Rustic Sounds Part 5

Then the late Mr. Clark, superintendent of the Museum of Zoology, and one of the kindest of men, occasionally gave us beasts to cut up. I shall never forget my pride of heart when a preparation which I made of a hedgehog's inside was placed in the Museum.

Just as I was leaving Cambridge in 1869 or '70 there arrived that great man, Sir Michael Foster, who organised the revolution in which the futilities of the early 19th century were blown to fragments, and in their place a sound system of practical instruction was created. Foster was discovered by Huxley, and it was through him, and thanks to the patriotism of Trinity College in creating for him the post of Praelector, that Foster got this great opportunity. The effect of what he did for English education has been incalculably great. His pupils have gone forth into all lands, and have spread the art of learning and teaching wherever they have come to rest.

In thinking over the reformation wrought by Michael Foster I am somehow-quite inconsistently-reminded of the great scene in _Guy Mannering_. I see in imagination the cold dark cave at Warroch Head, where Dirk Hatteraick lurks; he plays the part of False Science in the Mystery Play, and the cave is the Cave of Inanity. Then comes the great flare of light, as Meg Merrilees throws the torch on to the heap of flax, and her cry, "The hour is come and the man!" while Harry Bertram with his supporters rush in and bind False Science fast. Harry Bertram is, of course, Michael Foster, and I should say that Dandie Dinmont is Coutts Trotter. Meg Merrilees is naturally Huxley, who was the magician of the affair (she is always said to have looked like a man). Here all a.n.a.logy breaks down. Meg was killed by False Science, Huxley was not; indeed it was the other way. Harry Bertram lived happily ever afterwards. Michael Foster was not so fortunate, and I am ashamed to think that before he died he was misunderstood and half forgotten in his own University.

I must apologise for this outburst of incoherence; I am afraid it was not this sort of thing that Tyndall had in mind when he pleaded for the scientific imagination-that is something much more serious.

Not only does the student of to-day get good practical teaching, but he has the great advantage of being under professors who are generally engaged in original work. And if a man can afford the time to stay up after his degree, he is encouraged and helped to undertake research. If practical teaching is the foundation, the protoplasm as it were, of scientific education, I am sure that original work is its soul or spirit.

Whether, like my father in South America, we have the genius to solve big problems in geology and "can hardly sleep at night for thinking of them,"

or whether, as with us smaller people, the task is some elusive little point which we triumphantly track to its cause, there is an extraordinary delight in such work. Professor Seward arranged an admirable imitation of original research in his advanced cla.s.s on the anatomy of plants at Cambridge. He gave out specimens which the students had never seen; these had to be investigated, and they had to give _viva voce_ accounts of their discoveries to the rest of the cla.s.s. I believe this to be a method worth imitating, and I may say as an encouragement to women teachers that it was a Newnham student who was especially distinguished in this mutual instruction cla.s.s.

When I left Cambridge and became a medical student in London, I had the luck to work in the laboratory of Dr. Klein, who was then head of the Brown Inst.i.tute at Nine Elms. He was fresh from Vienna, with all the continental traditions in favour of original research. Even in the ordinary laboratory work I remember how he tried to throw the romance of practicality over my task. He rushed in one day with a large bread-knife stained with blood in the most sinister manner, saying that a murder had occurred in South Lambeth, and it was for me to determine whether or no the red fluid on the blade was blood!

Later on he set me to work investigating inflammation, and I can still remember his praise of the harmless little paper I wrote. To my secret satisfaction he blamed me for the severity of my remarks on a German Professor who had written on the subject. He told me to strike out my criticism, though he allowed it to be just. I sighed as an author, but obeyed as a pupil,-to misquote the words of Gibbon.

Education is often spoken of, and is praised or blamed, as a method of imparting information to the young. It is obvious that it is far more than this. It includes the stimulation of tastes, tendencies, or instincts which are inherent but dormant in the pupil. In my case the opportunity, so wisely and kindly given by Dr. Klein, of seeing science in the making-of seeing research from the inside-his giving me the delight of knowing that I had added a minute fragment to the great raging flood of publications which marks the progress of knowledge-all this was a potent factor in my education in the wider sense. That is, it did not merely teach me certain facts, but woke in me the desire to work at science for its own sake. My father finally gave me the necessary opportunity by taking me as his a.s.sistant.

No one should ever be able to finish the history of his own education, because it is co-extensive with his life. In my father's autobiography written shortly before his death, he attempts to sum up the effect of this self-education on himself, both as concerns his experimental research and also in regard to the literary part of his work. An instance of his modest estimate of his own mental progress, is so characteristic that I shall venture to quote it. "I think that I have become a little more skilful in guessing right explanations and in devising experimental tests; but this may probably be the result of mere practice, and of a larger store of knowledge. I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus I have been led to see errors in reasoning and in my own observations or those of others." I repeat that self-education is an endless task. To some men this is a comforting, to others a depressing, fact. Samuel Johnson was, I think, saddened by the making of fresh plans of conduct for each new year. A very different man, though also a Samuel,-Butler, the author of _Erewhon_, was cheered by the thought that it was always possible to improve. When I knew him he was working as a painter in an untidy room in Clifford's Inn, without much furniture except a piano. He was poor, and therefore, to save models, painted himself over and over again, the result being a cupboard full of grim heads, which he called the chamber of horrors. He always believed he should succeed at last, and the point I am slowly reaching is that he comforted himself with the belief that John Bellini entirely altered his style when he was between 60 and 70 years of age. One of the French aphorism writers, Vauvenargues, has said (as translated by Lord Morley), "To do great things a man must live as though he had never to die." {94} I too would recommend the wholesome theory that it is never too late to learn; it helps to keep one from falling too soon into incurable fogeydom.

In the lives of big men it is sometimes possible to see how work done for its own sake may turn out to have had its real value as a piece of training for something of far greater worth. Thus my father began in 1846 working at a curious Cirripede, _i.e._, a barnacle, which he had found on his voyage; this led him to examine others, and in the end he worked seven or eight years at this group of animals.

To his children the habit of working at barnacles seemed a commonplace human function, like eating or breathing, and it is reported that one of us being taken into the study of a neighbour, and seeing no dissecting table or microscope, asked with justifiable suspicion, "Then where does he do his barnacles?" When I was writing my father's _Life_, I asked Mr.

Huxley his opinion whether this seven or eight years' work had been, in his judgment, worth the great labour involved. His answer was that no man is a good judge of the speculative strain which may be put on the raw materials of science, unless he knows at first hand how this raw material is acquired, and this knowledge my father gained by his barnacles. The _Origin of Species_ is the evidence that he did not miscalculate the strain his facts would bear, for his theory is as strong as ever.

There is one influence, of the greatest importance in regard to education, with which I have not attempted to deal. I mean the personal influence of the teacher. This is a part of the pupil's environment which not even a millionaire can undertake to supply to his pet University. It is rather a thing to pray for, and to treasure when the G.o.ds send it to us.

There is a magic in the personal effect of a great teacher, which makes it comparatively unimportant what sort of science he teaches. In him the How entirely dwarfs the What.

To take an instance. My father's master, Professor Henslow, was of this type. But some of his advice was extremely bad. Thus he told my father to read Lyell's _Principles_, but on no account to believe the theoretical parts of the book. In spite of the warning, my father was at once converted to the doctrines set forth in the _Principles_, and Lyell was from that time forward the chief influence of his scientific life.

But his grat.i.tude to Henslow remained fresh and strong to the day of his death.

The same thing is true of Lyell and his instructors. When he left Oxford and went down to Scotland geologising, he must have been full of Buckland's teaching, and ought to have believed that the surface of the county of Forfar was just as the Flood left it, some few thousand years ago. But he at once proceeded to discover in Noachian Forfarshire the most striking evidence of geological change actually in progress. So that, under the influence of a great catastrophist, Lyell became the greatest of the uniformitarians, and more than any one man was the destroyer of the older point of view.

The personal effect of teacher on pupil cannot be bought at a price, nor can it be paid for in any coin but grat.i.tude. It is the possibility of earning this payment that makes the best part of a teacher's life.

VII.

THE PIPE AND TABOR

An Address to a Society Of Morris Dancers, Oxford, February 12, 1914

In the following pages I have brought together some scattered information on the instruments, especially connected with Folk-Dancing, which give the t.i.tle to my address. The coming to life of a ma.s.s of beautiful tunes and dances, in response to the patient search of Mr. Cecil Sharp and a few others, is one of the most magical occurrences of which I have any memory. In a less degree I have experienced the same sense of the unexpected, in learning that in a Kentish village, so near London as often to be darkened by the skirts of town fogs, the ancient superst.i.tion still existed of telling the bees that their master is dead. Such an unsuspected lurking of primitive belief in our midst may well give a shock of surprise. But in the resurrection of the ma.s.s of hidden music, and of the dying traditions of dances, a web of extraordinary beauty is suddenly revealed-a matter of real importance.

If tunes have souls they are shut out by death from ever again vibrating in a human tenement. They are like the _gabel-rachels_, the souls of unbaptised infants whom men in Yorkshire used to hear crying round the church as though begging to be let in. But the traditional tunes of England are no longer homeless; they have a safe refuge in the printed page. They have become immortal, or as near immortality as modern paper can insure.

Mr. Sharp has done wonderful things; he is like a naturalist who should discover that we are unconsciously surrounded by whole races of beautiful things as unknown to us as elves and fairies. In the Commemoration Service we speak gratefully of all those who "found out musical tunes."

If ever a man deserved remembrance for literally finding out tunes it is Mr. Sharp.

But to return to the musical instruments of the Morris dancers-the Pipe and Tabor. I am told that the little drum on which the piper accompanies his tune should be p.r.o.nounced 'tabber.' I have no doubt this is right.

The Oxfordshire name Dub suggests it, and the old French word Tabour is something of an argument in the same direction. In Wright's _Dialect Dictionary_ it is said that the lesser spotted woodp.e.c.k.e.r is called the "tabberer" from its habit of drumming on tree trunks. I should like to call my pipe a "tabberer's" pipe if only out of affection for the little black and white bird and his drum, but the modern p.r.o.nunciation, with a long _a_, has a strong hold and can hardly be ousted. We nowadays put the pipe before the tabor, but in Shakespearian days this was not so. In _The Tempest_ Ariel plays the tune "Flout 'em and scout 'em" on a tabor and pipe-and the artist was called a taborer {98} not a piper. In the same way the Provencal performer on the two instruments was (according to Daudet), and I hope still is, known as the tabourinaire.

Morris dancing, for which the tabor and pipe once supplied the music, is now an everyday accomplishment. At Cambridge one may see Fellows of Colleges dancing, waving handkerchiefs and knocking sticks in the old manner, and I hope the same is true of Oxford.

But piping is not so common. Some of us have heard Mr. Sharp at a lecture, or Mr. Haydn Coffin on the stage. But it is not an art likely to spread rapidly, because the old English is pipe rare and hard to come by, and copies are not common either.

I began to learn the taborer's art on a French or Basque galoubet obtained in Oxford from that kind friend of many musicians, the late Mr.

Taphouse. But it was only quite recently, when Mr. Manning lent me an old Oxfordshire instrument and allowed me to have it copied, that I made any kind of progress.

I do not know when playing the "whittle and dub" (as they were called) became extinct as a village art. It certainly existed thirty years ago, and for all I know there are still some living who could hand on the grand manner of taboring. Mr. Taphouse remembered very well the days when the pipe and drum were heard all round Oxford at fairs and village festivals. I remember his showing me a whittle with a crack in it where it had been broken over the head of a reveller by a drunken taborer.

The two instruments have been generally a.s.sociated with dancing.

Tans'ur, {100a} writing in 1772, speaks of this. "The Tabor and Pipe are two musical Instruments that always accompany each other, and are mostly used at Wakes by Country People, and at their Dancings and innocent Diversions, and often with Morris Dancers." He speaks of the pipe as played with the left hand, "on which Wrist hangs a small drum, braced in Tune to the Pipe, and beat by the Right Hand as a Ba.s.s in Time to it: both of which being well managed make pretty Harmony."

In the Wallace Collection there is a picture by N. Lancret (16901743) of a celebrated dancer, Mme. Camargo, who is accompanied by a small orchestra of two recorders, a ba.s.soon and one or more viols; these are partly hidden at the back of the scene, while a boy with pipe and tabor {100b} stands close to the dancer, giving the impression that she depends on him rather than on the more formal musicians in the background. It may remind us of the Duke of Plaza Toro, who sings a song accompanied and supported by his own particular private drum as well as by the orchestra.

The same quasi independence of the tabor and pipe is still to be found in the folk music of the Catalans, the inhabitants of the north-east of Spain. The dance which Mr. Casals-himself a Catalan-described to me, is a round dance of some complexity. It is held in high esteem as a national affair, and is danced by gentle and simple together. The band consists of a tabor and pipe, four large rustic oboes, some cornets and a double-ba.s.s. The interesting point is that the taborer always leads off with a solo, a spirited flourish which Mr. Casals was so good as to play on the piano. It is curious that there is only one such traditional flourish, and this is used whatever the dance-music may be. Mr. Casals described the effect of the whole band as moving and exciting in a high degree.

I have an old newspaper cutting of the Queen Victoria and Prince Albert watching the British sailor dance a hornpipe on the deck of a man-of-war, accompanied by a couple of marines with a drum and fife. Shakespeare evidently considered these two instruments as the military equivalent of the tabor and pipe. He makes Bened.i.c.k laugh at Claudio, in love, for throwing over the drum and fife for the taborer's music.

In the middle ages the tabor and pipe were a good deal a.s.sociated with the performances of strollers and mountebanks. On the other hand, they did not always take this role. There is a beautiful carved figure playing the pipe and tabor in the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, dating from 1270. In Strutt's _Sports and Pastimes_ (Ed. 2, Plate XXIV), a horse is shown, dancing to a tabor and pipe, from a MS. of about 1300; on Plate XXIII is a drawing of a taboring hare (without a pipe) of about the end of the 13th century. I am not aware that these instruments are known to have existed in England earlier than the 13th century.

Fra Angelico puts these instruments into the hands of an angelic lady.

Her tabor is beautifully given, the pipe is but slightly indicated. In Florence, among the singing boys of Luca della Robbia (reproduced in fig.

5), is to be found the best representation of a pipe player that I have seen. There is a comparatively modern picture of Will Kemp, {102a} the Shakespearian actor, performing his dance to Norwich. He started, apparently in 1599, on the "first Monday in cleane Lent," and succeeded in his object, though not without difficulty. His attendants' names are pleasant: Taborer, Tom Slye, Servant, Wm. Bee, Overseer, Geo. Sprat.

I am glad to say that a tabor and pipe appear in one very honourable secular affair, {102b} namely, a tournament, more correctly a joust or single combat. One of the combatants is supported by a bagpipe, the other by a tabor and pipe. It must be confessed, however, that the taborer was not well treated in mediaeval times, badly paid, and not received with the honour given to minstrels.

[Picture: Fig. 5.-Pipe and Tabor]

I like the rustic character of the pipe, and its a.s.sociation with cheerful mediaeval vagabonds, and, still more, its memories of centuries of village dances. I wish it had found a place in that "dancing in the chequered shade," in which Milton has immortalised the jocund rebecks.

But Milton was a player of the ba.s.s viol, and does not show any especial feeling for wind instruments, so at least I gather from Welch's interesting book. {103a}

The taborer's pipe is a whistle; it happens to be made of wood, but its musical structure is precisely that of the penny whistle, except in one important particular, that it has but three holes in place of six. The pipe is therefore a poor relation of that beautiful but extinct instrument the _recorder_ {103b} which is only a wooden whistle. The recorder has a low, hollow, but most effective tone, and I shall never forget the ravishing effect of a quartet of recorders as played at a concert given by Mr. Galpin, the well-known authority on old English instruments. The taborer's pipe has none of the sweetness of the recorder; it is essentially a shrill instrument; indeed, I am told by a philologist that its old German name _Schwegel_ contains a root implying shrillness. Another old German name is _Stamentien Pfeiffe_, which my philological friend tells me does not occur in the best German dictionary, and is of unknown origin.

As I have said, the pipe has but three holes (stopped by the index, middle finger and thumb); these give four fundamental tones, which however do not occur in the working scale of the instrument. In the penny whistle, and most wood-wind instruments, the octave or first harmonic gives the means of extending the scale. But in the taborer's pipe the whole of the workable scale consists of harmonics; what corresponds to the lower octave in the penny whistle-the non-harmonic or fundamental part of the register-can only be faintly sounded. It is the first harmonic or octave of the lowest of these faint notes that forms the bottom note of the scale of the three-holed pipe. {104a} This note is approximately D of the modern flat pitch. By successively raising the middle and index fingers and then the thumb, E, F, and G are sounded.

Then all the finger holes are again closed, and by a little extra impulse given to the breath A is sounded, being the harmonic 5th of the lower D.

Then follow B and C as harmonic 5ths of E and F, and the final D as the octave of the lowest tone. Above this a variable number of notes-about four-are producible by cross-fingerings. The ordinary work-a-day scale of the taborer's pipe corresponds to the 12 or 13 uppermost notes of a seven octave P-F., or to the upper notes of a piccolo. The galoubet's scale begins on a B flat one-third below the taborer's pipe. There was also a ba.s.s galoubet. This instrument is known from the figures in Praetorius {104b} (1618), and also from one solitary pipe which has escaped destruction. Mr. Galpin has a copy of it in his wonderful collection, and has allowed me to play on it. {105a}

Mersenne, {105b} in speaking of the performance of an Englishman, John Price, may give to some unwary reader the impression that the said John could play a continuous scale of three octaves. But it is quite clear that Mersenne included the faint D an octave below the lowest harmonic note, so that Price could produce an _interval_ of three octaves but a continuous _scale_ of only two octaves. This is not impossible. I can play two out-of-tune shrieking notes above my high A, or 12th note, so that I can, after a fashion, get within one note of John Price, and I live in hopes of acquiring yet another and tying with him. The uppermost sounds are made by what was technically known as _pinching_, _i.e._ crooking the thumb and forcing the nail into the top hole, so that only a minute stream of air escapes. An old pipe of mine shows the mark of the pinching thumb nail. Mr. Forsyth speaks of "an instrument with only a few notes" as being "much restricted in the way of compa.s.s": {105c} this is not quite just to the taborer's pipe.

In relation to Mr. Forsyth's discussion on the _diauloi_, it should be remembered that the double pipe still exists in Russia. It is described by Mahillon {106} under the name of the Gelaka. The fundamental tones of the two instruments are the lower F sharp in the treble stave, and the B natural above it. Mahillon adds: "tantot elles se partagent la melodie, d'autres fois elles font entendre des intonations doubles."

With regard to the Greek double-pipe, I am sure that Mr. Forsyth is right, and that the bandage (_phorbeia_), which is commonly said to have served to compress the cheeks, must have had some other use. I have no doubt that he is justified in a.s.suming that the bandage served to support the instrument. In a pipe with three holes on the upper surface a certain amount of grip on the instrument is given by pressure of the little finger above and the thumb below, and with practice it would be quite possible to manage the instrument. Still, the bandage would give freedom to the fingers, and for the four-holed pipe this form of support would be absolutely necessary. My conclusions are based on experiments on the penny whistle temporarily converted into an instrument for one hand.

In speculating on the evolution of the taborer's pipe, it must be remembered that its harmonics (on which, as I have said, its scale depends) are those of a cylindrical pipe, and a pipe that is long in relation to its bore. I like to think that it had its origin in some of the many natural hollow cylinders found among plants, for instance, the reed gra.s.s that grows in fens and d.y.k.es, or the elder which supplies a pipe when its pith is bored out, and is perhaps more familiar as the parent of pop-guns than of musical instruments. Then again, there are the hollow stalks of umbelliferous plants, such as angelica and hemlock.