Long I lay awake that night, and listened to the thunder-rolls and
crashings of the mighty tide. Deeper than these distinct shocks of
noise, and all the storming of the nearer waves, was the bass of the
further surf,—a ceaseless abysmal muttering to which the building
trembled,—a sound that seemed to imagination like the sound of the
trampling of infinite cavalry, the massing of incalculable
artillery,—some rushing, from the Sunrise, of armies wide as the world.
Then I found myself thinking of the vague terror with which I had
listened, when a child, to the voice of the sea;—and I remembered that
in after-years, on different coasts in different parts of the world,
the sound of surf had always revived the childish emotion. Certainly
this emotion was older than I by thousands of thousands of
centuries,—the inherited sum of numberless terrors ancestral. But
presently there came to me the conviction that fear of the sea alone
could represent but one element of the multitudinous awe awakened by
its voice. For as I listened to that wild tide of the Suruga coast, I
could distinguish nearly every sound of fear known to man: not merely
noises of battle tremendous,—of interminable volleying,—of immeasurable
charging,—but the roaring of beasts, the crackling and hissing of fire,
the rumbling of earthquake, the thunder of ruin, and, above all these,
a clamor continual as of shrieks and smothered shoutings,—the Voices
that are said to be the voices of the drowned., Awfulness supreme of
tumult,—combining all imaginable echoings of fury and destruction and
despair!
And to myself I said:—Is it wonderful that the voice of the sea should
make us serious? Consonantly to its multiple utterance must respond all
waves of immemorial fear that move in the vaster sea of
soul-experience. Deep calleth unto deep. The visible abyss calls to
that abyss invisible of elder being whose flood-flow made the ghosts of
us.
Wherefore there is surely more than a little truth in the ancient
belief that the speech of the dead is the roar of the sea. Truly the
fear and the pain of the dead past speak to us in that dim deep awe
which the roar of the sea awakens.
But there are sounds that move us much more profoundly than the voice
of the sea can do, and in stranger ways,—sounds that also make us
serious at times, and very serious,—sounds of music.
Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to unimaginable depth the
mystery of the past within us. Or we might say that it is a prodigious
incantation, every different instrument and voice making separate
appeal to different billions of prenatal memories. There are tones that
call up all ghosts of youth and joy and tenderness;—there are tones
that evoke all phantom pain of perished passion;—there are tones that
resurrect all dead sensations of majesty and might and glory,—all
expired exultations,—all forgotten magnanimities. Well may the
influence of music seem inexplicable to the man who idly dreams that
his life began less than a hundred years ago! But the mystery lightens
for whomsoever learns that the substance of Self is older than the sun.
He finds that music is a Necromancy;—he feels that to every ripple of
melody, to every billow of harmony, there answers within him, out of
the Sea of Death and Birth, some eddying immeasurable of ancient
pleasure and pain.
Pleasure and pain: they commingle always in great music; and therefore
it is that music can move us more profoundly than the voice of ocean or
than any other voice can do. But in music’s larger utterance it is ever
the sorrow that makes the undertone,—the surf-mutter of the Sea of
Soul…. Strange to think how vast the sum of joy and woe that must have
been experienced before the sense of music could evolve in the brain of
man!
Somewhere it is said that human life is the music of the Gods,—that its
sobs and laughter, its songs and shrieks and orisons, its outcries of
delight and of despair, rise never to the hearing of the Immortals but
as a perfect harmony…. Wherefore they could not desire to hush the
tones of pain: it would spoil their music! The combination, without the
agony-tones, would prove a discord unendurable to ears divine.
And in one way we ourselves are as Gods,—since it is only the sum of
the pains and the joys of past lives innumerable that makes for us,
through memory organic, the ecstasy of music. All the gladness and the
grief of dead generations come back to haunt us in countless forms of
harmony and of melody. Even so,—a million years after we shall have
ceased to view the sun,—will the gladness and the grief of our own
lives pass with richer music into other hearts—there to bestir, for one
mysterious moment, some deep and exquisite thrilling of voluptuous
pain.