Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862
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Naturally, Tom became a nine-days' wonder on the plantation. He was
brought in as an after-dinner's amusement; visitors asked for him as the
show of the place. There was hardly a conception, however, in the minds
of those who heard him, of how deep the cause for wonder lay. The
planters' wives and daughters of the neighborhood were not people
who would be apt to comprehend music as a science, or to use it as a
language; they only saw in the little negro, therefore, a remarkable
facility for repeating the airs they drummed on their pianos,--in a
different manner from theirs, it is true,--which bewildered them. They
noticed, too, that, however the child's fingers fell on the keys,
cadences followed, broken, wandering, yet of startling beauty and
pathos. The house-servants, looking in through the open doors at the
little black figure perched up before the instrument, while unknown,
wild harmony drifted through the evening air, had a better conception
of him. He was possessed; some ghost spoke through him: which is a fair
enough definition of genius for a Georgian slave to offer.
Mr. Oliver, as we said, was indulgent. Tom was allowed to have constant
access to the piano; in truth, he could not live without it; when
deprived of music now, actual physical debility followed: the gnawing
Something had found its food at last. No attempt was made, however, to
give him any scientific musical teaching; nor--I wish it distinctly
borne in mind--has he ever at any time received such instruction.
The planter began to wonder what kind of a creature this was which he
had bought, flesh and soul. In what part of the unsightly baby-carcass
had been stowed away these old airs, forgotten by every one else,
and some of them never heard by the child but once, but which he now
reproduced, every note intact, and with whatever quirk or quiddity of
style belonged to the person who originally had sung or played them?
Stranger still the harmonies which he had never heard, had learned from
no man. The sluggish breath of the old house, being enchanted, grew into
quaint and delicate whims of music, never the same, changing every day.
Never glad: uncertain, sad minors always, vexing the content of the
hearer,--one inarticulate, unanswered question of pain in all, making
them one. Even the vulgarest listener was troubled, hardly knowing
why,--how sorry Tom's music was!
At last the time came when the door was to be opened, when some
listener, not vulgar, recognizing the child as God made him, induced his
master to remove him from the plantation. Something ought to be done for
him; the world ought not to be cheated of this pleasure; besides--the
money that could be made! So Mr. Oliver, with a kindly feeling for Tom,
proud, too, of this agreeable monster which his plantation had grown,
and sensible that it was a more fruitful source of revenue than
tobacco-fields, set out with the boy, literally to seek their fortune.
The first exhibition of him was given, I think, in Savannah, Georgia;
thence he was taken to Charleston, Richmond, to all the principal cities
and towns in the Southern States.
This was in 1858. From that time until the present Tom has lived
constantly an open life, petted, feted, his real talent befogged by
exaggeration, and so pampered and coddled that one might suppose the
only purpose was to corrupt and wear it out. For these reasons this
statement is purposely guarded, restricted to plain, known facts.
No sooner had Tom been brought before the public than the pretensions
put forward by his master commanded the scrutiny of both scientific
and musical skeptics. His capacities were subjected to rigorous tests.
Fortunately for the boy: for, so tried,--harshly, it is true, yet
skilfully,--they not only bore the trial, but acknowledged the touch
as skilful; every day new powers were developed, until he reached his
limit, beyond which it is not probable he will ever pass. That limit,
however, establishes him as an anomaly in musical science.
Physically, and in animal temperament, this negro ranks next to the
lowest Guinea type: with strong appetites and gross bodily health,
except in one particular, which will be mentioned hereafter. In the
every-day apparent intellect, in reason or judgment, he is but one
degree above an idiot,--incapable of comprehending the simplest
conversation on ordinary topics, amused or enraged with trifles such
as would affect a child of three years old. On the other side, his
affections are alive, even vehement, delicate in their instinct as a
dog's or an infant's; he will detect the step of any one dear to him in
a crowd, and burst into tears, if not kindly spoken to.
His memory is so accurate that he can repeat, without the loss of a
syllable, a discourse of fifteen minutes in length, of which he does
not understand a word. Songs, too, in French or German, after a single
hearing, he renders not only literally in words, but in notes, style,
and expression. His voice, however, is discordant, and of small compass.
In music, this boy of twelve years, born blind, utterly ignorant of a
note, ignorant of every phase of so-called musical science, interprets
severely classical composers with a clearness of conception in which
he excels, and a skill in mechanism equal to that of our second-rate
artists. His concerts usually include any themes selected by the
audience from the higher grades of Italian or German opera. His
comprehension of the meaning of music, as a prophetic or historical
voice which few souls utter and fewer understand, is clear and vivid: he
renders it thus, with whatever mastery of the mere material part he may
possess, fingering, dramatic effects, etc.: these are but means to him,
not an end, as with most artists. One could fancy that Tom was never
traitor to the intent or soul of the theme. What God or the Devil meant
to say by this or that harmony, what the soul of one man cried aloud to
another in it, this boy knows, and is to that a faithful witness. His
deaf, uninstructed soul has never been tampered with by art-critics who
know the body well enough of music, but nothing of the living creature
within. The world is full of these vulgar souls that palter with eternal
Nature and the eternal Arts, blind to the Word who dwells among us
therein. Tom, or the daemon in Tom, was not one of them.
With regard to his command of the instrument, two points have been
especially noted by musicians: the unusual frequency of occurrence of
_tours de force_ in his playing, and the scientific precision of his
manner of touch. For example, in a progression of augmented chords, his
mode of fingering is invariably that of the schools, not that which
would seem most natural to a blind child never taught to place a finger.
Even when seated with his back to the piano, and made to play in that
position, (a favorite feat in his concerts,) the touch is always
scientifically accurate.
The peculiar power which Tom possesses, however, is one which requires
no scientific knowledge of music in his audiences to appreciate.
Placed at the instrument with any musician, he plays a perfect bass
accompaniment to the treble of music _heard for the first time as
he plays_. Then taking the seat vacated by the other performer, he
instantly gives the entire piece, intact in brilliancy and symmetry, not
a note lost or misplaced. The selections of music by which this power
of Tom's was tested, two years ago, were sometimes fourteen and sixteen
pages in length; on one occasion, at an exhibition at the White House,
after a long concert, he was tried with two pieces,--one thirteen, the
other twenty pages long, and was successful.
We know of no parallel case to this in musical history. Grimm tells us,
as one of the most remarkable manifestations of Mozart's infant genius,
that at the age of nine he was required to give an accompaniment to an
aria which he had never heard before, and without notes. There were
false accords in the first attempt, he acknowledges; but the second was
pure. When the music to which Tom plays _secondo_ is strictly classical,
he sometimes balks for an instant in passages; to do otherwise would
argue a creative power equal to that of the master composers; but when
any chordant harmony runs through it, (on which the glowing negro soul
can seize, you know,) there are no "false accords," as with the infant
Mozart. I wish to draw especial attention to this power of the boy, not
only because it is, so far as I know, unmatched in the development of
any musical talent, but because, considered in the context of his
entire intellectual structure, it involves a curious problem. The mere
repetition of music heard but once, even when, as in Tom's case, it
is given with such incredible fidelity, and after the lapse of years,
demands only a command of mechanical skill, and an abnormal condition of
the power of memory; but to play _secondo_ to music never heard or seen
implies the comprehension of the full drift of the symphony in its
current,--a capacity to create, in short. Yet such attempts as Tom has
made to dictate music for publication do not sustain any such inference.
They are only a few light marches, gallops, etc., simple and plaintive
enough, but with easily detected traces of remembered harmonies: very
different from the strange, weird improvisations of every day. One would
fancy that the mere attempt to bring this mysterious genius within him
in bodily presence before the outer world woke, too, the idiotic nature
to utter its reproachful, unable cry. Nor is this the only bar by which
poor Tom's soul is put in mind of its foul bestial prison. After any
too prolonged effort, such as those I have alluded to, his whole bodily
frame gives way, and a complete exhaustion of the brain follows,
accompanied with epileptic spasms. The trial at the White House,
mentioned before, was successful, but was followed by days of illness.
Being a slave, Tom never was taken into a Free State; for the same
reason his master refused advantageous offers from European managers.
The highest points North at which his concerts were given were Baltimore
and the upper Virginia towns. I heard him sometime in 1860. He remained
a week or two in the town, playing every night.
The concerts were unique enough. They were given in a great barn of
a room, gaudy with hot, soot-stained frescoes, chandeliers, walls
splotched with gilt. The audience was large, always; such as a
provincial town affords: not the purest bench of musical criticism
before which to bring poor Tom. Beaux and belles, siftings of old
country families, whose grandfathers trapped and traded and married with
the Indians,--the savage thickening of whose blood told itself in high
cheekbones, flashing jewelry, champagne-bibbing, a comprehension of
the tom-tom music of schottisches and polkas; money-made men and their
wives, cooped up by respectability, taking concerts when they were given
in town, taking the White Sulphur or Cape May in summer, taking beef for
dinner, taking the pork-trade in winter,--_toute la vie en programme_;
the _debris_ of a town, the roughs, the boys, school-children,--Tom was
nearly as well worth a quarter as the negro-minstrels; here and there
a pair of reserved, homesick eyes, a peculiar, reticent face, some
whey-skinned ward-teacher's, perhaps, or some German cobbler's, but
hints of a hungry soul, to whom Beethoven and Mendelssohn knew how
to preach an unerring gospel. The stage was broad, planked, with a
drop-curtain behind,--the Doge marrying the sea, I believe; in front, a
piano and chair.
Presently, Mr. Oliver, a well-natured looking man, (one thought of
that,) came forward, leading and coaxing along a little black boy,
dressed in white linen, somewhat fat and stubborn in build. Tom was
not in a good humor that night; the evening before had refused to play
altogether; so his master perspired anxiously before he could get him
placed in rule before the audience, and repeat his own little speech,
which sounded like a Georgia after-dinner gossip. The boy's head, as
I said, rested on his back, his mouth wide open constantly; his great
blubber lips and shining teeth, therefore, were all you saw when
he faced you. He required to be petted and bought like any other
weak-minded child. The concert was a mixture of music, whining, coaxing,
and promised candy and cake.
He seated himself at last before the piano, a full half-yard distant,
stretching out his arms full-length, like an ape clawing for
food,--his feet, when not on the pedals, squirming and twisting
incessantly,--answering some joke of his master's with a loud "Yha!
yha!" Nothing indexes the brain like the laugh; this was idiotic.
"Now, Tom, boy, something we like from Verdi."
The head fell farther back, the claws began to work, and those of his
harmonies which you would have chosen as the purest exponents of passion
began to float through the room. Selections from Weber, Beethoven, and
others whom I have forgotten, followed. At the close of each piece,
Tom, without waiting for the audience, would himself applaud violently,
kicking, pounding his hands together, turning always to his master
for the approving pat on the head. Songs, recitations such as I have
described, filled up the first part of the evening; then a musician from
the audience went upon the stage to put the boy's powers to the final
test. Songs and intricate symphonies were given, which it was most
improbable the boy could ever have heard; he remained standing,
utterly motionless, until they were finished, and for a moment or two
after,--then, seating himself, gave them without the break of a
note. Others followed, more difficult, in which he played the bass
accompaniment in the manner I have described, repeating instantly the
treble. The child looked dull, wearied, during this part of the trial,
and his master, perceiving it, announced the exhibition closed, when the
musician (who was a citizen of the town, by-the-way) drew out a
thick roll of score, which he explained to be a Fantasia of his own
composition, never published.
"_This_ it was impossible the boy could have heard; there could be no
trick of memory in this; and on this trial," triumphantly, "Tom would
fail."
The manuscript was some fourteen pages long,--variations on an inanimate
theme. Mr. Oliver refused to submit the boy's brain to so cruel a test;
some of the audience, even, interfered; but the musician insisted, and
took his place. Tom sat beside him,--his head rolling nervously from
side to side,--struck the opening cadence, and then, from the first note
to the last, gave the _secondo_ triumphantly. Jumping up, he fairly
shoved the man from his seat, and proceeded to play the treble with more
brilliancy and power than its composer. When he struck the last octave,
he sprang up, yelling with delight:--
"Um's got him, Massa! um's got him!" cheering and rolling about the
stage.
The cheers of the audience--for the boys especially did not wait to
clap--excited him the more. It was an hour before his master could quiet
his hysteric agitation.
That feature of the concerts which was the most painful I have not
touched upon: the moments when his master was talking, and Tom was left
to himself,--when a weary despair seemed to settle down on the distorted
face, and the stubby little black fingers, wandering over the keys,
spoke for Tom's own caged soul within. Never, by any chance, a merry,
childish laugh of music in the broken cadences; tender or wild, a
defiant outcry, a tired sigh breaking down into silence. Whatever
wearied voice it took, the same bitter, hopeless soul spoke through all:
"Bless me, even me, also, O my Father!" A something that took all the
pain and pathos of the world into its weak, pitiful cry.
Some beautiful caged spirit, one could not but know, struggled for
breath under that brutal form and idiotic brain. I wonder when it will
be free. Not in this life: the bars are too heavy.
You cannot help Tom, either; all the war is between you. He was in
Richmond in May. But (do you hate the moral to a story?) in your own
kitchen, in your own back-alley, there are spirits as beautiful, caged
in forms as bestial, that you _could_ set free, if you pleased. Don't
call it bad taste in me to speak for them. You know they are more to be
pitied than Tom,--for they are dumb.
KINDERGARTEN--WHAT IS IT?
What is a Kindergarten? I will reply by negatives. It is not
the old-fashioned infant-school. That was a narrow institution,
comparatively; the object being (I do not speak of Pestalozzi's own,
but that which we have had in this country and in England) to take
the children of poor laborers, and keep them out of the fire and the
streets, while their mothers went to their necessary labor. Very good
things, indeed, in their way. Their principle of discipline was to
circumvent the wills of children, in every way that would enable their
teachers to keep them within bounds, and quiet. It was certainly better
that they should learn to sing _by rote_ the Creed and the "definitions"
of scientific terms, and such like, than to learn the profanity and
obscenity of the streets, which was the alternative. But no mother who
wished for anything which might be called the _development_ of her child
would think of putting it into an infant-school, especially if she lived
in the country, amid
"the mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,"
where any "old grey stone" would altogether surpass, as a stand-point,
the bench of the highest class of an infant-school. In short, they
did not state the problem of infant culture with any breadth, and
accomplished nothing of general interest on the subject.
Neither is the primary public school a Kindergarten, though it is
but justice to the capabilities of that praiseworthy institution, so
important in default of a better, to say that in one of them, at the
North End of Boston, an enterprising and genial teacher has introduced
one feature of Froebel's plan. She has actually given to each of her
little children a box of playthings, wherewith to amuse itself
according to its own sweet will, at all times when not under direct
instruction,--necessarily, in her case, on condition of its being
perfectly quiet; and this one thing makes this primary school the best
one in Boston, both as respects the attainments of the scholars and
their good behavior.
_Kindergarten_ means a garden of children, and Froebel, the inventor of
it, or rather, as he would prefer to express it, _the discoverer of the
method of Nature_, meant to symbolize by the name the spirit and plan
of treatment. How does the gardener treat his plants? He studies their
individual natures, and puts them into such circumstances of soil and
atmosphere as enable them to grow, flower, and bring forth fruit,--also
to renew their manifestation year after year. He does not expect to
succeed unless he learns all their wants, and the circumstances in which
these wants will be supplied, and all their possibilities of beauty and
use, and the means of giving them opportunity to be perfected. On the
other hand, while he knows that they must not be forced against their
individual natures, he does not leave them to grow wild, but prunes
redundancies, removes destructive worms and bugs from their leaves and
stems, and weeds from their vicinity,--carefully watching to learn what
peculiar insects affect what particular plants, and how the former can
be destroyed without injuring the vitality of the latter. After all the
most careful gardener can do, he knows that the form of the plant is
predetermined in the germ or seed, and that the inward tendency must
concur with a multitude of influences, the most powerful and subtile of
which is removed in place ninety-five millions of miles away.
In the Kindergarten _children_ are treated on an analogous plan. It
presupposes gardeners of the mind, who are quite aware that they have as
little power to override the characteristic individuality of a child, or
to predetermine this characteristic, as the gardener of plants to say
that a lily shall be a rose. But notwithstanding this limitation on
one side, and the necessity for concurrence of the Spirit on the
other,--which is more independent of our modification than the remote
sun,--yet they must feel responsible, after all, for the perfection of
the development, in so far as removing every impediment, preserving
every condition, and pruning every redundance.
This analogy of education to the gardener's art is so striking, both as
regards what we can and what we cannot do, that Froebel has put every
educator into a most suggestive Normal School, by the very word which he
has given to his seminary,--Kindergarten.
If every school-teacher in the land had a garden of flowers and fruits
to cultivate, it could hardly fail that he would learn to be wise in his
vocation. For suitable preparation, the first, second, and third thing
is, to
"Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher."
The "new education," as the French call it, begins with children in the
mother's arms. Froebel had the nurses bring to his establishment, in
Hamburg, children who could not talk, who were not more than three
months old, and trained the nurses to work on his principles and by his
methods. This will hardly be done in this country, at least at present;
but to supply the place of such a class, a lady of Boston has prepared
and published, under copyright, Froebel's First Gift, consisting of six
soft balls of the three primary and the three secondary colors, which
are sold in a box, with a little manual for mothers, in which the true
principle and plan of tending babies, so as not to rasp their nerves,
but to amuse without wearying them, is very happily suggested. There
is no mother or nurse who would not be assisted by this little manual
essentially. As it says in the beginning,--"Tending babies is an art,
and every art is founded on a science of observations; for love is not
wisdom, but love must act _according to wisdom_ in order to succeed.
Mothers and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest
do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse
them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel's exercises, founded on
the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse
without wearying, to educate without vexing."
Froebel's Second Gift for children, adapted to the age from one to two
or three years, with another little book of directions, has also been
published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every
nursery; for this is the age when many a child's temper is ruined,
and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer _want of
resource and idea_, on the part of nurses and mothers.
But it is to the next age--from three years old and upwards--that the
Kindergarten becomes the desideratum, if not a necessity. The isolated
home, made into a flower-vase by the application of the principles set
forth in the Gifts[A] above mentioned, may do for babies. But every
mother and nurse knows how hard it is to meet the demands of a child
too young to be taught to read, but whose opening intelligence and
irrepressible bodily activity are so hard to be met by an adult, however
genial and active. Children generally take the temper of their whole
lives from this period of their existence. Then "the twig is bent,"
either towards that habit of self-defence which is an ever-renewing
cause of selfishness, or to the sun of love-in-exercise, which is the
exhaustless source of goodness and beauty.
[Footnote A: These Gifts, the private enterprise of an invalid lady, the
same who first brought the subject of Kindergartens so favorably before
the public in the _Christian Examiner_ for November, 1858, can be
procured at the Kindergarten, 15 Pinckney Street, Boston.]
The indispensable thing now is a sufficient society of children. It is
only in the society of equals that the social instinct can be gratified,
and come into equilibrium with the instinct of self-preservation.
Self-love, and love of others, are equally natural; and before reason
is developed, and the proper spiritual life begins, sweet and beautiful
childhood may bloom out and imparadise our mortal life. Let us only give
the social instinct of children its fair chance. For this purpose, a few
will not do. The children of one family are not enough, and do not
come along fast enough. A large company should be gathered out of many
families. It will be found that the little things are at once taken out
of themselves, and become interested in each other. In the variety,
affinities develop themselves very prettily, and the rough points of
rampant individualities wear off. We have seen a highly gifted child,
who, at home, was--to use a vulgar, but expressive word--pesky and
odious, with the exacting demands of a powerful, but untrained mind and
heart, become "sweet as roses" spontaneously, amidst the rebound of
a large, well-ordered, and carefully watched child-society. Anxious
mothers have brought us children, with a thousand deprecations and
explanations of their characters, as if they thought we were going to
find them little monsters, which their motherly hearts were persuaded
they were not, though they behaved like little sanchos at home,--and,
behold, they were as harmonious, from the very beginning, as if they had
undergone the subduing influence of a lifetime. We are quite sure that
children begin with loving others quite as intensely as they love
themselves,--forgetting themselves in their love of others,--if they
only have as fair a chance of being benevolent and self-sacrificing as
of being selfish. Sympathy is as much a natural instinct as self-love,
and no more or less innocent, in a moral point of view. Either principle
alone makes an ugly and depraved form of natural character. Balanced,
they give the element of happiness, and the conditions of spiritual
goodness and truth,--making children fit temples for the Holy Ghost to
dwell in.
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