me with a strange message from afar, especially in the shrill high notes ; and on Sunday, in the village church, the organist thundered out fuo^ues and fantasias, but it was the final cadences only that touched me : somehow the organ seemed wanting in that supreme searching power of wind and wood. But one day, it was a summer evening, there came into the court-yard four zither- players from the South. I say zither- players, but their instruments were more like the old Italian lutes for size and the number of strings. They were regu- lated each at a certain interval, including only the notes of the middle octaves. I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 15 They played a singular rapid music with little tune. It was like a rippling mcenad dance : apparently reckless and untrained, yet in reality perfectly regulated in step and figure, every note true to its corresponding note in the higher or lower octave, and now and again all united in one sudden con- sonant harmony, by which the wild lawless music vindicated its perception of unison and the moral perfection of pure sound ; but even in tliis there seemed to me nothing that spoke in just the same voice as did the gentle whisper of that teaching wind through grass and wood. On the organ in the parish church, written in faded gold letters, were the words from Luther's IJible : ' The wind blowcth where it will, and thou hearest the sound of it well, so is every one that is of tlu: .s])iriL l)orn,' When, as a child, I sat during long .sermons in the little grated seat of the pastor's children, i6 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i I pondered over these words, and for a long time could find no reason or congruity in them. What had the wind blowing where it listeth to do with the birth of the spirit ? But on one hot summer afternoon, when I had fallen asleep during my father's discourse, I was suddenly aroused by the cessation of the preacher's voice and by the murmuring fall of harmony, for the organist probably had been asleep too, and was playing uncon- sciously such simple notes as came first to hand. I say I awoke suddenly into life and sense, and saw the rich mellow tints of the organ -wood, and these mystic letters all lighted up with the gilding rays ; and an inward consciousness came like a flash of lightning from heaven into the child's mind that the wandering, seeking wind through reed or organ-pipe or flute, or over strings of violin or grassy hill, spoke to the spirit and to the spirit-born, and to such only, with I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 17 a sufficient and adequate voice. This con- ception came to me like a message from above. It raised my thoughts of Nature and harmonised her voices with the needs and desires of my own soul. I pondered over it day and night ; but before long an event occurred which was in the end the means of leading me beyond this half truth, and of more fully opening to me the gates of the mystical city of sound, of which this organ- text had already given me some fairy glimpses, and of revealing to me at last the true music which is not only heard by the spirit-born but is born of the spirit itself My father went once every month on a kind of supernatural mission, as it seemed to us children, to an unknown and dimly con- ceived mansion or mountain -palace in the hills. That is, he was chaplain to the old Grafin von Wetstein, and once a month he preached before her on Sundays. Sume- i8 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN T times, on special occasions, an ornamental or state-coach was sent for the pastor, who thus seemed rapt as in a celestial chariot from his family and the ordinary villat^e folk. One surprising day, when the lad was between fourteen and fifteen, the father said to him : ' Put on thy best clothes, for to- morrow thou shalt go with me to the Grafin.' It may well be imagined that there was not much sleep for the boy that night. It would take too long to tell of the wonders of that journey in the state-coach, of the foolish, but perhaps natural pride of sitting there above the common folk, and observing through the windows the respect paid by all to the magnificent and symbolic vehicle, if not to those who sat therein. When we reached the scJdoss, which stood high up on the hills amid woodland meadows and cow -pastures, then indeed the boy's expectation and excitement grew too painful I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 19 almost to be borne. He passed through the gardens, with terraces and urns and statues, and the cascades of water that came down from great ponds, formed in the summits of the hills by building high stone walls and dams across the ravines. Later on he was even presented to the Grafin, who, herself a wizened, faded old woman, stood beneath the portraits of her ancestors, by a great window in the gallery of the sckloss, overlooking the valleys and the champaign country beyond. For some unknown reason this old woman, who scarcely spoke to any one and seemed to take no interest in the present world, looking, as it were, constantly out of the high windows into the driving cloudland, as though she saw there all her past life and the figures of all those who had alone made- it dear to her, and who were themselves all gone into the cloudland of the Infmite Un- seen, — this old woman, not at the first inter- 20 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I view, but at the second or third, in the fresh mornings over the early coffee, took a strange Hking for the Httle village lad. As this ill-assorted pair sat at the open window on the quiet summer evenings, far above the distant woodland and the forest meadows, face to face with the long streaks of solemn light along the horizon, an almost imper- ceptible murmur, so soft and gentle was it, passed up through the branches of the syca- more and chestnut trees and of the lower growing pines, and, mingling with the dis- tant Raiiz des Vaches, brought up as it seemed the life and struggles and sorrows of the plain and of the people into the ears of this worn-out, old, feeble aristocrat of the hills. She would say to the boy : ' And what do you do, you children, in the winter nights, when you steal back in your night-dresses to the great fire, and the father is reading Terence? Tell it to me all again.' A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN Finally, she insisted upon my staying with her for weeks at a time, and she bound herself to the pastor, by a written paper, to provide for my future career. The boy led mostly a wild life, for his interviews with his patroness took place at odd times and hours, but he had some lessons from a resident cleric who superintended the household, and had other teachers more than perhaps any one knew. My father had often told his listening family of the great nobles who would from time to time stay at the scJiloss, and how he would be invited, being of a witty and con- versational habit, derived probably from his reading in Terence, to dine with them. Some (){ lliese great noblemen I also saw at a distance in the i/arden or elsew here ; init on one occasion a young Graf came to stay some days with his great-aunt, having re- turned (|uite hiLcIy Iroin the Italian tuur with A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN his tutor. This tutor, an ItaHan, performed wonderfully, it was said, on the violin. He was invited to play before the Grafin, and the boy was admitted among the domestics of the schioss. Then, on a sudden, was revealed to him the secret which had escaped him so long, the consciousness of the existence of which had haunted him in the wind-swept meadow and amid the awful, swaying branches of the lofty trees. I am not going to describe this playing. Attempts have been sometimes made to de- scribe violin-playing in words, but rarely, I think, with much success. I shall only say that almost as soon as he began to play what seemed to me then a singularly strange idea occurred to me. This man, I thought, is not playing on his instrument : he is play- ing on my brain. His violin is only as it were the bow, or rather, every note of his 1 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 23 violin vibrates with the accordine note of the brain-fibre. I do not say that I put the thought exactly into these words ; but these are the words into which, at the present time, I put the recollection of my thought. I need not point out how my ignorance erred in detail, how the brain has no ex- tended strings corresponding to the strings of a violin ; but I have since thought that there was more truth in this wild idea of a child's ignorance than would at first appear, and it seemed to lead the way to a second thought, which crossed mv mind in the trans- port of ecstasy produced by this, the first violin-playing worthy of the name, which I had ever h(jard. I knew the secret now, both of the c;n- trancing whisper of the wind-music and also w^hy, at a certain point, il had (ailed. The blind, .senseless wind, blowing merely where it listed, had aroused the human si)iriL 24 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I through the medium of grass and reed and rock and forest, and called it through the fairy gate into cloud and dreamland ; but when, instead of the blind, senseless wind the instructed human spirit itself touched the strings, music, born of cultured har- mony, through all the long scale of ac- cordant sound, won for the listening, rapt, ecstatic spirit an insight and an entrance into realms which the outward eye had not seen, the secrets of which it is not lawful or possible to utter to any save to the spirit- born. ' You seem absorbed in the music, my boy,' said this gentleman to me : ' do you play the violin, perchance ? ' I said that I had played on no instru- ment save picking out harmonious thirds on an old harpsichord at the parsonage house. My father was perfectly an amateur : he loved music so much that he refused to play A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN himself, or to allow any one else to play in his hearing save those who could play well : ' playing a little ' was his dread. The gentleman shut up his precious violin in its case and produced another, on which he showed me the possibility of vary- ing the note through every shade of pitch by the position of the finger on the vibrating string. It is impossible to describe the de- light I felt when I was able to feel out a chord of three notes. ' I am violating your father's instructions perhaps,' said the gentleman, smiling; 'but every one must have a beginning. Never- theless he has much on his side. It has been said, rather cynically, "The moment a man touches an instrument he ceases to be a musician." ' I did not understand this ihtMi, but 1 understood it well afterwards. The gentleman left one ol his less cher- 26 A TEACHER Ol- THE VIOLIN i ished instruments behind him, with some simple exercises which he enjoined me to practise only, and to attempt nothing else, but I blush to say that I did not follow his advice. I played the chords he left me now and again, but I was absorbed in the one idea that his playing had left with me — the thought of the human spirit informing the senseless wind. I delighted only in the fancy that I was a mere automaton, and that the pervading spirit — the spirit that inspires man and breathes in Nature — was playing through my spirit upon the obedient vibrat- ing strings. In this way I played fantasias of the most strikinof and orio^inal character, and at the same time destroyed all my chances, or ran a serious risk of doing so, of ever becoming a violinist. Three quiet years passed in this manner, during which I lived almost constantly at Geiselwind with the Grafin, who, in fact. I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 27 treated me as her own son. At the end of that time she informed me that she intended to send me to the university of Wenigstaat. She chose this university for me, she told me, because it was near, but above all be- cause it was not famous, but was, in fact, a mere appanage to a kingly city, and was therefore less likely to pervert from the correct and decorous habits in which they had been brought up, the ideas and habits of young men. She would provide me with a sufficient income, and would take care that my wardrobe and appointments were those of a gentleman, a station which she wished me to occupy and to maintain without dis- grace. The habits of society in the universities and elsewhere were very different in those days from what rhey have since become. The old society of the days before the revo- lution existed in its full strength. l''rench 28 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN l taste in costume and amusements was uni- versal ; and the fashion of philosophic inquiry which was copied from the French was a mere intellectual toy, and had no effect upon the practical conclusions of those who amused themselves with it. The merits of republican institutions and the inviolability of the rights of man were dis- cussed as abstract questions, without a thouo-ht that the conclusions would ever be applied to modern life, or to the daily re- lationships of nobles and peasants and towns- people. Before the bursting of the torrent which was to sweep it out of existence, the old world slumbered in a rainbow - tinted evening light of delicately fancied culture and repose. The habits and appearance of university students have changed more completely than those of any other class. In the most advanced cities even in those days they A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN dressed completely in the French manner, in embroidered suits and powdered hair, fluttering from toilette to toilette, and caring little for lectures or professors. In the old stately city of Wenigstaat, it may be easily understood, the ideas and habits of the past existed with a peculiar unchangeableness. I regretted leaving the life of hill and forest and dreamy phantasy in which I had found so much to delight me, but the natural love of youth for change and adventure con- soled me. One great advantage I derived from the choice the Grafin had made for me was, that I did not change the character of my outward surroundings. I was nearly nineteen when I left Geiselwintl and arrivetl one evening In ;i postchaise at Wenigstaat. The city lay in a wooded valh^y sur- rounded by hills covered to their suiiuuits with woods of beech and oak and fir : thrf)ugh these wo(k1s running stn-anis and 30 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i cascades forced their way now through the green mountain - meadows, now over rocky steeps and dingles : a soft blue sky brooded over this green world of leaf and grass and song birds, and sunlit showers swept over the woodland and deepened the verdure into fresher green. In the centre of this plain, almost encircled by a winding river, the city was built upon a hill which divided itself into two summist, upon one of which stood the cathedral and upon the other the King's palace. Between these summits the old town wound its way up, past gates and towers and market-place and rathhaiis and the buildings of the university, with masses of old gabled houses of an oppressive height and of immemorial antiquity, with huge overhanging stories and tiers of rooms wandering on, apparently without plan or guide, from house to house and street to street — a human hive of intricate workman- I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 31 ship, of carpentry-work and stonework and brickwork, all crowded together in the little space of the rising hill - street above the rushing stream, a space small in itself but infinite in its thronged stories of centuries of life — a vast grave, not only of genera- tions of the dead, themselves lying not far from the foundations of their homes, but of buried hopes, of faded beauty, of beaten courage and stricken faith and patience crushed and lost at last in the unequal fight with fate. The dim cathedral, full of storied windows of deep blood-stained glass and of colossal figures of mailed heroes guarding emblazoned tombs, faced the King's palace, a massive ivy-covered fortress relieved here and there with facades of carved work of the later Renaissance. The tired horses of my poslchaise struggled up over the stone pavement of this .steep street amid the crowd <>l loiicnrs 32 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i and traffickers and gay pleasure-seekers that thronged it and drew up before the Three Roses in the Peterstrasse, where a room had been provided for me. Here I slept, and here I dined every day at an ordinary frequented by many of the principal citizens, by some of the wealthier students, and by some officials and courtiers, when it was not the turn of the latter in waiting at the palace. This table was one at least of the centres of life and interest in the little kingly city. To a boy reared in a country parsonage and an old half-deserted manor - house, all this, it may be conceived, was strange enough ; but somehow it did not seem to me wholly strange. I had been trained at the table of the Grafin to the usages of polite life, and the whispering wind and the solemn forests of my childhood had seemed to lift me above a sense of embarrassment, I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 33 as though the passing scenes before me were but the shadows and visions of a dream. I looked down the long table at the varied faces, at the talkers and showy ones, at the grave citizens, at the quiet humorous students, who now and then said a few words that turned the laugh against the talkers, at the courtiers affecting some special knowledge of affairs of state about which the King probably troubled himself little ; and 1 remember that it all seemed to me like turning the pages of a story-book, or like the shifting scenes of a play, about which latter, though I had never seen one, I had read and heard much. On the second and third day I found myself seated by a little elderly man, very elaborately dressed, with powdered hair and a beautifully embroidered coat. I have always felt an attraction towards old men : they are so polite, and their roiivcrsatinn, D 34 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I when they do talk, is always worth listening to. Something of this feeling, perhaps, showed itself in my manner. On the third day he said to me on rising from dinner : ' I perceive, sir, that you are a stranger here ; you seem to me to be a quiet well-bred young man, and I shall be glad if I can be of any use to you. You are doubtless come to the university, and are evidently well connected. I am a professor — a professor of belles lettres and music, and I have been tutor to the Crown Prince. I may possibly be of some service to you : some of the great professors are rather difficult of access.' ' I am the adopted son of the Grafin von Wetstein, sir,' I answered. ' I have letters to several of the professors of the university, but I find them much occupied in their duties, and not very easy of approach. 'We will soon remedy all that,' he said, smiling. ' To what course of study are you A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 35 most Inclined, and what is the future to which your friends design you ?' ' I fear, sir,' I returned, ' that my future is very undefined, I am — as you say you are a professor of music — very fond of the violin ; but I am a very poor performer, and I fear I shall never be a proficient.' ' I profess music,' said the old gentle- man, with his quaint smile, ' but do not teach it : I only talk about it. I will intro- duce you, however, to a great teacher of the violin, and, indeed, if you would like it, we can go to him now. This is about the time that we shall find him disengaged.' We went out tog(;ther into the crowded market - place and turned to the left hand, up a street of marvellous height, narrow- ness, and steepness which led round the eastern end of the cathedral, and indeed nearly concealed it from siL^ht. ;\t the top of this street, on the side farthest from the 36 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I cathedral, the vast west window of which could just be seen over the gables, chimneys, and stork-nests of the opposite houses, we stopped before the common door of one of the lofty old houses, against the posts of which were attached several ^?/^^//^i- or notices of differing forms and material. Among these my companion pointed out one larger and more imposing than the rest : ' Veitch, teacher of the violin.' ' I ought to tell you,' said the old gentle- man, ' that my daughter is reader to the Princess, and that she comes to Herr Veitch for lessons on the violin, that she may assist her Highness. If the Graf von Wetstein should take lessons here also, he may possibly meet her.' ' I beg your pardon,' I said : ' I must correct an important mistake. I am only the adopted son of the Grafin von Wetstein. I am not the Graf : my name is Saale.' I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 37 The old gentleman seemed rather dis- appointed at this, but he rallied sufficiently to say : ' You may nevertheless meet my daughter, Herr von Saale.' It sounded so pleasantly that I had not the hardihood to correct him again. I was accordingly introduced to every one in Wenigstaat as Herr von Saale, and I may as well say, once for all, that I did not suffer for this presumption as I deserved. Some weeks later on I received a letter from the Grafin, in which she said : ' I have noticed that you have been mentioned to me in letters as Otto von Saale. As I have chosen to adopt you, and as Saale is the name of a river, and therefore is to a certain extent territorial, I think perhaps that this may not be amiss ; and I Hatter m)self that I have sufficient influence at the Imperial Court to procure for you a faculty which will enable you to add the prefix van to your 38 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i patronymic' Accordingly, some months afterwards, I did receive a most important and wordy document ; but I had by that time become so accustomed to my aristo- cratic title that I thought little of it, though its possession, no doubt, may have saved me from some serious consequences. We have been standing too long on the staircase which led up to Herr Veitch's room on the second floor of the great rambling house. The room which the old gentleman led me into was one of great size, occupying the entire depth of the house. It had long deep-latticed windows at either end raised by several steps above the level of the room : the window towards the front of the house looked down the steep winding street ; from the other I saw, over the roofs of the city, piled in strange confusion beneath the high- pitched windows of the upper town, a wide prospect of sky and river and valley, and the I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 39 distant blue mountains and forests of the Fichtelgebirge, where my home had been. The room was somewhat crowded with furniture, chiefly large old oaken presses or cabinets apparently full of books, a harpsi- chord, clavichord, and several violins. In the centre of this apartment, as he rose to receive us, stood an elderly man, rather shabbily dressed, with an absent expression in his face. ' Herr Vcitch,' said my guide, 'permit me to present to you Herr von Saale, a young gentleman of distinguished family and con- nections, who has come to reside in our university. He is anxious to perfect himself in the violin, upon which he is already no mean performer.' I was amazed at the gllbn(,'ss with which this surprising old gentleman discoursed upon that of which he knew so little. The old violinist looked at me wilii a 40 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 1 dazed and even melancholy expression, his eyes seemed to me to say as clearly as words could have spoken : ' Here is another frivo- lous impostor intruded upon me.' ' Is this one of my daughter's days ? ' said my friend, the old gentleman. ' No ; I expect her to-morrow about this time.' * The Princess,' said my friend, ' is very shy : she dislikes taking lessons from men, and prefers to gain her knowledge of music from my daughter.' The old master took up a violin that lay upon the table and handed it to me. I played a simple lesson that had been left me by the Italian, the only one that had taken my fancy, for it had in its few notes, as it seemed to me, something of the pleading of the whispering wind. The old man took the violin from me without a word : then he drew the bow 1 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 41 across the strings himself and played some bars, from, I imagine, some old forgotten Italian master. As he played the solemn chords of the sonata, in the magnetic reson- ance of its full smooth rich notes, there was something that seemed to fill all space, to lead and draw the nerves and brain, as over gorgeous sun-coloured pavements and broad stately terraces, with alluring sound and speech. He laid down the violin after he had played for a few minutes, and went to the harpsichord, which stood near to the window looking down into the street. 'You know something of music,' he saitl to me : ' do you understand this ? ' He struck a single cU^'ir note ujjon the harpsichord and turned towards the window, a casement of which was open towards the crowded street. 'Down there,' he said, — 'where I know A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN not, but somewhere down there, — is a heart and brain that beats with that beat, that vibrates with the vibration of that note, that hears and recognises and is consoled. To every note struck anywhere there is an accordant note in some human brain, toihng, dying, suffering, here below,' He looked at me, and I said : ' I have understood something of this also.' 'This is why,' he went on, * in music all hearts are revealed to us : we sympathise with all hearts, not only with those near to us but with those afar off. It is not strange that in the notes of the higher octaves that speak of children and lark singing and heaven, you, who are young, should hear of such things ; but, in the sudden drop into the solemn lower notes, why should you, who know nothing of such feelings, see and feel with the old man who returns to the streets and fields of his youth ? He lives, I A TEACHER OP^ THE VIOLIN 43 his heart vibrates in such notes : his Hfe, his heart, his tears exist in them, and through them in you. Just as one looks from a lofty precipitous height down into the teeming streets of a great city, full of pigmy forms, so in the majestic march of sound we get away from life and its little- ness, and see the whole of life spread out before us, and feel the pathos of it with the pity of an archangel, as we could never have done in the bustle of the streets there below.' ' You are cutting the ground from under my feet, my friend,' said the old Professor, rather testily. ' It is your business to teach music, mine to talk about it.' The old master smiled al this salK^ Inil he went on all the same. I thougliL that he perceived in me a sympathetic listener. ' Have you never felt that in tlie shrill, clear, surging chords of the higher notes you were climbing into a lolilci' existence, and 44 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i do you not feel that for the race itself some- thing like this is also possible ? It will be in and through music that human thought will be carried beyond the point it has hitherto reached.' He paused a moment and then went on in a lower, less confident voice. ' This is my faith, and I shall die in it. There is one thing only which saddens me. There are men, ay, great performers, real masters of the bow — who know nothing of these things, who have no such faith. There is none whom I would sooner regard as a devil than such a one. Sometimes when I hear them they almost destroy the faith that is in me — the faith in my art.' 'Pooh! pooh! my friend,' said the Pro- fessor. ' They are not so bad as that ! They have simply the divine gift of the perception of harmony — the instinctive har- monic touch. They know not why or how. I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 45 They are not devils. Herr von Saale,' he went on, with, for him, considerable earnest- ness, ' do not believe it. I fancy that you are in danger of falling into the fatal error of supposing that you can play on the violin in the same way that you can whistle an air, by the mere force of the mental faculty. You cannot form a more mistaken notion. The varieition of the thirty-secondth of an inch in the sudden movement of the finger on the string will cause the note to be out of tune ; and the man who puts his finger on the right spot at the right second of time, though he may have no more mental instinct than a pig. will produce in the utmost perfection the chords of th(; most angelic composer.' ' I deny it!' cried the master, in a kind of fury, walking \\\) and down tlic long room, ' I deny it ! There is true sympathy and co- operation in the nerves and tissues of this faithful despised servant, tlic material luimaii 46 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i frame, even to the finger-tips, with the in- forming, teaching spirit. There is a tremor, a shading, a trill of meaning, given by the spirit to the nerves and tissues that no instinctive touch of harmony will ever give. The ancient Greeks (as you ought to know, Herr Professor, for you speak of them often enough) had no music worthy of the name, for they had no instruments ; but had they had our instruments they would have pro- duced the most ravishing music, for the spirit taught them what music was apart from out- ward sound, and they talked as beautifully as you talk in your lecture-room of the divine laws of motion and of number, and of the harmonics of sound and of the mind.' The Professor seemed rather taken aback by this onslaught, and turning to me, said : 'Well, Herr von Saale, you had better come with me : I will show you some of the sights of our kingly city. You shall come to Herr A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 47 Veitch to-morrow, when perhaps you will see my daughter.' He seemed to me strangely willing that I should see his dtmghter. He took me into the great cathedral and showed me the gigantic mailed figures that guarded the tombs of the kings, talking very learnedly upon heraldry, about which he seemed to know a great deal. The next morning I went to Herr Veitch at the appointed time and found him alone, playing over a set of old Italian sonatas. He seemed to have been much put out by the Professor's remarks of the day before, and to regard me with kindliness as having been apparently on the opposite side ; but when he came to talk to me I tlid not see much (liffcrence l)e- tween his advice and that of the i'rofcssor. ' Thf; Professor is so far right,' he said, ' in ihaL of all iiislrumciUs the vif)liii needs the most careful study, the most practised 48 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i fingering, the most instinctive aptitude of ear and touch. It is all very well to talk of expression, but expression with faulty execu- tion is fatal on the violin. It is true that some of the most entrancing players have been self-taught amateurs, but they were such because they had musical genius by birth, and it was therefore possible to them to be amateurs and to be self-taught. In con- certed music no amount of expression will enable a performer to take his part or to be tolerated. What pleases me in your playing is that you are able to produce smooth and sweet notes : the scrapy, scratchy period with you has apparently been short, What you want is greater certainty of touch and ear. This can only be obtained by patient labour and study.' I set to work to play lessons, and while we were thus engaged the door opened and a young lady entered, accompanied by a tall I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 49 and imposing domestic in the royal livery. I did not need to be told that this was the Professor's daughter, the Fraulein Adelheid, the reader to the Princess. She appeared to me on this, the first time that my eyes rested upon her, a handsome, stately girl, with a steady fixed look, and grave solemn eyes and mouth, which seldom changed their expression or smiled. She was rather above the common height, with fair brown hair and eyes, and was richly dressed in white, with a lace kerchief across her shoulders, and a broad white hat with a crimson feather. She seemed to me a true German girl, with earnest, steadfast truth and feeling ; but I did not fall in love with her at Hrst sight. ' This is Otto von Saale, Priiulcin,' said the master, ' whom your father introduced to me yesterday, and of whom he may have spoken to you. lie is very fond of music and the E 50 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I violin, and your father seemed much taken with him. His /or^e is expression.' The Fraulein regarded me without em- barrassment, with her steady brown eyes. ' Do you phiy in concert, Herr von Saale ?' she said, ' He is not quite equal to that yet,' said Herr Veitch. ' The prospect of playing with you, will, I am confident, inspire him with resolve to practise with the necessary patience.' 'That will be very well timed,' she said serenely, 'as we want to perform a trio before the Princess.' ' He must work some time before he can do that,' observed Herr Veitch decisively. They set to work to play, and I confess that I felt indescribable mortilication in being unable to take a part. All my beautiful fantasias and wind -music seemed at the moment nothing to the power of joining in I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 51 a concerted piece. The beauty of the play- ing, however, soon soothed my ruffled vanity and banished every thought save that of dehght. The master and pupil were playing in perfect accord both in feeling and sym- pathetic touch — the old man and the stately beautifully dressed girl — it was a delicious banquet of sight and sound. After they had played some time, Herr Veitch said, to my great delight : ' Otto will play you a lesson of his which the whisper- ing woodlands of his mountains have taught him. You will like it.' I took the bow willi a tremor of delight and excitement. I played my very best. I endeavoured only to listen to — to think only of the woodland voices that had spoken to the child ; and after a few moments I seemed, indeed, once again to be a cln'ld beside the lancelikc waving rushes with their sunny dance-music, by the pool, or beneatii the 52 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I solemn poplars with the weird and awful notes that sounded amid their distant branches high above me in the sky. When I stopped I fancied that the brown eyes looked at me with a softer and more kindly gaze. 'He will do,' said the master; 'he will play the trio before the Princess anon, if he will be good.' For several days I was very good : I practised continually scales and passages and shades of accent, both with the master and in my chamber at the * Three Roses,' where, had I not been in Germany, I should no doubt have been thought a nuisance. I saw the Fraulein Adelheid almost every day, and was allowed once or twice to play in a simple piece. So every- thing seemed to prosper, when one fatal day I broke waywardly loose from this virtuous and regular course. It was after this manner that it came about. I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 53 One morning in the late summer I woke up with a sudden surprising sense of a crisp freshness, of a sudden strain of livelier colour shot through sky and woodland, of a change beginning to work through masses of brown foliage and cloudless summer sky. The touch was that of the angel of decay: but the first signs of his coming were gentle and gracious, with a sense even of life-giving in that new feeling of a change. The first day of autumn had dawned. As I rose, in- tending to go to the master, the city lay in a wonderful golden mist, through which the old streets and gables and spires seemed strange to the sight, with the romantic vision, almost, of a dream. An intense longing possessed me for the woods and hills. It seemed to mc as if a far-off voice from the long past hours of childhood was calling me to the distant rocks and forests: a faint, low voice, like that strange whisper through the short 54 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I grass, to hear which at all you must lay your ear very close indeed to the ground : a note untuned, uncertain, untrammelled, but with a strange alluring power, making itself felt amid the smooth, cultured, artistic sounds to which I had given myself up, and saying, as in the old harmonic thirds which as a child I had delighted to pick out, ' Come back to me.' I was engaged to Herr Veitch, but it was uncertain whether the Fraulein would be able to come. There was some talk that the Princess would make an excursion with a guest of distinction into the mountains, and her reader might possibly be required to accompany her. The Princess was under- stood to be very shy, and to surround herself as much as possible with her ladies and women. The irresistible impulse was too strong for me. I sent a message to Herr Veitch, and hastened out of the confining streets, I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 55 past the crumbling gates and towers, into the valley and the fields. I wandered down the banks of the stream, by which the road ran, for some hours, until the sun was high in the heavens, and every sound and leaf was hushed in the noontide stillness and heat. Then crossing the river at a ferry, where a little village and some mills stayed its current for a time, I ascended a steep path into the wooded meadows, whence the seductive voice seemed still to come. In a broad upland valley that sloped downwards to the plain and to the river I came upon a wide open meadow skirting the wild pathless wood. Here, at a corner of the outstanding copse, I saw to my surprise a number of horses picketed and apparently deserted by their grooms, and turning the corner of the wood I saw in the centre of the iiK^adow an unex- pected and most beautiful sight. In the midst of the meadcnv, only, as it 56 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i seemed, a few paces from me, was a group of gentlemen in hunting costume, some with long curved horns slung at their backs. Some servants and grooms were collected a few paces behind them, but a little to the side nearest to me, close to two men of dis- tinguished appearance some paces in advance of the rest, stood the most beautiful creature that I had ever seen. She was dressed as a huntress of romance, in green trimmed with white, and a hat fringed with white feathers, and a small silver bugle hung by her side. But it was not her dress, or her figure, that gave her the indescribable charm that made her so lovely : it was the bewitching expres- sion of her face. Her features might possibly have been described as large, but this, as her complexion was of perfect delicacy and fresh- ness, only increased the subduing charm of the shy, fleeting, coy expression about her eyes and mouth. Two ladies stood close I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 57 behind her, neither of whom was the Frau- lein, but I knew at once that this could be none other than the Princess. No family of pure German origin could have produced such a face : she sprang, doubtless, as is becom- ing to a daughter of kings, from a mixed race. A perfect stillness and hush, as of ex- pectation, pervaded the scene : even the well-trained horses made no movement as I passed by them. One of the grooms caught a glimpse of me and made a slight sign : then, just as the group had settled itself on my sight, a slight, scarcely perceptible rustle was heard in the wood, and a stag of full age and noble bearing camr; out into the meadow and stood at gaze, startled Init not alarmed. One of the gentlemen in front raised a short hunting- piece, and the Princess, in a soft sweet undertone that penetrated all the listening air and left an imperishable mcinoiy 58 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I upon the heart, exclaimed : ' Oh, do not kill it ! How beautiful it is !' A short, sharp crack, a puff of smoke, and the stag leaped suddenly into the air and fell lifeless, shot between the eyes. There was a sudden outbreak of exclama- tion and talk, a rush of the hunters towards the fallen beast. Two or three of the gentle- men drew around the Princess and her ladies, as if to protect her, and in the excitement no one noticed me. I stood for a moment or two, my eyes fixed on this changing, sensitive, inexpressibly beautiful face. Then the beaters and foresters came out of the wood : some remained with the fallen stag, and the rest of the party moved on farther up into the forest followed by the grooms and horses. I returned at once, silent and fancy-struck, to the city, and passed the rest of the day and the entire night in a dream. The next morning I made my best ex- 1 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 59 cuses to Herr Veitch, and tried to settle to my work, but I found that this was impossible until I had made a full confession. He took it very quietly and as a matter of course : not so, however, did the Fraulein, a day or two afterwards, when he revealed the whole story to her. She looked at me strangely with her great brown eyes as one who fore- saw some great danger awaiting me ; and I wondered, in vain, from what quarter it would come. I made great progress under her tuition. In playing with her in unison I learned more in a few minutes than in any other way. The instinct of fnif^erincf seemed to come naturally by her means, by her gentle guid- ance, by her placid rule. Here again out- ward harmonies of nature and of art corre- sponded in its contrast with the life of the spirit; with tlie rajjt, enthralling passion of love which had come up(jn me by the vision 6o A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i in the forest, and with the calm sympathy which was growing up in my heart with the Fraulein, smooth, broad, tranquil, as the full harmonious chords which she taught me to play. But with all this I confess that the prevailing thought of my mind was that I should some day, and that soon, take my part in this music before the lovely Princess ; that I should see again that indescribable, enchanting face. 'We are getting on,' said Herr Veitch : ' we shall be ready soon.' 'Let us have a rehearsal,' said Adelheid, with her grave, gentle smile : ' let us have a rehearsal to-morrow in Das Vergniigen, in the garden-valley of the palace.' Below the palace, on the side farthest from the city, the wooded valley formed a fairy garden of terraces and of streams flow- ing down from the hills. In the bottom of the valley were buildings, somewhat on a A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 6i small scale, after the fashion of the French garden-palaces of Trianon and Marly, and in these little houses some of the court-officials had rooms. The Professor and his daughter occupied one of the most charming suites of apartments opening upon a wide lawn be- neath the terraced garden leading up to the palace, broken up by clipped hedges and rows of statues. I had never seen this garden of romance until the afternoon of the rehearsal. In the excitement and nervous- ness of the hour I was dimly conscious of a solemn blue sky overhead, of the dark foliage of the dying summer rising on the steep hill- sides on every hand, of a still afternoon full of sombre tints and sleeping sunlight, of the late-flowering china-roses and the tall asters, of massive wreaths of clematis, of a sense of fmished effort and growth, and of a hush and pause before decay set in and brought the end of life aiul (jf the year: tlic little 64 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN I were very lively and quick ; but the great charm of the piece lay in some perfectly modulated chords of great beauty distributed through the parts in a sustained, broad, searching tone on the fourth string. Herr Veitch played the violoncello with consum- mate skill. We had played the piece nearly through when Adelheid suddenly ceased, and turned in the direction of the wider lawns to which was access between the urns ; and the next moment the same lovely creature I had seen some days before, but now very differ- ently dressed, came through the opening in the low hedge, accompanied by a beautiful young lady, evidently of high rank, whom I also recoQfnised as one of the ladies I had seen in the wood. The Princess looked for a moment serenely at the group, who drew backward a step or two and bowed very low; but the next moment, as her eyes fell upon me, she flushed suddenly, and her face I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 65 assumed an expression of embarrassment, and even reproof. 'I did not understand that you had strangers here, Fraulein,' she said, and stopped. 'This, Royal Highness,' said Adelheid, bowing very low, ' is a young gentleman. Otto von Saale, who is to play in the trio. It did not occur to me to mention him to the Royal Highness.' The Princess looked very disconcerted and mortified, but her embarrassment oiih' made the unic^ue expression of her face more exquisitely piquant and enchanting. I would willingly have risked untold penalties to secure such a sight. The young lady who accompanied hf;r regarded me with an ex- pression of loathing animosity and contempt, as much as to say, 'What do joii mean by using your miserable existence to get us into this scraj)e ? ' 66 A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN i The Professor came to the rescue with great aplomb. Herr Veitch evidently re- garded the whole matter with lofty con- tempt. ' If the Royal Highness will deign to take a seat/ said the Professor, 'she may still hear the trio rehearsed. We will regard Otto as second violin merely. One violin is much like another.' * Oh, sit down, my Princess ! ' said the young lady coaxingly ; * I should so like to hear the violins.' The Princess hesitated, and looked still more enchantingly confused and shy, but she sat down at last. It was reported that, as a boy, her brother, the Crown Prince, had been mortally in dread of the Professor. It is possible that his sister may have conceived something of a similar feeling. We played the trio through. In spite of I A TEACHER OF THE VIOLIN 67 my excitement I had the sense to take the greatest pains. I kept my attention perfectly fixed upon my playing, and the clear notes of the great chords came in perfectly true and in time. When we had finished there was a short embarrassed pause. Then Adel- heid whispered to me, ' Play that lesson of yours of the woodland breeze.' Scarcely knowing what I did I began to play ; but I had not finished the opening bars before a slight change in the attitude of the Princess attracted my eyes, and suddenly, as if by inspiration, I conceived the fancy that I was playing to a creature of the forest and of the wind. She was sitting slightly forward, her eyes fixed upon the woodland slope before her, her slight, lithe figure and prominent speaking features like no offspring of common clay, but innate in lliat primeval god-sprung race of the golden hours, before the iron horny-handed sons of in