The music hushed, and left me dreaming, and vainly trying to explain the
emotion that it had made. Of one thing only I felt assured,--that the
mystery was of other existences than mine.
For the living present, I reflected, is the whole dead past. Our
pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution,--vast
complexities of sentiency created by experience of vanished beings
more countless than the sands of a myriad seas. All personality is
recombination; and all emotions are of the dead. Yet some seem to us
more ghostly than others,--partly because of their greater relative
mystery, partly because of the immense power of the phantom waves
composing them. Among pleasurable forms, the ghostliest are the emotion
of first love, the emotion following the perception of the sublime in
nature--of terrible beauty,--and the emotion of music. Why should they
so be? Probably because the influences that arouse them thrill furthest
into our forgotten past. Frightful as the depth of the abyss of Space
is the depth of one thinking life,--measureless even by millions of
ages;--and who may divine how profoundly in certain personalities the
mystery can be moved. We only know that the deeper the thrilling, the
heavier the wave responding, and the weirder the result,--until those
profundities are reached of which a single surge brings instant death,
or makes perpetual ruin of the delicate structures of thought.
Now any music that makes powerful appeal to the emotion of love,
awakening the passional latency of the past within us, must inevitably
revive dead pain not less than dead delight. Pain of the conquest of
will by a mystery resistless and pitiless, the torture of doubt, the
pangs of rivalry, the terror of impermanency,--shadows of these and
many another sorrow have had their part in the toning of that psychical
inheritance which makes at once love’s joy and love’s anguish, and grows
forever from birth to birth.
And thus it may happen that a child, innocent of passion or of real
pain, is moved even to tears by music uttering either. Unknowingly he
feels in that utterance a shadowing of the sorrow of numberless vanished
lives.