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I
“Broken” were too abrupt a word. My sleep was not broken, but suddenly
melted and swept away by a flow of music from the night without,--music
that filled me with expectant ecstasy by the very first gush of its
sweetness: a serenade,--a playing of flutes and mandolines.
The flutes had dove-tones; and they cooed and moaned and purled;--and
the mandolines throbbed through the liquid plaint of them, like a
beating of hearts. The players I could not see: they were standing in
heavy shadows flung into the street by a tropical moon,--shadows of
plantain and of tamarind.
Nothing in all the violet gloom moved but that music, and the
fire-flies,--great bright slow sparks of orange and of emerald. The
warm air held its breath; the plumes of the palms were still; and the
haunting circle of the sea, blue even beneath the moon, lay soundless as
a circle of vapor.
* * * * *
Flutes and mandolines--a Spanish melody--nothing more. Yet it seemed as
if the night itself were speaking, or, out of the night some passional
life long since melted into Nature’s mystery, but continuing to haunt
the tepid, odorous, sparkling darkness of that strange world, which
sleeps under the sun, and wakens only to the stars. And its utterance
was the ghostly reiteration of rapture that had been, and never again
could be,--an utterance of infinite tenderness and of immeasurable
regret.
Never before had I felt how the simplest of music could express what
no other art is able even to suggest;--never before had I known
the astonishing possibilities of melody without ornament, without
artifice,--yet with a charm as bewildering, as inapprehensible, as the
Greek perception of the grace supreme.
Now nothing in perfect art can be only voluptuous; and this music,
in despite of its caress, was immeasurably, ineffably sad. And
the exquisite blending of melancholy with passion in a motive so
simple,--one low long cooing motive, over and over again repeated, like
a dove’s cry,--had a _strangeness_ of beauty like the musical thought
of a vanished time,--one rare survival, out of an era more warmly human
than our own, of some lost art of melody.