d
beautiful monster could stir more surprise and curiosity. It is but
shifting the scene from a domestic dwelling to a concert-hall to notice
how much sympathetic lying is in all applause. We saw a young man
vigorously clap the performance to which he had not listened, and, when
the _encore_ took effect, return immediately to his noisy and disturbing
engrossment in the young ladies' society from whose impertinent
whispering he had only rested for the moment, troubling all who sat near
him both with his talk and his sympathetic lie. A true man will not move
a finger or lisp a syllable to echo what he does not apprehend and
approve. A true man never assents anywise to what is error to him. In
the delicious letters of Mendelssohn we read of an application by a
distinguished lady made to him to write a piece of music to accompany
the somewhat famous lines known as "Napoleon's Midnight Review." The
great artist, feeling the untruth to his genius of any such attempt at
description in sound, with gentle energy declines the request. He
affirms that music is a most sober thing in his thoughts, that notes
have their veracity as well as words, and even a deeper relation to
reality than any other tongue or dialect of province or people, and that
acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his
function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more
perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than
turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or
transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic
lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was
it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The
most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is
direct to the feelings, could not induce him to tell a sympathetic lie.
Would that the writers and speakers of plain English, and of their
mother-tongue in every vernacular, might take example from the
conscientious creator, who would not put a particle of cant into the
crooked marks and ruled bars which are such a mystery to the
uninitiated, blot with one demi-semi-quaver of falsehood his papers, or
leave aught but truth of the heavenly sphere at a single point on any
line! Then our sternest utterance with each other would be concord, our
common questions and answers more melodiously responsive than chants in
great cathedrals, and our lowest whisp