Chambers's journal of popular literature, science, and art, fifth series, no. 125, vol. III, May 22, 1886

Harry Noel puffed out a long stream of white smoke as he answered carelessly: ‘Ah, I daresay he is, if what you mean is just that he’s got some remote sort of negro tinge somewhere about him—though he doesn’t look it; but I expect almost all the old West Indian families, you know, must have intermarried long ago, when English ladies were rare in the colonies, with pretty half-castes.’

Quite unwittingly, the young Englishman had trodden at once on the very tenderest and dearest corn of his proud and unbending West Indian entertainers. Pride of blood is the one form of pride that they thoroughly understand and sympathise with; and this remote hint of a possible (and probable) distant past when the purity of the white race was not quite so efficiently guaranteed as it is nowadays, roused both the fiery Dupuys immediately to a white-heat of indignation.

‘Sir,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy said stiffly, ‘you evidently don’t understand the way in which we regard these questions out here in the colonies, and especially in Trinidad. There is one thing which your English parliament has not taken from us, and can never take from us; and that is the pure European blood which flows unsullied in all our veins, nowhere polluted by the faintest taint of a vile African intermixture.’

‘Certainly,’ Mr Tom Dupuy echoed angrily, ‘if you want to call us niggers, you’d better call us niggers outright, and not be afraid of it.’

‘Upon my word,’ Harry Noel answered with an apologetic smile, ‘I hadn’t the least intention, my dear sir, of seeming to hint anything against the purity of blood in West Indians generally; I only meant, that if my friend Hawthorn—who is really a very good fellow and a perfect gentleman—does happen to have a little distant infusion of negro blood in him, it doesn’t seem to me to matter much to any of us nowadays. It must be awfully little—a mere nothing, you know; just the amount one would naturally expect if his people had intermarried once with half-castes a great many generations ago. I was only standing up for my friend, you see.—Surely,’ turning to Tom, who still glared at him like a wild beast aroused, ‘a man ought to stand up for his friends when he hears them ill spoken of.’

‘Oh, quite so,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy replied, in a mollified voice. ‘Of course, if Mr Hawthorn’s a friend of yours, and you choose to stand by him here, in spite of his natural disabilities, on the ground that you happened to know him over in England—where, I believe, he concealed the fact of his being coloured—and you don’t like now to turn your back upon him, why, naturally, that’s very honourable of you, very honourable.—Tom, my dear boy, we must both admit that Mr Noel is acting very honourably. And, indeed, we can’t expect people brought up wholly in England’—Mr Dupuy dwelt softly upon this fatal disqualification, as though aware that Harry must be rather ashamed of it—‘to feel upon these points exactly as we do, who have a better knowledge and insight into the negro blood and the negro character.’

‘Certainly not,’ Tom Dupuy continued maliciously. ‘People in England don’t understand these things at all as we do.—Why, Mr Noel, you mayn’t be aware of it, but even among the highest English aristocracy there are an awful lot of regular coloured people, out-and-out mulattoes. West Indian heiresses in the old days used to go home—brown girls, or at anyrate young women with a touch of the tar-brush—daughters of governors and so forth, on the wrong side of the house—you understand’—Mr Tom Dupuy accompanied these last words with an upward and backward jerk of his left thumb, supplemented by a peculiarly ugly grimace, intended to be facetious—‘the sort of trash no decent young fellow over here would have so much as touched with a pair of tongs (in the way of marrying ’em, I mean); and when they got across to England, were snapped up at once by dukes and marquises, whose descendants, after all, though they may be lords, are really nothing better, you see, than common brown people!’

He spoke snappishly, but Harry only looked across at him in mild wonder. On the calm and unquestioning pride of a Lincolnshire Noel, remarks such as these fell flat and pointless. If a Noel had chosen to marry a kitchen-maid, according to their simple old-fashioned faith, he would have ennobled her at once, and lifted her up into his own exalted sphere of life and action. Her children after her would have been Lincolnshire Noels, the equals of any duke or marquis in the United Kingdom. So Harry only smiled benignly, and answered in his easy off-hand manner: ‘By Jove, I shouldn’t wonder at all if that were really the case now. One reads in Thackeray, you know, so much about the wealthy West Indian heiresses, with suspiciously curly hair, who used to swarm in London in the old slavery days. But of course, Mr Dupuy, it’s a well-known fact that all our good families have been awfully recruited by actresses and so forth. I believe some statistical fellow or other has written a book to show that if it weren’t for the actresses, the peerage and baronetage would all have died out long ago, of pure inanition. I daresay the West Indian heiresses, with the frizzy hair, helped to fulfil the same good and useful purpose, by bringing an infusion of fresh blood every now and then into our old families.’ And Harry ran his hand carelessly through his own copious curling black locks, in perfect unconsciousness of the absurdly malapropos nature of that instinctive action at that particular moment. His calm sense of utter superiority—that innate belief so difficult to shake, even on the most rational grounds, in most well-born and well-bred Englishmen—kept him even from suspecting the real drift of Tom Dupuy’s reiterated innuendoes.

‘You came out to Barbadoes to look after some property of your father’s, I believe?’ Mr Dupuy put in, anxious to turn the current of the conversation from this very dangerous and fitful channel.

‘I did,’ Harry Noel answered unconcernedly. ‘My father’s, or rather my mother’s. Her people have property there. We’re connected with Barbadoes, indeed. My mother’s family were Barbadian planters.’

At the word, Tom Dupuy almost jumped from his seat and brought his fist down heavily upon the groaning table. ‘They were?’ he cried inquiringly. ‘Barbadian planters? You don’t mean to say, then, Mr Noel, that some of your own people were really and truly born West Indians?’

‘Why on earth should he want to get so very excited about it?’ Harry Noel thought to himself hastily. ‘What on earth can it matter to him whether my people were Barbadian planters or Billingsgate fishmongers?’—‘Yes, certainly, they were,’ he went on to Tom Dupuy with a placid smile of quiet amusement. ‘Though my mother was never in the island herself from the time she was a baby, I believe, still all her family were born and bred there, for some generations.—But why do you ask me? Did you know anything of her people—the Budleighs of the Wilderness?’

‘No, no; I didn’t know anything of them,’ Tom Dupuy replied hurriedly, with a curious glance sideways at his uncle.—‘But, ’pon my honour, Uncle Theodore, it’s really a very singular thing, now one comes to think of it, that Mr Noel should happen to come himself, too, from a West Indian family.’

As Harry Noel happened that moment to be lifting his cup of coffee to his lips, he didn’t notice that Tom Dupuy was pointing most significantly to his own knuckles, and signalling to his uncle, with eyes and fingers, to observe Harry’s. And if he had, it isn’t probable that a Lincolnshire Noel would even have suspected the hidden meaning of those strange and odd-looking monkey-like antics.

By-and-by, Harry rose from the table carelessly, and asked in a casual way whether Mr Dupuy would kindly excuse him; he wanted to go and pay a call which he felt he really mustn’t defer beyond the second day from his arrival in Trinidad.

‘You’ll take a mount?’ Mr Dupuy inquired hospitably. ‘You know, we never dream of walking out in these regions. All the horses in my stable are entirely at your disposal. How far did you propose going, Mr Noel? A letter of introduction you wish to deliver, I suppose, to the governor or somebody?’

Harry paused and hesitated for a second. Then he answered as politely as he was able: ‘No, not exactly a letter of introduction. I feel I mustn’t let the day pass without having paid my respects as early as possible to Mrs Hawthorn.’

Tom Dupuy nudged his uncle; but the elder planter had too much good manners to make any reply save to remark that one of his niggers would be ready to show Mr Noel the way to the district judge’s—ah—dwelling-place at Mulberry.

As soon as Harry’s back was turned, however, Mr Tom Dupuy sank back incontinently on the dining-room sofa and exploded in a loud burst of boisterous laughter.

‘My dear Tom,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy interposed nervously, ‘what on earth are you doing? Young Noel will certainly overhear you. Upon my word, though I can’t say I agree with all the young fellow’s English sentiments, I really don’t see that there’s anything in particular to laugh at in him. He seems to me a very gentlemanly, well-bred, intelligent—— Why, goodness gracious, Tom, what has come over you so suddenly? You look for all the world as if you were positively going to kill yourself outright with laughing about nothing!’

Mr Tom Dupuy removed his handkerchief hastily from his mouth, and with an immense effort to restrain his merriment, exclaimed in a low suppressed voice: ‘Why, now, Uncle Theodore, do you mean to tell me you don’t see the whole joke! you don’t understand the full absurdity of the situation?’

Mr Dupuy gazed back at him blankly. ‘No more than I understand why on earth you are making such a confounded fool of yourself now,’ he answered contemptuously.

Tom Dupuy calmed himself slowly with a terrific effort, and blurted out at last, in a mysterious undertone: ‘Why, the point of it is, don’t you see, Uncle Theodore, the fellow’s a coloured man himself, as sure as ever you and I are standing here this minute!’

A light burst in upon Mr Dupuy’s benighted understanding with extraordinary rapidity. ‘He is!’ he cried, clapping his hand to his forehead hurriedly in the intense excitement of a profoundly important discovery. ‘He is, he is! There can’t be a doubt about it! Baronet or no baronet, as sure as fate, Tom, my boy, that man’s a regular brown man!’

‘I knew he was,’ Tom Dupuy replied exultantly, ‘the very moment I first set eyes upon that ugly head of his! I was sure he was a nigger as soon as I looked at him! I suspected it at once from his eyes and his knuckles. But when he told me his mother was a Barbadian woman—why, then, I knew, as sure as fate, it was all up with him.’

‘You’re quite right, quite right, Tom; I haven’t a doubt about it,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy continued helplessly, wringing his hands before him in bewilderment and horror. ‘And the worst of it is I have asked him to stop here as long as he’s in Trinidad! What a terrible thing if it were to get about over the whole island that I’ve asked a brown man to come and stop for an indefinite period under the same roof with your cousin Nora!’

Tom Dupuy was not wanting in chivalrous magnanimity. He leaned back on the sofa and screwed his mouth up for a moment with a comical expression; then he answered slowly: ‘It’s a very serious thing, of course, to accuse a man offhand of being a nigger. We mustn’t condemn him unheard or without evidence. We must try to find out all we can about his family. Luckily, he’s given us the clue himself. He said his mother was a Barbadian woman—a Budleigh of the Wilderness. We’ll track him down. I’ve made a mental note of it!’

Just at that moment, Nora walked quietly into the dining-room to ask the gentlemen whether they meant to go for a ride by-and-by in the cool of the evening. ‘For if you do, papa,’ she said in explanation, ‘you know you must send for Nita to the pasture, for Mr Noel will want a horse, and you’re too heavy for any but the cob, so you’ll have to get up Nita for Mr Noel.’

Tom Dupuy glanced at her suspiciously. ‘I suppose since your last particular friend fell over the gully that night at Banana Garden,’ he said hastily, ‘you’ll be picking up next with a new favourite in this fine-spoken, new-fangled, haw-haw, English fellow!’

Nora looked back at him haughtily and defiantly. ‘Tom Dupuy,’ she answered with a curl of her lip (she always addressed him by both names together), ‘you are quite mistaken—utterly mistaken. I don’t feel in the least prepossessed by Mr Noel’s personal appearance.’

‘Why not? Why not?’ Tom inquired eagerly.

‘I don’t know by what right you venture to cross-question me about such a matter; but as you ask me, I don’t mind answering you. Mr Noel is a shade or two too dark by far ever to take my own fancy.’

Tom whistled low to himself and gave a little start. ‘By Jove,’ he said, half aloud and half to himself, ‘that was a Dupuy that spoke that time, certainly. After all, the girl’s got some proper pride still left in her. She doesn’t want to marry him, _although_ he’s a brown man. I always thought myself, as a mere matter of taste, she positively preferred these woolly-headed mulattoes!’

JOHN HULLAH.

In 1870, when Mrs John Hullah was canvassing on behalf of Miss Garrett, M.D., then a candidate for the London School Board, several persons suggested that Mrs Hullah herself should have been proposed—‘For it’s a name that ought to be on the Board.’ That the name of Hullah must at one time have been a household word might be gathered from Lord Wharncliffe’s statement in the House of Lords, that between the end of 1841 and July 1842, fifty thousand persons were enlisted as musical students under the superintendence of Mr Hullah and his pupils. Very early in life, Mr Hullah’s thoughts had been occupied with the great problem of popularising the noble and refining art of music, and this problem it was his life’s labour to deal with, bringing to the task considerable wisdom and culture, magnificent patience, and generous enthusiasm. At a time when musical culture was very limited indeed, Hullah stood forward to proclaim that this evil was readily curable, that almost any child might learn to sing on scientific principles, so as to be able to pursue the study after leaving school, and that music deserved to be dealt with systematically, instead of being treated as a mere ‘relaxation from severer studies.’ As showing how these ideas were promoted during a long and busy career, the _Life of John Hullah_, now published by his widow (London: Longmans), and including a few pages of autobiography, will be welcome not only to musicians but to social reformers, and all who have any respect for the pioneers of progress.

On the authority of Grove’s _Dictionary of Music and Musicians_, Mr Hullah informs us that he first saw the light in the city of Worcester, on the 27th of June 1812. In a private school, he received a remarkably good education in English literature, but apparently in nothing else; and his future career was still an open question, when it was suggested, by a musical family very intimate with the Hullahs, that John should be trained to the profession of music. Accordingly, he became a pupil of William Horsley, the celebrated glee-writer. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Hullah himself ventured on the composition of a glee; and in 1833, he became a student at the Royal Academy of Music, then possessing, in his opinion, a reputation which it has never exceeded. Here, among his fellow-students, he met Miss Fanny Dickens, sister of the novelist, and shortly afterwards he appears to have become intimately acquainted with Charles Dickens himself. Mr Hullah’s first marriage took place on December 20, 1838; and early in the following year, the idea of a popular method of teaching singing began to engage his attention. He went to Paris to observe the method of M. Wilhem, and soon afterwards began teaching on a small scale at the Normal School at Battersea. Through Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, the sympathy of many influential persons was secured, and Hullah awoke to find himself famous. All classes from royalty downward were eager for information as to the new method. Lectures were required in all parts of the country; and owing probably to Mr Hullah’s own enthusiasm, very many of his pupils became teachers.

In 1844, Hullah became Professor of Music at King’s College, London, an office which he filled with acceptance for thirty years. He held similar appointments at Bedford College and Queen’s College, two well-known schools for girls; and, indeed, was associated with F. D. Maurice in the founding of the latter institution.

The erection of St Martin’s Hall, the scene of his most public labours, was an enterprise entered upon by him with characteristic light-heartedness. ‘To the work carried out in St Martin’s Hall,’ says Mrs Hullah, ‘is undoubtedly traceable the present all but universal study of music by every class in England; but it may certainly be said that for the chief director of that early movement, splendidly as he was supported and encouraged by his immediate friends, the results were ruinous in every way.’ In this costly building he took up his residence, in order to be near the scene of his classes and concerts, and for more than fourteen years he carried on a severe struggle for the cause which lay so near his heart. In 1861, when the Hall was destroyed by fire, and ‘Mr Hullah, now past his prime, stood a ruined man in the midst of a large family,’ a host of influential friends—including Charles Dickens, Henry Chorley, Sir J. Kay Shuttleworth, Sir Arthur Helps, and Mr (now Lord) Coleridge—rallied round him, and gave him a new start in life.

In 1861, Hullah published his Royal Institution Lectures on _The History of Modern Music_, a work which met with a cordial reception, and has since been translated into Italian by Alberto Visetti. Hullah’s failure in 1865 to gain the appointment of Professor of Music at Edinburgh was apparently as crushing as any misfortune could be to so buoyant a nature. There was scarcely a spot in the world which he would have chosen for his home in preference to Edinburgh. His lectures at the Philosophical Institution and his numerous concerts had made him well known there, and gained him many warm friends, who apparently encouraged him to suppose that his election was certain. There can be no doubt that he would have been a brilliant professor and an honour to the university; for he was a man of wide culture and boundless enthusiasm for his art. That ‘capacity for general appreciation,’ which he pointed to in Mendelssohn, was very properly cited by a friend as the striking feature in Hullah’s own character. Natural scenery, poetry, painting, and especially architecture, all found in him a thoughtful appreciation.

But admirably as he was fitted for such a professorship, perhaps the post which he received in 1872 of government Inspector of Music was even more suited to call forth his best talents and energies. His great objects were, firstly, to abolish singing by ear; and secondly, to encourage the formation of mixed choirs. He wished women to have more systematic training in choirs, so as to supersede the passionless soprano of boys and the falsetto counter-tenor of men. What he did towards the promotion of a scientific method of singing, may be judged from the fact, that during nine years, he examined sixteen thousand male and female students who expected to become teachers, and in that case would probably give their pupils the benefit of his system. His official position brought him into delicate relations with the advocates of other singing methods, but although of course we find occasional depreciatory remarks, his tone is generally very fair. Referring to the tonic sol-fa system, he went so far on one occasion as to recommend the government to refuse their sanction to ‘a notation or alphabet absolutely unknown out of Great Britain, the closest acquaintance with which fails to enable its possessors to read music as it is written by musicians.’ This seems at first sight inconsistent with his repeated deprecation of ‘any attempt to enforce on the musical instructors in training-schools directly or indirectly the adoption of any particular method of instruction, books, or exercises whatever;’ but possibly his meaning was that the tonic sol-faists, however their course might begin, should ultimately include in it a knowledge of the old notation—a provision to which they could not possibly object.