Musical Criticisms Part 1

Musical Criticisms.

by Arthur Johnstone.

FOREWORD.

The Editors desire to express their thanks to the Proprietors of the _Manchester Guardian_ for their permission to reprint the articles contained in this volume.

They also wish to acknowledge the a.s.sistance they have received in compiling the memoir from the family of the late Mr. Arthur Johnstone and from his friends, and they are more particularly indebted to Professor Sidney Vantyn for the long correspondence he placed at their disposal.

The letters quoted were for the most part written to Mr. Oliver Elton.

MEMOIR.

ARTHUR GIFFARD WHITESIDE JOHNSTONE was born December 3rd, 1861, the fourth son of the Rev. Edward Johnstone and Frances Mills. His father was then taking the duty at Colton in Staffordshire, but in the following year accepted the living of Warehorne in Kent; this he resigned in 1866 and went to live at St. Leonards. Mr. Johnstone died in 1870, and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his mother. Mrs. Johnstone gave her life to good works and to the care of her children, one of whom was an invalid. Arthur looked on her as a saint, and the thought held up his belief in humanity during the somewhat long struggle when his powers and aims were uncertain, and when he had to observe excessive dulness, dreariness, and meanness at close quarters. He was also beholden to her for the gift that was at last to determine his career. She was a good musician, and it was from her that Johnstone inherited his fine taste and received his first instruction in music. Later he studied under Mr. W. Custard, a local organist. The atmosphere of his home was religious--extreme Anglican approaching to Roman Catholic. Johnstone, though he became by reaction anti-clerical, continued to appreciate the value of religion, chiefly through art and music, as his letters and criticisms show. But his bent was secular as well as artistic; a high Anglican school and a high Anglican college were therefore not a pasture in which he could thrive. His spirit was foreign to theirs. It says much for his strength of mind, that these inst.i.tutions left him able to admire certain forms of Christian art.

In 1874 he went to Radley and remained there four years, doing neither well nor ill, stifled rather in the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the school, caring little for games, and out of sympathy with the public school spirit. He therefore lived his own life, learnt to protect himself by ingenious tact and reserve, and read irregularly what he liked. Though not specially built for athletics he was by no means lacking in bodily arts and dexterities. When quite young he was a first rate billiard-player, a good skater, and at lawn tennis well above the average. His chief accomplishment was an odd one which never left him.

During these early years he made a constant pastime of conjuring, and devoted to it much of his leisure and some of his business hours. He even gave elaborate entertainments in public, from the age of fourteen.

On one occasion when he was only seventeen he was able to apply his skill to a really practical use. He was going by train to give a performance and happened to enter a compartment where there was a gang of card sharpers. They drew him into playing "Nap" with them; soon he began losing and knew that he was being cheated. They were using the ordinary conjuror's cards with plain white backs, of which he had a supply in his pocket. He soon found an opportunity of replacing their pack with one of his own, won back his losses with schoolboy satisfaction, and changed carriages at the first stopping-place, leaving the experts to solve the mystery for themselves. His self-possession in public and private, the mature and slightly initiate air that became less marked as he grew older, were probably due to these performances.

They served in his real education. The intellectual side of what is usually common showman's art attracted him. The psychology of the conjuror's victim, amused and angry, straining all his wits on the wrong point; the festal atmosphere, or _Stimmung_, of inattentive youth and good temper necessary for success, the real poverty of intricate mechanical appliance compared with skill and patter--of these things he would talk in youth with an Edgar-Poe-like elaboration and solemnity, no doubt as well as any man in England. The best of these exhibitions was when Johnstone was professing to explain to a few friends a trick of his own doing. There came first, in long and well-cut sentences, a kind of metaphysic of conjuring; an account of those principles of delusion that were inapplicable in the present instance; exposure of the vulgar and obvious methods, which seemed to the crowd the same as those subtler ones which merely satisfied the conscience of the artist; and lastly, on the verge of the "explanation," a long parenthesis or a touch of coldness and abstraction, not to be interrupted, which ended, if at all, not in any explanation whatever, but in a last performance of the trick.

Johnstone made a point of seeking acquaintance with the chief professors of manual illusion who visited England. He well knew, of course, the methods of signalling to counterfeit clairvoyance; and in one case, that of "Little Louie," whose show at the Westminster Aquarium was the best public marvel of the sort, he was convinced that the performers only eked out by signalling and other tricks the failures of some genuinely supernormal power of the "telepathic" kind which they themselves did not fully understand. We say thus much about legerdemain, as it was long our friend's quaint and picturesque subst.i.tute for the less original forms of young men's amus.e.m.e.nt. It gave a good deal of pleasure to other people, and he needed amus.e.m.e.nt, for his life was not to be easy.

Johnstone left Radley at the end of the summer term 1878, and for the next two years worked under Messrs. Wren and Gurney for the Indian Civil Service, the limit of entrance then being nineteen years. It must be admitted that he made no serious attempt to succeed, and that here, as at Oxford later, the prospect of an examination proved to be the reverse of an incentive to work. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he failed, for though he would have found a great interest in the natives (and extended his _repertoire_ of tricks) he would have been repelled by the average Anglo-Indian; besides, his abilities did not lie in the direction of legal and political administration. In October, 1880, Johnstone came up to Keble College, Oxford, and he quickly had a small circle round him. Among his friends were R. A. Farrar, son of the well-known Dean, and G. H. Fowler, the biologist, of his own College; Winter, of St. John's, the best musician among undergraduates; his biographers; and, later, Prof. York Powell, who instantly detected his ability and force of nature. Amongst the dons of Keble, Johnstone cared for two. One was the Warden, the Rev. E. S. Talbot, now Bishop of Southwark, who behaved with tact, and encouraged as far as he might a mind of no pattern type, which would not bring the College any regulation honours; the other was the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, the best writer of the school, and since known as a philosophical preacher.

Ascetic, but thoroughly humane, Mr. Illingworth attracted Johnstone by his honesty and fineness of temper. But these clergymen, after all, dwelt in their own world, not in his. Until he met York Powell, Johnstone had found no older man from whom he could learn without cautions and reservations, and who struck him as a master-mind and a perfectly free spirit. The two men signally valued each other's conversation; they had many delicate qualities in common--the kind of delicacy only found in Bohemians of experience who have kept their perceptions at the finest edge. Powell materially helped Johnstone more than once by letting persons of consequence know what he thought of his younger friend. Even in Powell's record there was hardly any friendship more completely unruffled.

In youth, as an undergraduate, Johnstone was sallow, but healthy, rather lean and light, with a large and well-moulded musician's head, like Beethoven's or, still more, Rubinstein's, in the outline of the overhanging brow. It is easy to recall that earnest face, that delightful smile always characteristic of him, and, above all, the fascination of his playing on the piano. His voice was clear and carried well, with a sharp metallic ring when he was indignant, but was usually pitched low, as if unwilling to be overheard. His manner was formed and his talk was from the first what it remained: forcible, emphatic, and undoubtedly over-superlative at times, cut into quaintly elaborate but perfectly built sentences, which came so naturally to him that we have heard him discharge one of them the moment after opening his eyes in the morning. They can best be ill.u.s.trated by his more familiar style in his writings and letters; the latter, indeed, give a fairly exact reflex of his talk. A _flaneur_ of the best kind, he observed closely and curiously; in spite of long spells of apparent idleness, the alert quality of his mind never showed the faintest trace of slackness. He described vividly and accurately; and he had a remarkable gift for explaining any subject or point of view unfamiliar to his listeners, careful that the slightest detail should not escape them. And, in turn, he would quickly catch up and develop the ideas of his friends however vaguely suggested or insufficiently thought out. Johnstone professed Radical principles and was a member of the Russell Club, where the advanced Liberals met for papers and debates; but his Radicalism was social rather than political, and after the foreign experiences of his later years his opinions tended in the direction of strong government and Imperialism. At this time it amused him to be rather eccentric in dress, though he afterward became trim and fairly modish. In 1882 the intellectual undergraduate was capable of wearing a wide-brimmed, light-brown, hard hat, descending over the ears and eyes and long hair penthouse fashion. He had one of these "built for me, ground plan and projection" on a special scale. He also had a tie which could be folded into twenty-five different aspects or patterns, some of them striking; it was a mosaic of squares, and the harvest of a long search; twenty-five neckties in one. His collars were ultra-Byronic. Otherwise he was not markedly strange in attire; though the real incongruity was between these freaks of dress, and the keen intent grey gleam of his eyes, and the look of held-in vehemence and sensibility.

To what did this sensibility tend, what did it crave for? Not chiefly for definite learning, or book-knowledge, or for abstract philosophical truth. Johnstone's nature and gifts did not set towards scholarship (except afterwards to musical scholarship) or to pure speculation. He wanted, no doubt, to write, but he never cared to practise style as a mere handicraft; "let us have," he would say, "something with blood in it." He did not ask for religious solutions or consolations. Since nearly all he printed was on musical subjects, only his letters and our memories can give the impression of what he wanted. It was a sufficiently rare ambition among the Oxford young men of our time, though often enough professed. He wanted art and beauty. This desire, of course, in others often was a cant; there were scholars and verse-makers--more or less of the "aesthetic" type--sentimental and hard at bottom like most such persons, who cultivated beauty, and have usually come to nothing except prosperity. Johnstone was of another race to these; they never heard of him; he did not care for the main chance; he was in profound earnest. Few young men looked at life with so definite an aspiration to get the grace, enjoyment, and beauty out of it, and so definite a conviction that not much of these things is attainable. To such spirits, pre-appointed to suffer and wait, society seems at first an irrational welter, out of which, as by a miracle, emerge enchanting islets of grace, and wit, and cheer. The desire to find beauty in things or persons, and the desire to find soul and humanity, are the unalloyed, intense, and usually disappointed pa.s.sions of elect youth claiming its rights. It is the second of them that saves a young man from the conceit and exclusive folly that may beset the first. Johnstone's tastes, his reading, loves and friendships were guided by these two pa.s.sions, and by a third which took off from the strain of them, and was equally imperious--the wish to study the world and to be entertained reasonably. Cla.s.ses did not exist for him, except that he often felt he was more likely to be able to foregather with and help men and women who were at a discount in the world. With such warring elements and a spirit so hard to satisfy, it was no wonder that his earlier years seemed planless, and in part were so. The instinct for travel and odd experience lasted long. No one but his near friends had much knowledge of this complex but essentially single nature. To them there seemed to be more than a seed of n.o.bility and fair example in such a youth, so externally disappointing to parents, and guardians, and shepherds of colleges. Out of it was gradually wrought a character full of fire and aspiration, fundamentally austere and uncompromising in loyalty and in artistic conscience, but masked under a certain reticence. But this is to forestall by several years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AGED 20.]

Johnstone had entered Oxford at a time of great intellectual ferment.

Looking back we can now see that it was during the years about 1880 that the revolutionary flood ran highest. The authority of Darwin and Huxley was unquestioned by many of the younger generation and all-embracing.

The vague Christianity and sentimental optimism of Tennyson was held in little esteem beside the wider tolerance, the subtle a.n.a.lysis, the ceaseless curiosity of Browning. Above all "the Bard," as Swinburne was admiringly called, was the poet of the young men. Another very important factor in the mental development of our generation--and for Johnstone, perhaps, the strongest of all--was supplied by the French literature of the century, from the Romantic School onwards. It is no wonder, therefore, that the reaction from the High Church influences and surroundings of his youth was severe and complete, and that his highly aesthetic nature demanded the fullest artistic and intellectual freedom.

The so-called "aesthetic movement," as we have before implied, left him untouched. He would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a civilisation that had utterly pa.s.sed away, nor with the deliberate neglect of the modern world, and its most intense and living art--Music. Johnstone had not much mediaeval sense, and was sparing in his appreciation of Rossetti, to whom he became unjust. What he liked best was "Jenny," though he was rightly critical on the unsound streaks in its rhetoric. It was first brought home to him, as to others of his group, by the skilful and dramatic reading, in a singular clanging voice, of his chief Keble friend, C. W. Pett.i.t: a young man of high and melancholy character who was found drowned, probably by accident, in the Upper River, near Oxford, in the spring of 1882. A memorial stone with Pett.i.t's initials marks the place, in an unfrequented reach of the stream, and the inscription, if not effaced, is now a mystery except to some few who remember him.

"Jenny" also struck upon what may be mentioned now as the deepest chord in Johnstone's sympathies; it is heard sounding in the letters, quoted below, that review the stories of Ruth, Fantine, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. His att.i.tude in this matter was free from conventional ethics, and was, therefore, essentially Christian; and the relations of society to technically errant women, who have lapsed even once by accident, preoccupied him bitterly, and that in no theoretical or sequestered way. In his own gipsy experience, he witnessed at least one instance where the issue only just escaped disaster. He was haunted by the story, as De Quincey was by that of his lost companion in Oxford Street. The girl whom Johnstone, though generally hard up, managed to befriend in his secret, chivalrous and effectual fashion, finally married some one decent and respectable. Concealing the place and circ.u.mstance, he afterwards cast the incident of the "Fantine of Shotover" (we also conceal, of course, the name of the village) into a kind of prose sketch or _poeme_, which he finished when he was about twenty-six, re-wrote twice, and thought of printing. It is unfortunately not now to be traced. Its musical, exalted prose, if inexperienced in form, gave genuine promise in that kind of composition; but he never to our knowledge, pursued the vein, and the prose in which he became expert was, apart from his letters, purely critical and expository. Still, enough has been said to show the force and unusual bent of Johnstone's human sympathies. It is clear that a young man's truth of instinct and strength of head are never more hardly taxed than when he is confronted with a concrete story of this kind. He may become foolish in opposite ways, especially if he is also an artist and has strength of temperament. He may be personally entangled through his sympathies, and make ill worse. He may be superior, and spoil everything by clumsy missionary benevolence, hard of hand. It is something if he can get behind the ordinary, blind, d.a.m.natory formulae of society. This however, is not so difficult to a free mind. What is harder is to do it, and yet to see the facts without mere theorising, without the c.u.mber of rhetorical and literary sentiment that obscures them. A Scotch-descended brain is useful at this point. In our memory Johnstone rose to the occasion thus presented, and acted and judged with balance. But we are more concerned now with the road by which he arrived at his force of sympathy. aestheticism of the rootless academic kind had, it is evident, no hold upon him; he was too angry to be precious; but his motive power at bottom was that of the artist, as it was surely not that of the radical theorist or philanthropic organiser; although it was, if we use accurate language, by no means less human than theirs. What was at work was his sense of beauty; of physical beauty, first of all, or of grace, in the victimised person, as the sign and vesture of an originally sound and simple, or gay and innocently festal nature; beauty inbred, and then marred by some rough contact, and then marred more by social punishment, and seldom retrieved, even in part--as in the particular instance it chanced to be retrieved--by any fortunate and final escape. All this revolts the deepest of human feelings, which distinguishes us from most of the beasts, namely the aesthetic feeling, which at this point happens to coincide closely with the religious. A certain depth and rarity were thus super-added to the plain good feeling and kindliness of the man; and we can draw these facts from the jealous hiding-place of the past without undue violence to the shyness in which he wrapped them, as they show his personal and special path of approach to the human tragedy, and may even come to the notice of, and serve for the encouragement of similar minds at a corresponding stage of discontent. We may now go back to his early youth, when he was halfway through Oxford, and when some of these ideas were germinating into necessarily crude expression, which none the less has its interest. In a letter of 1881, he writes:--

"How can we escape from Swinburne? Does not modern society drive one to his school, at least the sort of society that I am _supposed_ to have been brought up in, whose moral atmosphere is a sort of perpetual afternoon tea, where all the men are pale young curates and the women district visitors, their excitements vulgar ritualistic tea-pot tempests, the doctrinal significance of birettas, purificators.... Their minds ever on the alert to quash the smallest expression of any delight in natural beauty--'beauty is only skin-deep,' the d.a.m.nedest lie that was ever formulated (compare Browning's Paracelsus). I wish with Gautier that I had been born in the days of the Roman Empire, when asceticism was almost unknown and what there was of it entirely specialised, before ever such an astounding cla.s.sification as the World, the Flesh, and the Devil had been made, or every natural beauty writhed, like the divine feminine torso, in the accused grip of fashion." These are the outpourings of a very young man only twenty. It may fairly be said that Johnstone was always far more of an ascetic, personally, than he ever admitted, and the articles on Bach and Sir Edward Elgar abundantly prove the religious habit of mind induced by the training and a.s.sociations of his early years. A year later his views have become better balanced, as shown by the following extract from a letter on the same subject.

"I read most of the _Apologia_ a month or two back. As you say, Newman stands quite alone in his sincerity and spiritual power, the only orthodox thinker who is not an instance of self-deception resulting from reiterated untruth. All the purest and most beautiful aspects of the old faith seem to group round him. But the lights are almost out on the stage where he poses so magnificently, a rough crowd is spoiling all the scenic illusion, and garish sunbeams are coming in through the roof.

"I was moved to tears the day before yesterday by the appearance in this place [Tunbridge Wells] of a pretty face.

"There she was, a radiant and triumphant vindication of human nature among the myriad libels on the human form.

"I love the wonderful human body. How utterly the most beautiful of imaginable things in its strange dualism; perfect form expressed with infinite subtlety in two mutually supplemental phases. The one--tall, lithe-limbed, and athletic, with its shifting net-work of muscles beneath the clear brown skin, boldly chiselled features and short crisp hair--emblem of strength and swiftness and G.o.dlike protection, buoyant and fearless; the other--a harmony of exquisite curves, white and sensitive, and crowned with rippling hair, fulfilled of tender life and wondrous grace--living type of fruitfulness. To say that either deviated from the abstract perfection of form is merely to say the very idea of s.e.x is such a deviation; and is there not a certain divine suggestiveness in this very fact? Their union is perfect Beauty--veils of the great human Sacrament. And all this is faded clean out of modern life. The belief in the body is dead. I believe some of us live and die never knowing the likeness of the human form, just as some of us do without ever seeing the sunrise.

"The 'pale Galilean' has banished Beauty; and only here and there, disguised almost beyond recognition, has it ventured with infinite apology to return.... Yet let us not be all unthankful to the pale Galilean and his lessons of suffering; there are too many of us who see in their own instincts the very impress of impossibility to be satisfied, who have to reflect with some bitterness, not '_il faut mourir_,' but '_il faut vivre_' and gather up our sc.r.a.ps and skulk along, hoping, perhaps, some day for a lowly place in some court in the House of Life, if it be only that of a scullion. And then at what a frightful cost have those lessons become part of the world's inheritance! Surely it cannot have been for nothing."

Obviously, in all this outburst, if its literary and intellectual origins are not hard to trace, there was no pose whatever; it was a mood that Johnstone honestly and pa.s.sionately lived through, or rather it remained as a background to his nature. He was far from happy at this period. He had many friends and varied interests, but he felt that life was being wasted; in fact he had not "found himself," nor was he to do so until his visit to Germany. No doubt Keble was not the college for one of his temperament, and the English system of teaching the cla.s.sics made them, for him, dead languages indeed; but had their oral use been encouraged (the practice of the late Professor Blackie) it is possible that he might have taken a real interest in them. With one of his friends he would speak constantly in Latin.

During the next few years Johnstone was mainly engaged in scholastic work, and the necessity of earning his own living prevented him from taking his degree. In a letter of September 1885, he regrets that he "had to live much in continuous utter rebellion against outward circ.u.mstances. In the morning is much strife and crying; in the evening, comfort of the pot. The Day of Rest brings loneliness in crowds--'stalled oxen and hatred.' _Ca finira._"

In the spring of 1887 he inherited a small legacy, which set him free, for a time, from the drudgery of teaching, and enabled him to carry out his long-deferred wish for a course of serious musical study at a foreign conservatorium. At this period he knew absolutely no German, and had only a fair knowledge of French, and was quite unconscious of possessing the natural gift for modern languages, which he was afterwards to turn to good account at the Edinburgh Academy and elsewhere. In August he went to Kreuznach to acquire the elements of German before proceeding to the Cologne Conservatorium, where he had determined to study. The family where he stayed could speak no English and but little French, so he was forced from the outset to express himself in a strange tongue and make shift to understand it. Early in October he entered the Conservatorium as a student, and engaged himself to take the year's course. His chief friend was M. Sidney Vantyn, now Professor of the Piano at the Liege Conservatoire, and then in his last year of study. They met in the cla.s.s of Professor Eibenschutz, one of the most severe masters there, who made no allowance for Johnstone's previous amateur training, and was rather harsh and discouraging. He knew no English and Johnstone's German was still elementary, so Vantyn, who knew English thoroughly, acted as interpreter between them. In his recollections of those days M. Vantyn writes:--

"It was certainly evident that he had never had a musical training before his arrival in Cologne. Johnstone's fingers were stiff and he had to begin almost at the very beginning. And this he had the courage to do. At that time I was one of the advanced pupils, I offered to help, and for some months we practised together every day, more especially with a view to developing the fingers. In April, 1888, he showed me a sketch of a _Valse de Concert_. This composition was what one would have expected from Johnstone--bright, original, thorough. At my request he completed the _Valse_ which I played shortly afterwards at a concert, where it met with a decided success. A little later it was sold to a music publisher at Liege. He soon left Herr Eibenschutz for Dr.

Klauwell, with whom he studied the piano and harmony." Among the other professors at the Conservatorium were Humperdinck, afterwards famous as the composer of _Hansel und Gretel_, and Gustav Jensen, the brother of the better-known song writer.

At length, Johnstone was living in a world which brought out his best qualities and stimulated his keenest interests. But he now realised that he had come ten years too late for the attainment of any eminence, either as executant or composer, and contented himself with considerably extending his general knowledge of music. Nor did he ever confine his attention to music alone; but he endeavoured to see as much as possible of German methods of work, especially as regards the teaching of languages. In reading the Cologne verdict on Johnstone's early training it must be remembered that in his youth the piano was not well taught in England, where the principles and importance of a good technique were alike unknown. Of course, the princ.i.p.al and all his masters liked him personally, but naturally their chief interest lay with young pupils who promised to make a name in the musical world. The year's course at the Conservatorium ended in July, and about this time he writes:--

"As regards intentions, I am quite resolved now (and quite contented) to become a modern language teacher for life. During this year I have obtained some insight into the musical profession, with the conclusion that for all but the very few of quite the first rank it is a wretched life. So I am after all going to take my degree, and shall reside next term as a member of Balliol.... I could get a living by music now, but that would be to sink into a drudgery yet worse than anything I have yet had to do. I _will_ not teach beginners. Besides, I can make a much better living in another profession."

Johnstone returned to England at the end of August, 1888, in wonderful spirits and in better health than he had ever before enjoyed, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm for everything German. It was Gulliver's homecoming after the voyage to the Houyhnhnms, and his friends had to listen to criticism of a similar kind. There is no doubt that this year brought real maturity to Johnstone. He gained a confidence in himself and a grip on life, which even when the prospect seemed most hopeless prevented him from ever again falling into his old moods of despondency.

In October he returned to Oxford. Some years back he had taken his name off the books of Keble and migrated to New Inn Hall. The Hall had lately been absorbed by Balliol, and so in the end Johnstone became a member of the College which should have sheltered him from the beginning. In Balliol he was tolerably well at home, though now senior to the men around him. He forgathered with Farmer, who had just left Harrow for Balliol and with the Master's support arranged a concert in the Hall every Sunday evening. Once he gave a conjuring show, by Farmer's request. Jowett shrilled in cherubic mirth, sent for Johnstone, listened to his conversation, which flowed more easily than that of most of Jowett's undergraduate visitors and was of another stamp; and continued to treat him with politeness. Johnstone, whose cla.s.sics had somewhat rusted during his stay in Germany, read with Mr. St. George Stock, the philosophical writer, then and since a well-known private teacher in Oxford. In December he pa.s.sed the necessary schools and took his degree; his last experience of the old, disquieting city was pleasant, if brief--a period of _recueillement_ before embarking upon the new career which he had chosen.

In the March following, 1889, he received an offer to go as tutor to the young son of Prince Abamelek in Podolia, a province of Southern Russia.

The following account of his journey is interesting:--

"I left Berlin on Thursday morning at 8.30; the stage through Galicia, Oswiecim, Cracow, Lemberg, Podwoloczyska was a bad twenty-four hours.

Just at the frontier the snow was immensely deep, standing in a wall on each side of the train. It was like being let into Russia through the works of a great snow fortification. The worst mistake I made was in bringing no victuals with me. I noticed at the frontier examination that my portmanteau was the only one not half full of food. The restaurants at the large junctions are excellent, being all under the management of Tartars, a race possessing the genius of cookery, but if you have to wait as I did, more than twenty-four hours at an out-of-the-way country station, you may find nothing obtainable but tea. Travelling in Russia is in any case tiring; the distances are interminable, and every journey has to be regarded as a sort of pilgrimage. On coming from Osipoffka here, we had to leave about ten in the evening to meet the desired train.

"The start was rather amusing, for we were a considerable caravan with children, servants, horses and dogs. All night we drove across the Steppe, accompanied by several mounted men with torches, which they lighted when the way was bad.

"I had an outside place and was somewhat dazed and curried by the wind and dust by the time we got to the station. Railway travelling is interesting if you have got the courage not to go first cla.s.s. The carriages are on the American plan, with an opening down the middle.

Instead of dapper bagmen you find long-coated and long-haired Jews, besides soldiers and students in curious costumes, while whole families, travelling together, produce the effect of an emigrant convoy. Everyone undresses with complete _sang-froid_.

"The family always come for the summer to this estate. It lies in a well-wooded district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than the region to which I first went. The house is very large, and the garden magnificent. It is skirted by a river and there are primitive boats and an excellent bathing place. They have also a steam-launch of English manufacture, which is shortly to be got afloat.

"The neighbourhood is a paradise of Gipsies. The river throws out arms and endless windings, and the ground between is much broken and covered with undergrowth. Here the Gipsies encamp. One sees them in the evening bathing with their horses, and thus I had an opportunity of observing a thing, the peculiar and suggestive appropriateness of which is remarked on by Darwin in his 'Voyage of the Beagle,' namely, a naked man on a naked horse. This is the true centaur; they become one thing. I am now convinced that the Gipsies are the most physically beautiful of all races. In England they are abject beggars, but here rather more well-to-do than the average of the population; for they are not like the peasants, more than half-starved by ecclesiastical regulation, and obviously, in a country in such a stage as Russia is at present, they have a better time. There are plenty of immense regions where they can trap and fish quite unmolested, and the climate favours their mode of life--doubly, I should imagine, the winter giving a short account of defective const.i.tutions. I suppose they are thieves, but to the casual observer they are entirely admirable. Troops of splendid little brown children go about in the evening singing or shrieking with shrill laughter. Their music, by the way, is valued in Russia. There are several troops who get large sums for attending various festivities.

"It has gradually been borne in upon me that the climate of this region is almost ideal. The sky is deep blue and far off, yet the heat is never really oppressive, on account of a constant breeze which brings balsam from the woods. For the landscape a finer contrast could scarcely be found to the Southern Steppe, which is like the burnt and sc.r.a.ped bottom of a pot. It has a character of its own, of course. From the fact of being usually able to see to the level horizon in all directions, it reminds one of the sea, while in summer the heated and quivering air which rises from the ground produces marvellous atmospheric effects; but there is always a wind, skin-drying and far from healthy. Here, on the other hand, we are well watered and surrounded by deep and lordly forest, and the aspect of the whole country is _riant_.

"I have not yet seen much of the _kirchliches Wesen_. The priest at Osipoffka, I gathered, is a man who has to get in a ma.s.s as often as he is sober enough. The Abameleks do not receive him, and never go to Church while there. In any case, I do not think the Princess is particularly _devote_. She is of Polish descent, and her family having given up Western Catholicism, have never become, I suppose, enthusiastic as Russian orthodox.

"Of the children the boy is much the most interesting. The eldest girl, though not without promise of beauty, is at present in a somewhat gaping and lumbering stage. The younger one is much smaller, though only a little younger than her sister, also of better intelligence, if worse temper. She laughs with a curious _abandon_ and is full of _calineries_, and is two totally different persons when pleased and bored.

"Master Paul has not the faintest resemblance that I can trace to either of them. He is an exceptionally round-limbed and well-made child, with low forehead and hair like dead-black fur showing a dead-white skin between, tending to stand up though perfectly soft, and always with a backward sweep, as though he had lately stood facing a high wind; beady brown eyes, clear brown colour, delicate little nose and chin and a mouth like a cherry, make up a face which is no false promise of his vivacity of temperament. It changes in the hundredth part of a second from bubbling laughter to a sort of Last Judgment seriousness.

"He wags his little _tete de Polichinelle_ over his victuals, and converses with them in several languages. Sometimes his mother interrupts him and asks if he knows what he is saying, when he swears that he hasn't spoken for a quarter of an hour. _Pauvre pet.i.t bijou_ she calls him."

In the autumn of 1889 his engagement as tutor ended, and he spent the winter in Odessa to study the language. He put himself, as usual, under conditions where it was impossible to speak any other language; entered a Russian family; prepared his questions in Russian when he shopped; and addressed in Russian the official who delayed his necessary papers until he had silently put down a bribe of two roubles, and who then shook him warmly by the hand. He was full of tales; he told of the English journalist, so aggressively and deliberately English that he would not uncover before the Tsar's portrait in a hairdresser's shop; of the Prince Abamelek, who was always talking of taking him out shooting, but never did so; of the Princess, who feared that her little Paul was "trop jeune encore pour profiter de son esprit eminemment cultive"; of the social tyranny of Russian orthodoxy, which drove free-thinking persons of quality in the country to church and sacrament at all the Christian festivals; and, finally, of his shortness of funds which forced him to find his way home in humble style.