There is not one of the fields that is not storied, and the story is usually a desolate one. There are fields I know in the mountain valleys of Wicklow where a green tongue of earth runs out to meet the ploughs, which turns aside to avoid it. Those are the graves of the rebels of 1798. Not so long ago I stood on a great rath in the Queen's County, close by the Rath of Mullaghmast, haunted by the ghosts of the O'Moores, who, being invited to a banquet there by a Lord Deputy of Elizabethan days, were afterwards treacherously murdered. In the high rath, amid wide fields, the young descendants of English nobles, who became, in time, more Irish than the Irish, used, a few short years ago, to fight the battles over again of fairy knights and horsemen, as of the chiefs who came later. The raths are so full of the Spirit of Place that one is afraid. There is the Hill of Tara, from which St. Patrick banished the Druids, haunted by the memories of Irish kings and their palaces. I found nothing there but a great wind when I visited it. One should have slept there to see visions and dream dreams. There is Ben Bulben, in Sligo, with its memories of Diarmuid and Grania. There is Croagh Patrick, where the Saint fasted forty days and nights till he had wrung from the Angel of God the three things he asked. The Angel came to St. Patrick to comfort him, and the Saint asked of God through His Envoy that the Faith might never depart from the Irish people. 'That is granted,' said the Angel. 'Now go down from the mountain.' 'I will not,' said Patrick. 'Is it for that one thing I lay out under frost and snow and the canopy of heaven, that I was buffeted and beaten by evil spirits, that I fasted forty days from meat and drink? I will not go down from the mountain till I am given the second thing I ask.' 'Ask, then,' said the Angel. 'I ask that those who recite my Breast-plate' (that is, his prayer, socalled) shall be saved.' "That, too, is granted,' said the Angel. 'Now go down from the mountain.' 'I will not go for those two things,' said Patrick, with a recapitulation of the things he had done and suffered. "There is yet a third boon I ask from my God.' 'Speak it then,' said the Angel, ‘and go down from the mountain.' There is something splendidly audacious about this third prayer of St. Patrick. 'I ask, then, that I may sit on the Judgment Day by the side of my God to judge the Irish people.' "That I am quite sure will not be given you,' said the Angel. 'You may go down from the mountain with that ungiven.' But Patrick would not go down from the mountain till he had wearied the Angel with his persistence into granting his last magnificent request. I have said that the Spirit of Place, in Irish country, is concerned with kings or chiefs and battlefields. It is concerned with Saints also and religious observances and with tragic and passionate love stories. St. Patrick broke the power of the Druids in Ireland, but their stones and cromlechs are everywhere and their fires are yet supposed to linger on the hills, as on Knockmany in Tyrone, where many persons say they have seen the fires. The Spirit of Irish Place is very lonely but not fearful. In England, with its problems of a congested population, loneliness might mean actual physical fear. The fear in lonely places in Ireland is of the border world that lies between this and the other world. So far as physical danger is concerned one might still walk Ireland from end to end, like the Lady of Moore's Rich and Rare. But fairies and ghosts are another matter. By Croagh Patrick the Spirit of Place is on her knees. The great, conical hill, the Reek, as the people call it, wraps itself around in mist as though it were Mount Sinai. The clouds brood upon it and float around it to hide the mysteries. You may approach it for a whole morning without being aware of it and then, suddenly, you may see a shining green path suspended in mid-air, as I once had the luck to see it; and, while you marvel at it, the curtain begins to lift on a dazzling world of majestic mountain and sea and a thousand isles. Many thousands of people- tens of thousands, I would say, make the pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick every summer as they make the pilgrimage to Lough Derg, St. Patrick's Purgatory, where was a grotto through which the Saint entered Purgatory. There the place is impregnated with prayer and faith, so that the fasting and praying pilgrims feel the exhilaration of the lake water as though it were wine, and come back to the world as from a heavenly cure, happily exhausted, but full of the sense of well-being. We It is good to think that pilgrimages go on still in one of these islands, when the memory of them to the greater island but survives in a Pilgrim's Way, a few flower names, the tales of a poet, and one or two exquisite songs. should all be better if we went a-pilgriming in the sweet o' the year, following the winding way to Canterbury, with bare feet in the bluebells and the dew, or turning North to Our Lady of Walsingham, by her track of many churches. except with great and simple things. She is obvious of new and trivial things. She is for the immortal griefs and joys. By the battlefields of Europe she will wander, wringing her hands, and our children's children will hear in twilight the stories she has to tell of the time when: Love forgot to save The young, the beautiful, the brave. [The New Statesman] BY W. J. TURNER not NONE of the other Arts has a god like John Sebastian Bach - not literature, not sculpture, not painting, not architecture nor has science. The faults of Shakespeare and of Michelangelo are lingered over uncomfortably by even their devoutest admirers who cannot 'away' with them by the most tortuous ingenuity. Even their acknowledged masterpieces are incomplete or blemished or, if flawless, of limited scope. In music, Beethoven, the most inspired, is perhaps the most unequal of the great composers. The formlessness of his work is so distressing that it prevents many people from ever really enjoying his symphonies and sonatas. Even such a great work as the C Minor Symphony sounds like a series of marvelous improvisations, loosely strung together like beads on a thread. The fatal 'repeats,' proof of the lack of any real organic design, are sprinkled almost everywhere. Perhaps the nearest approach to a genuine organic structure in Beethoven's orchestral music is in the Leonore Overture No. 3, and there the form is dictated by an external dramatic programme, wonderfully assimilated, I grant, but still external to the music. You could not, as Sir Henry Wood does in the The Spirit of Place is not concerned, Leonore Overture, take a trumpeter out of the orchestra and put him behind doors to emphasize the effect, if the logic of the overture were musical instead of being what it is, dramatic by reference to a literary programme. On the intellectual and constructive side, Beethoven was weak, and like nearly all his successors, had recourse to a mould into which to pour his musical ideas, not having the power, the patience, the training, and the temperament requisite to enable him to build them into a structure of their own. If you take any of Bach's great organ preludes and fugues, you will find that there occur in them moments as dramatic as that pause and trumpet call in the Leonore Overture moments that thrill your blood, but they will stand much more repetition than the Leonore Overture, and the thrill will be soberer, graver, more intense with repetition, because it is not incidental, it does not depend on the emotional value of a chance situation, for example, sympathy with a prisoner in a dungeon hearing the trumpet call of his approaching liberator. It may be argued that you can be equally stirred by the Leonore Overture if you are completely ignorant of its programme, but I say that the Overture challenges your intellectual curiosity. You have to invent a programme, and if you did not find one that would fit it you could not bear to listen to it; it would drive you mad in unsatisfied irritation that is, if you had any intellectual grasp of music. The Bach prelude and fugue, on the other hand, raises no such questions as to its meaning because it is complete in itself. It is that rare thing, an artistic whole; it has the unity that exalts and satisfies, that is all-embracing yet concrete, finite, yet infinite, which scientists are forever seeking and approaching in their profoundest and most comprehensive laws. If you can imagine the sensation of a Galileo, of a Newton, of an Einstein, when they first grasp the complete idea that they have been groping for, you get some faint perception of the sensations of a musician when he hears one of Bach's great preludes and fugues, for Bach - and this is not to be said lightly—is more satisfying than Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, because he is nearer the truth than they are, his imagination has flown deeper and higher and is more all-embracing. It may well be asked what authority I have for such a statement. Well, first, even the plain man can feel for himself the inadequacy of the scientists' finest generalizations, beautiful as they are, and this feeling is supported by the scientists who will admit to sharing it themselves. But I know of no musician of acknowledged standing who could honestly say that there was anything lacking, anything imperfect or unsatisfying in Bach's greatest works, and there is, assuredly, no other composer living or dead of whom they could say the same. Now, I should like to go on to argue that absolute perfection is possible in art, while it never will be possible in science, unless science as it very possibly may do occasionally-becomes an art and does not attempt to represent all reality except as a creation of the mind; but this would lead me away from my subject, which is Bach. Dr. Terry has done English musicians considerable service by translating and editing Forkel's famous monograph on Bach, originally published in 1802.* It is true that Forkel's book had been translated and published in England in 1820, but it was badly done, and the translator added nothing by Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work. Translated from the German of J. N. Forkel, with notes and appendices by Charles Sanford Terry. Constable. 21s. net. way of commentary to a book which needs supplementing very considerably. The great merit of Forkel who as a musician and composer is now completely forgotten was that alwas that although born in 1749, a little more than a year before Bach's death, and writing in 1802 (fifty-two years later), he was the first to proclaim Bach's supreme greatness to the world. Dr. Terry has written an introduction which tells us a good deal about Forkel that is not to be found elsewhere in English, but he has also added a complete chapter on Bach's life in Leipzig for twenty-seven years as Cantor of St. Thomas' School (of which Forkel tells us nothing), a large number of notes, one hundred and fifty-six pages of appendices (giving a chronological catalogue of Bach's compositions, an exhaustive examination of the librettos of the cantatas, a full account of the monumental Bachgesellschaft Editions, and a Bibliography), an index, and seven illustrations, so that two thirds of what Dr. Terry magnanimously describes as 'Bach by Forkel' is Bach by Terry. My only complaint is that there is not still more Terry. I would not have the very important rivulet of Forkel drained away. Forkel is mainly critical and explanatory and, on the whole, I think, illuminating and sound, but he tells us practically nothing personal. He is, as Dr. Terry points out, extraordinarily meagre in biographical detail of which Dr. Terry might well have added more than he has done. Although Dr. Terry seems to think that Forkel appreciated Bach mainly as a supreme master of technique, he does not attempt to deal critically with Forkel's criticism, which therefore still remains the sole contribution to that side of the subject. This was wise, for a critical estimate of Bach would require a volume to itself. But it is im possible to read this book through without a feeling of sympathy for what Dr. Terry describes as Forkel's 'narrow depreciation of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.' To Forkel these composers, by comparison with Bach, must have seemed like inspired amateurs. In his constant reference to Bach's indefatigable application, Forkel surely hits the nail on the head. Astounding as Bach's original genius was, it was certainly not greater than Mozart's, than Beethoven's, or than Wagner's. An early death and unfavorable conditions prevented Mozart from doing himself justice. Beethoven was by temperament and mental equipment unable to cope with the greatness of his ideas. Wagner alone achieved an intellectual mastery of a wealth of material comparable to Bach's, but there was an ignoble strain in Wagner, and he never attained the sublimity of Beethoven and Bach, or the unsullied purity of Mozart. Bach alone was undivided and undistracted in his absorption in his work. The demands made upon him were more regular, more insistent, and more prolonged. His very situation and control of singers and players would have made any ordinarily gifted man a master of technique. For twentyone years Bach composed a new Cantata every month for official use; as Dr. Terry well says, 'there are few phenomena in the record of art more extraordinary than this unflagging cataract of inspiration in which masterpiece followed masterpiece with the monotonous periodicity of a Sunday sermon.' I would say there are none and would add this question: How can the composer of to-day, restlessly rushing from place to place, full of social engagements, without leisure, without congenial occupation, without the control of players to perform his works, with out repose of mind or spirit, how can he hope to produce works of the calibre of J. S. Bach, even if, which is improbable, he had the genius? [The Athenæum] HARRY BY ROBERT NICHOLS MANY Women-sisters, mothers, wives, and lovers-came to Ward One, where the desperate cases lay. The lovers were the saddest sight of all. Although Harry very well knew what his transference to Ward One implied, he was very gay. 'I've got no arm, Sister,' he said, as the orderlies bore him in, 'an' no leg; so what's left of me is all the more precious.' Precious it was, poor boy, precious to him, and even more precious to those who watched him and who dreaded, with only too much reason, that he would have to lose even another limb if his spirit was to continue to shine from the eyes of that close-cropped golden head, the face of which was seamed with odd, narrow lines significant of such physical pain as is not usually encountered during a space of fifty years, which had here been crowded into as many days since the morning when the surgeons had cut away the right arm and left leg of this boy of twenty-two. 'At any rate, Sister, I balance,' Harry said. And Sister laughed. It was her duty. Harry bore the hour of dressing that hour accounted by many soldiers the most terrible of their appalling profession with great fortitude. He was elaborate about his preparations; he required two pillows behind his shoulders and one behind his head; he placed a wad of lint in his mouth; he clutched the side of the bed with the arm that was left to him. 'It's no good yellin', Sister,' he said. "That's all right, Harry,' Sister replied. 'Yell if it helps you at all.' Then the vein that ran down between his brows stood up. He became bathed in sweat. Sometimes, because of the anguish, he spewed the lint out of his mouth and shrieked. He would apologize for this. 'When I hear the hammers in my ears I have to yell,' he said. 'I feel as if hair was comin' off· the job hurts my me so.' But for the most part he endured with only stifled exclamations. When a dressing was over a few tears always fell from his eyes - tears of shame, sorrow, pain, and relief. The surgeon was almost daunted by him. 'I should feel happier if that young chap yelled,' he remarked. "There's a limit to all pluck. He's not saving himself, and he may need to. It's a pity we have each our own nature to deal with, and cannot give another the tip. But one can't tell; perhaps he feels that if he gives way at all the whole body of his morale may go. And perhaps he's right. Nature has an instinct for conduct. Advice might be dangerous.' ex But it was not the dressing cruciating offices they were that sapped Harry's courage: it was to be twenty-two and have only one arm and one leg. That was a pain which found no expression save in his habitual joke, uttered ever with less and less of mirth, 'I've got no arm and no leg, Sister, so take good care of me; for I says, what's left of me is all the more precious.' The occasions on which Harry spewed out the lint became more and more frequent. He grew ashamed, crestfallen, wholly silent. A terrible dull look dull look sign of the stalemate of death and courage stood in his eyes. |