All song, all melody, all music, means only some evolution of the
primitive natural utterance of feeling,--of that untaught speech
of sorrow, joy, or passion, whose words are tones. Even as other
tongues vary, so varies this language of tone combinations.
Wherefore melodies which move us deeply have no significance to
Japanese ears; and melodies that touch us not at all make
powerful appeal to the emotion of a race whose soul-life differs
from our own as blue differs from yellow....Still, what is the
reason of the deeper feelings evoked in me--an alien--by this
Oriental chant that I could never even learn,--by this common
song of a blind woman of the people? Surely that in the voice of
the singer there were qualities able to make appeal to something
larger than the sum of the experience of one race,--to something
wide as human life, and ancient as the knowledge of good and
evil.
One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I
heard a girl say "Good-night" to somebody passing by. Nothing but
those two little words,--"Good-night." Who she was I do not know:
I never even saw her face; and I never heard that voice again.
But still, after the passing of one hundred seasons, the memory
of her "Good-night" brings a double thrill incomprehensible of
pleasure and pain,--pain and pleasure, doubtless, not of me, not
of my own existence, but of pre-existences and dead suns.
For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once
cannot be of this life. It is of lives innumerable and forgotten.
Certainly there never have been two voices having precisely the
same quality. But in the utterance of affection there is a
tenderness of timbre common to the myriad million voices of all
humanity. Inherited memory makes familiar to even the newly-born
the meaning of the tone of caress. Inherited, no doubt,
likewise, our knowledge of the tones of sympathy, of grief, of
pity. And so the chant of a blind woman in this city of the Far
East may revive in even a Western mind emotion deeper than
individual being,--vague dumb pathos of forgotten sorrows,--dim
loving impulses of generations unremembered. The dead die never
utterly. They sleep in the darkest cells of tired hearts and busy
brains,--to be startled at rarest moments only by the echo of
some voice that recalls their past.