CHAPTER XXVIII

1890

STUDYING COUNTERPOINT AND TAKING LEAVE

OF EVOLUTION

DURING 1888 or 1889, at the house of Miss Bertha 1890 Aet. 54 Thomas, we met Mademoiselle Gabrielle Vaillant. As the reader knows, Butler had met her years before at Miss Savage's. I also had met her at my mother's house in London, where she used to come to give lessons on the violin to my elder sister, who, however, did not proceed far with the violin, and began to learn the zither. I remember Mademoiselle Vaillant's scorn and anger when she heard that one of her pupils had given up the violin for that contemptible instrument, the zither. She was a performer of considerable attainments and of great taste, but seldom appeared in public because, owing to an accident in her childhood, she was lame. She made her living by teaching, and had a wide circle of pupils. She very kindly undertook to give me lessons on the violaliterally to give me lessons, for she would not allow me to pay. We saw a great deal of her, and often went to her house, where she and her pupils sometimes played our music through. Her health broke down, and she died in 1899, at the age of forty-six.

In 1889 Butler was asked to sign a petition-but we may as well have his note about it:

MRS. ROSSETTI AND "ALMOST "

Mrs. W. M. Rossetti, née Madox Brown (whom by the way I hardly know) sent me a note a few weeks back desiring me to

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1890 come and sign a memorial in order to get a pension for her sister Aet. 54 (Dr. Hueffer's widow). Dr. Hueffer was musical critic for The

Times and ought to have insured his life, but it seems he had not done So, and Mrs. Hueffer must therefore have a pension. I did not like signing. I knew nothing of Dr. Hueffer, except that he would have snarled at my music if he had ever taken any. notice of it, which he assuredly did not. I shall never get any public money myself and am therefore naturally jealous of seeing others get it. The people who get pensions are invariably those who are most bitter and contemptuous towards myself; nevertheless I thought that to sign would be, as Jones expressed it, "the smoothest progression open to me"; accordingly I said I would call and sign which, at the appointed hour, I did.

She, of course, was on her good behaviour; so was I, for there is no use in doing things by halves. We deplored the rapid flight of time, and Mrs. Rossetti said she felt as though her life had passed by and she had nothing to show for it. I said that was exactly how I felt myself.

"Oh no," she exclaimed immediately, "you have really almost something to show for your life."

I had hard work to prevent laughing, but turned it off, and I don't think she noticed it.

Dr. Hueffer being dead, Mr. J. A. Fuller Maitland followed him as musical critic for The Times, and one afternoon, early in the year, when I went to Mademoiselle Vaillant's for my lesson on the viola, I found him with her and was introduced. They were rehearsing something they were to play together at a charity concert, and when they had finished he began at once talking to me about Narcissus, of which we had sent a copy to The Times. He questioned me about our musical studies, and, finding that, as he had suspected, neither Butler nor I had ever done any exercises in counterpoint, he strongly urged us to study under that learned musician and incomparable teacher, William Smith Rockstro (1823-1895). I talked the proposal over with Butler, who did not much like the idea of lessons, and was busy with his Life of Dr. Butler; it was settled, however, that no harm could come of my taking a few lessons and reporting to him. I accordingly began a course of medieval counterpoint with Rockstro, and in a few weeks Butler became so much interested in what I told him that nothing would do but

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ROCKSTRO AND HANDEL

91

he must have lessons also. I was a little nervous as to 1890 what this might lead to, because Rockstro was a pupil of Aet. 54 Mendelssohn, whose Life he had written, and among his fellow-pupils, besides Joachim and Otto Goldschmidt, had been Madame Schumann. We did a great many exercises in the ecclesiastical modes, and composed a few academic fugues, and Butler readily forgave Rockstro's association with Mendelssohn and Madame Schumann and also any troublesome pedantry, because he found him to be as devoted a lover as himself of Handel, whose Life he had also written. There was never a lesson without frequent references to Handel. I found among Butler's papers this passage in an early draft of his song, "Tears of Joy" in our oratorio Ulysses:

And on the MS., in Rockstro's writing, is this characteristic note about the two B's in the last bar:

This passage is written quite correctly; but according to the practice of the eighteenth century, C must be sung instead of the first B. This is what Handel would have insisted upon, throwing Cuzzoni out of the window for disobedience.

Rockstro spoke of modern music as "licentious meaning not that modern composers were dissolute fellows,

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1890 but that, instead of being satisfied with the pane quotidiano Aet. 54 of the rules, varied with occasional licenses, they wrote

their music in licenses and paid little attention to the rules. The classical illustration of the contrast is afforded by Handel and Bach.

"Bach," Rockstro said, "is taking niggling, restless, little irritating licenses all the time for no particular reason; Handel follows the rules with loving obedience and, when he does take a license, takes a good big one for a dramatic reason, and the effect is overwhelming."

This placing of Handel above Bach completed Rockstro's conquest of Butler, and they became great friends.

Butler told him about Freck, the shepherd at Langar, who, he was sure, slept with his face upwards (ante, I. p. 40). Freck used to ask Butler if he could "prick him out this or that part. To prick out a part is a relic of speech handed down from days when the notes were actually pricked, hence prick-song and counterpoint, and to know that Butler had actually heard the phrase as a survival, and not as an imitation, naturally interested Rockstro.

We talked about Schubert and his studying Handel's oratorios, and being thereby led to recognise his own deficiencies in counterpoint and to determine to take a course of lessons from the leading authority of his time, and we wondered what would have been the effect on his music if he had lived. Rockstro, however, was more interested in Schubert from a rather different point of view.

"Ah," he exclaimed wistfully, "what a pupil he would have made!"

Rockstro was a devout Roman Catholic, but that did not prevent him from occasionally indulging in what Butler speaks of as "the mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter" (The Authoress of the Odyssey, p. 247), and he told us an anecdote about Jullien, the famous writer of dance-music. Late in life Jullien went mad, and proposed to set the Lord's Prayer to music. His friends endeavoured to dissuade him, but he was obstinate, and declared that