'Yes, I could tell that by your head,' he answered. Then my
father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger
so distressed and shaken in the foundation of his creed that, I hear,
he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was
something in my face, and wanted to know what it was if not music."

The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of
music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally
different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular
case. "I have," he said, "no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save
my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good
from bad." Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that
he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly
clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never
could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him;
but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it "fascinates me
like a tune." Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is
"useful for only two things--a yacht and a string quartette." In his
younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De
Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre
every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was "terribly
excited" over Halevy's "La Juive," so much so indeed that he had to
"slope" in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside,
so he went into a "bierhalle" and brooded for nearly an hour over his
glass. "An opera," he mused, "is far more real than real life to me. It
seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and
most conventional illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon
me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I
don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so
constituted. Besides, it would soon pall--imagine asking for three-kreuzer
cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your
dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!" Here, as some one has
remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man--the tinsel and the
humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real.

That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural,
but in that accomplishment