I, who labor under the suspicion of not knowing the difference between
"Old Hundred" and "Old Dan Tucker,"--I, whose every attempt at music,
though only the humming of a simple household melody, has, from my
earliest childhood, been regarded as a premonitory symptom of epilepsy,
or, at the very least, hysterics, to be treated with cold water, the
bellows, and an unmerciful beating between my shoulders,--_I_, who can
but with much difficulty and many a retrogression make my way among the
olden mazes of tenor, alto, treble, bass, and who stand "clean daft" in
the resounding confusion of andante, soprano, falsetto, palmetto,
pianissimo, akimbo, l'allegro, and il penseroso,--_I_ was bidden to
Camilla's concert, and, like a sheep to the slaughter, I went.
He bears a great loss and sorrow who has "no ear for music." Into one
great garden of delights he may not go. There needs no flaming sword to
bar the way, since for him there is no gate called Beautiful which he
should seek to enter. Blunted and stolid he stumps through life for whom
its harp-strings vainly quiver. Yet, on the other hand, what does he not
gain? He loses the concord of sweet sounds, but he is spared the discord
of harsh noises. For the surges of bewildering harmony and the depths
of dissonant disgust, he stands on the levels of perpetual peace. You
are distressed, because in yonder well-trained orchestra a single voice
is pitched one-sixteenth of a note too high. For me, I lean out of my
window on summer nights enraptured over the organ-man who turns poor
lost Lilian Dale round and round with his inexorable crank. It does not
disturb me that his organ wheezes and sputters and grunts. Indeed, there
is for me absolutely no wheeze, no sputter, no grunt. I only see dark
eyes of Italy, her olive face, and her gemmed and lustrous hair. You
mutter maledictions on the infernal noise and caterwauling. I hear no
caterwauling, but the river-god of Arno ripples sort songs in the
summer-tide to the lilies that bend above him. It is the guitar of the
cantatrice that murmurs through the scented, dewy air,--the cantatrice
with the laurel yet green on her brow, gliding over the molten moonlit
water-ways of Venice, and dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with
the plash of the oars of the gondolier. It is the chant of the
flower-girl with large eyes shining under the palm-branches in the
market-place of Milan; and with the distant echoing notes come the sweet
breath of her violets and the unquenchable odors of her crushed
geraniums borne on many a white sail from the glorified Adriatic.
Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my window, I shall by-and-by-throw
you a paltry nickel cent for your tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me,
did the sun of Dante's Florence give your blood its fierce flow and the
tawny hue to your bared and brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's
madness that burns in your uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the
fervid noon under the cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly
Marguerite with myrtle wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders
through the chestnut vales? Will you sleep to-night between the
colonnades under the golden moon of Napoli? Go back, O child of the
Midland Sea! Go out from this cold shore, that yields but crabbed
harvests for your threefold vintages of Italy. Go, suck the sunshine
from Seville oranges under the elms of Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows
of the vines swaying in the mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the
ivy in a triple crown above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so
wailingly to the Vikings of this frigid Norseland.
But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her
bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the
white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not
compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We
lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your
sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the
full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves are
silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason why,
if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my window,
Giuseppe; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not sleep in the
shadows of broken temples.
Yet I love music: not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence,
discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty
oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of
Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid
rocks loved it, when they came rolling heavily to his feet to listen; in
a great, coarse, clumsy, ichthyosaurian way, as the rivers loved sad
Orpheus's wailing tones, stopping in their mighty courses, and the
thick-hided hippopotamus dragged himself up from the unheeded pause of
the waves, dimly thrilled with a vague ecstasy. The confession is sad,
yet only in such beastly fashion come sweetest voices to me,--not in the
fulness of all their vibrations, but sounding dimly through many an
earthy layer. Music I do not so much hear as feel. All the exquisite
nerves that bear to your soul these tidings of heaven in me lie torpid
or dead. No beatitude travels to my heart over that road. But as
sometimes an invalid, unable through mortal sickness to swallow his
needed nutriment, is yet kept alive many days by being immersed in a
bath of wine and milk, which somehow, through unwonted courses,
penetrates to the sources of vitality,--so I, though the natural avenues
of sweet sounds have been hermetically sealed, do yet receive the fine
flow of the musical ether. I feel the flood of harmony pouring around
me. An inward, palpable, measured tremulousness of the subtile, secret
essence of life attests the presence of some sweet disturbing cause,
and, borne on unseen wings, I mount to loftier heights and diviner airs.
So I was comforted for my waxed ears and Camilla's concert.
There is one other advantage in being possessed with a deaf-and-dumb
devil, which, now that I am on the subject of compensation, I may as
well mention. You are left out of the arena of fierce discussion and
debate. You do not enter upon the lists wherefrom you would be sure to
come off discomfited. Of all reputations, a musical reputation seems to
me the most shifting and uncertain; and of all rivalries, musical
rivalries are the most prolific of heart-burnings and discomfort. Now,
if I should sing or play, I should wish to sing and play well. But what
is well? Nancie in the village "singing-seats" stands head and shoulders
above the rest, and wears her honors tranquilly, an authority at all
rehearsals and serenades. But Anabella comes up from the town to spend
Thanksgiving, and, without the least mitigation or remorse of voice,
absolutely drowns out poor Nancie, who goes under, giving many signs.
Yet she dies not unavenged, for Harriette sweeps down from the city, and
immediately suspends the victorious Anabella from her aduncate nose, and
carries all before her. Mysterious is the arrangement of the world. The
last round of the ladder is not yet reached. To Madame Morlot, Harriette
is a savage, _une bête_, without cultivation. "Oh, the dismal little
fright! a thousand years of study would be useless; go, scour the
floors; she has positively no voice." No voice, Madame Morlot?
Harriette, no voice,--who burst every ear-drum in the room last night
with her howling and hooting, and made the stoutest heart tremble with
fearful forebodings of what might come next? But Madame Morlot is not
infallible, for Herr Driesbach sits shivering at the dreadful noises
which Madame Morlot extorts from his sensitive and suffering piano, and
at the necessity which lies upon him to go and congratulate her upon her
performance. Ah! if his tortured conscience might but congratulate her
and himself upon its close! And so the scale ascends. Hills on hills and
Alps on Alps arise, and who shall mount the ultimate peak till all the
world shall say, "Here reigns the Excellence"? I listen with pleasure to
untutored Nancie till Anabella takes all the wind from her sails. I
think the force of music can no farther go than Madame Morlot, and,
behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out her underpinning. I am
bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and be _à la
mode_?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive
listener, what must be the agonies of the _dramatis personæ_? "Hang it!"
says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!"
And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What
shall avenge them for their _spretæ injuria formæ_? What can repay the
hapless performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by
terrible, indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted
Cremona is but a very second fiddle?
So, standing on the high ground of certain immunity from criticism and
hostile judgment, I do not so much console myself as I do not stand in
need of consolation. I rather give thanks for my mute and necessarily
unoffending lips, and I shall go in great good-humor to Camilla's
concert.
There are many different ways of going to a concert. You can be one of
a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime,
an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud, they
condemn, they criticise with perfect _au-faitism_. (No one need say
there is no such word. I know there was not yesterday, and perhaps will
not be to-morrow; but that there is such a one to-day, you have but to
open your eyes and see.) Into such company as this, even I, whose poor
old head is always fretting itself wedged in where it has no business to
be, have chanced to be thrown. This is torture. My cue is to turn into
the Irishman's echo, which always returned for his "How d' ye do?" a
"Pretty well, thank you." I cling to the skirts of that member of the
party who is agreed to have the best taste and echo his responses an
octave higher. If he sighs at the end of a song, I bring out my
pocket-handkerchief. If he says "charming," I murmur "delicious." If he
thinks it "exquisite," I pronounce it "enchanting." Where he is rapt in
admiration, I go into a trance, and so shamble through the performances,
miserable impostor that I am, and ten to one nobody finds out that I am
a dunce, fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils. It is a great strain
upon the mental powers, but it is wonderful to see how much may be
accomplished and what skill may be attained by long practice.
It is not ingenuous? I am afraid not quite. The guilt rest with those
who make me incur it! You cannot even read a book with any degree of
pleasure, if you know an opinion is expected of you at the finis. You
leave the popular novel till people have forgotten to ask, "How do you
like it?" How can you enjoy anything, if you are not at liberty to give
yourself wholly to it, but must be all the while making up a speech to
deliver when it is over? Nothing is better than to be a passive
listener, but nothing is worse than to be obliged to turn yourself into
a sounding-board: and must I have both the suffering and the guilt?
Also one may go to a concert as a conductor with a single musical
friend. By conductor I do not mean escort, but a magnetic conductor,
rapture conductor, a fit medium through which to convey away his
delight, so that he shall not become surcharged and explode. He does not
take you for your pleasure, nor for his own, but for use. He desires
some one to whom he can from time to time express his opinions and his
enthusiasms, sure of an attentive listener,--since nothing is so
pleasant as to see one's views welcomed. Now you cannot pretend that in
such a case your listening is thoroughly honest. You are receptive of
theories, criticisms, and reminiscences; but you would not like to be
obliged to pass an examination on them afterwards. You do, it must be
confessed, sometimes, in the midst of eloquent dissertations, strike out
into little flowery by-paths of your own, quite foreign to the grand
paved-ways along which your friend supposes he is so kind as to be
leading you. But however digressive your mind may be, do not suffer your
eyes to digress. Whatever may be the intensity of your _ennui_, endeavor
to preserve an animated expression, and your success is complete. This
is all that is necessary. You will never be called upon for notes or
comments. Your little escapades will never be detected. It is not your
opinions that were sought, nor your education that was to be furthered.
You were only an escape-pipe, and your mission ceased when the soul of
song fled and the gas was turned off. This, too, is all that can justly
be demanded. Minister, lecturer, singer, no one has any right to ask of
his audience anything more than opportunity,--the externals of
attention. All the rest is his own look-out. If you prepossess your mind
with a theme, you do not give him an even chance. You must offer him in
the beginning a _tabula rasa_,--a fair field,--and then it is his
business to go in and win your attention; and if he cannot, let him pay
the costs, for the fault is his own.
This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one.
There is yet another way. You may go with one or many who believe and
practise the doctrine of _laissez-faireity_. Do not now proceed to dash
your brains out against that word. I have just done it myself, and one
such head as mine is ample sacrifice for any verbal crime. They go to
the concert for love of music,--negatively for its rest and refreshment,
positively for its embodied delights. They take you for your enjoyment,
which they permit you to compass after your own fashion. They force from
you no comment. They demand no criticism. They do not require censure as
your certificate of taste. They do not trouble themselves with your
demeanor. If you choose to talk in the pauses, they are receptive and
cordial. If you choose to be silent, it is just as well. If you go to
sleep, they will not mind,--unless, under the spell of the genius of the
place, your sleep becomes vocal, and you involuntarily join the concert
in the undesirable _rôle_ of De Trop. If you go into raptures, it is all
the same; you are not watched and made a note of. They leave you at the
top of your bent. Whether you shall be amused, delighted, or disgusted,
they respect your decisions and allow you to remain free.
How did I go to my concert? Can I tell for the eyes that made "a
sunshine in the shady place"? Was I not veiled with the beautiful hair,
and blinded with the lily's white splendor? So went I with the Fairy
Queen in her golden coach drawn by six white mice, and, behold, I was in
Camilla's concert-room.
It is to be a fiddle affair. Now I am free to say, if there is anything
I hate, it is a fiddle. Hide it away under as many Italian coatings as
you choose,--viol, violin, viola, violone, violoncello,
violoncellettissimo, at bottom it is all one, a fiddle; in its best
estate, a diddle, diddle, frivolous, rattling, Yankee-Doodle,
country-tavern-ball whirligig, without dignity, sentiment, or power; and
at worst a rubbing, rasping, squeaking, woolleny, noisy nuisance, that
it sets my teeth on edge to think of. I shudder at the mere memory of
the reluctant bow dragging its slow length across the whining strings.
And here I am, in my sober senses, come to hear a fiddle!
But it is Camilla's. Do you remember--I don't, but I should, if I had
known it--a little girl who, a few years ago, became famous for her
wonderful performance on the violin? At six years of age she went to a
great concert, and of all the fine instruments there, the unseen spirit
within her made choice, "Papa, I should like to learn the violin." So
she learned it and loved it, and when ten years old delighted foreign
and American audiences with her marvellous genius. It was the little
Camilla who now, after ten years of silence, tuned her beloved
instrument once more.
As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment.
I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the essential
strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot in such
Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl and gold,
finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian water-courses, the
delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and crystallized,--of
all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty device, fantastic as
a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her instrument be
fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should the mystic soul
lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of slumber, and her
young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh, me! it is, after all, the
very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee!
But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do,
but walks in like a good Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and
faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the prelude.
There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red fiddle,
and I look scrutinizingly at her dress and think how ugly are hoops. The
skirt is white silk,--a brocade, I believe,--at any rate, stiff, and,
though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the seamstress, who
must compress it within prescribed limits about the waist, looks scanty
and straight, because, like all other skirts in the world at this
present writing, it is stretched over a barrel. Why could she not, she
who comes before us to-night, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,--why
could she not discard the mode, and assume that immortal classic drapery
whose graceful falls and folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the
painter vainly seeks to limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the
Capitol, when she knelt to be crowned with her laurel crown at the hands
of a Roman senator, is it possible to conceive her swollen out with
crinoline? And yet I remember, that, though _sa robe était blanche, et
son costume était très pittoresque_, it was _sans s'écarter cependant
assez des usages reçus pour que l'on pût y trouver de l'affectation_;
and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional
rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "_on_" would very readily
"_y trouver de l'affectation_." Nevertheless, though one must dress in
Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all
things into the account, as good as any, and, if not more graceful, a
thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable
than Helen's, still it does seem, that, when one steps out of the
ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might,
without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our
dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the
eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord
disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?
But I lift my eyes from Camilla's unpliant drapery to the red red rose
in her hair, and thence, naturally, to her silent face, and in that
instant ugly dress and red red rose fade out of my sight. What is it
that I see, with tearful tenderness and a nameless pain at the heart? A
young face deepened and drawn with suffering; dark, large eyes, whose
natural laughing light has been quenched in tears, yet shining still
with a distant gleam caught from the eternal fires. O still, pathetic
face! A sterner form than Time has passed and left his vestige there.
Happy little girl, playing among the flickering shadows of the
Rhine-land, who could not foresee the darker shadows that should settle
and never lift nor flicker from her heavy heart! Large, lambent eyes,
that might have been sweet, but now are only steadfast,--that may yet be
sweet, when they look to-night into a baby's cradle, but gazing now upon
a waiting audience, are only steadfast. Ah! so it is. Life has such hard
conditions, that every dear and precious gift, every rare virtue, every
pleasant facility, every genial endowment, love, hope, joy, wit,
sprightliness, benevolence, must sometimes be cast into the crucible to
distil the one elixir, patience. Large, lambent eyes, in which days and
nights of tears are petrified, steadfast eyes that are neither mournful
nor hopeful nor anxious, but with such unvoiced sadness in their depths
that the hot tears well up in my heart, what do you see in the waiting
audience? Not censure, nor pity, nor forgiveness, for you do not need
them,--but surely a warm human sympathy, since heart can speak to heart,
though the thin, fixed lips have sealed their secret well. Sad mother,
whose rose of life was crushed before it had budded, tender young lips
that had drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss
should hardly yet be brimmed for life's sweet spring-time, your
crumbling fanes and broken arches and prostrate columns lie not among
the ruins of Time. Be comforted of that. They bear witness of a more
pitiless Destroyer, and by this token I know there shall dawn a brighter
day. The God of the fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed
and fatherless, the Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with
you, and shield and shelter and bless!
But the overture wavers to its close, and her soul hears far off the
voice of the coming Spirit. A deeper light shines in the strangely
introverted eyes,--the look as of one listening intently to a distant
melody which no one else can hear,--the look of one to whom the room and
the people and the presence are but a dream, and past and future centre
on the far-off song. Slowly she raises her instrument. I almost shudder
to see the tawny wood touching her white shoulder; yet that cannot be
common or unclean which she so loves and carries with almost a caress.
Still intent, she raises the bow with a slow sweep, as if it were a wand
of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly voice, pouring
around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it breaks upon our
ears,--softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from that other sphere,
but deepening, strengthening, conquering,--now rising on the swells of a
controlling passion, now sinking into the depths with its low wail of
pain; exultant, scornful, furious, in the glad outburst of opening joy
and the fierce onslaught of strength; crowned, sceptred, glorious in
garland and singing-robes, throned in the high realms of its
inheritance, a kingdom of boundless scope and ever new delights: then
sweeping down through the lower world with diminishing rapture, rapture
lessening into astonishment, astonishment dying into despair, it gathers
up the passion and the pain, the blight and woe and agony; all garnered
joys are scattered. Evil supplants the good. Hope dies, love pales, and
faith is faint and wan. But every death has its moaning ghost, pale
spectre of vanished loves. Oh, fearful revenge of the outraged soul! The
mysterious, uncomprehended, incomprehensible soul! The irrepressible,
unquenchable, immortal soul, whose every mark is everlasting! Every
secret sin committed against it cries out from the housetops. Cunning
may strive to conceal, will may determine to smother, love may fondly
whisper, "It does not hurt"; but the soul will not _be_ outraged.
Somewhere, somehow, when and where you least expect, unconscious,
perhaps, to its owner, unrecognized by the many, visible only to the
clear vision, somewhere, somehow, the soul bursts asunder its bonds. It
is but a little song, a tripping of the fingers over the keys, a drawing
of the bow across the strings,--only that? Only that! It is the protest
of the wronged and ignored soul. It is the outburst of the pent and
prisoned soul. All the ache and agony, all the secret wrong and silent
endurance, all the rejected love and wounded trust and slighted truth,
all the riches wasted, all the youth poisoned, all the hope trampled,
all the light darkened,--all meet and mingle in a mad whirl of waters.
They surge and lash and rage, a wild storm of harmony. Barriers are
broken. Circumstance is not. The soul! the soul! the soul! the wronged
and fettered soul! the freed and royal soul! It alone is king. Lift up
your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the
King of Glory shall come in! Tremble, O Tyrant, in your
mountain-fastness! Tremble, Deceiver, in your cavern under the sea! Your
victim is your accuser. Your sin has found you out. Your crime cries to
Heaven. You have condemned and killed the just. You have murdered the
innocent in secret places, and in the noonday sun the voice of their
blood crieth unto God from the ground. There is no speech nor language.
There is no will nor design. The seal of silence is unbroken. But
unconscious, entranced, inspired, the god has lashed his Sibyl on. The
vital instinct of the soul, its heaven-born, up-springing life, flings
back the silver veil, and reveals the hidden things to him who hath eyes
to see.
The storm sobs and soothes itself to silence. There is a hush, and then
an enthusiasm of delight. The small head slightly bows, the still face
scarcely smiles, the slight form disappears,--and after all, it was only
a fiddle.
"When Music, heavenly maid, was young," begins the ode; but Music,
heavenly maid, seems to me still so young, so very young, as scarcely to
have made her power felt. Her language is as yet unlearned. When a baby
of a month is hungry or in pain, he contrives to make the fact
understood. If he is at peace with himself and his surroundings, he
leaves no doubt on the subject. To precisely this degree of
intelligibility has the Heavenly Maid attained among us. When Beethoven
sat down to the composition of one of his grand harmonies, there was
undoubtedly in his mind as distinct a conception of that which he wished
to express, of that within him which clamored for expression, as ever
rises before a painter's eye or sings in a poet's brain. Thought,
emotion, passion, hope, fear, joy, sorrow, each had its life and law.
The painter paints you this. This the poet sings you. You stand before a
picture, and to your loving, searching gaze its truths unfold. You read
the poem with the understanding, and catch its concealed meanings. But
what do you know of what was in Beethoven's soul? Who grasps his
conception? Who faithfully renders, who even thoroughly knows his idea?
Here and there to some patient night-watcher the lofty gates are
unbarred, "on golden hinges turning." But, for the greater part, the
musician who would tell so much speaks to unheeding ears. We comprehend
him but infinitesimally. It is the Battle of Prague. Adrianus sits down
to the piano, and Dion stands by his side, music-sheet in hand, acting
as showman. "The Cannon," says Dion, at the proper place, and you
imagine you recognize reverberation. "Charge," continues Dion, and with
a violent effort you fancy the ground trembles. "Groans of the wounded,"
and you are partly horror-struck and partly incredulous. But what lame
representation is this! As if one should tie a paper around the ankle of
the Belvedere Apollo, with the inscription, "This is the ankle." A
collar declares, "This is the neck." A bandeau locates his "forehead." A
bracelet indicates the "arm." Is the sculpture thus significant? Hardly
more does our music yet signify to us. You hear an unfamiliar air. You
like it or dislike it, or are indifferent. You can tell that it is slow
and plaintive, or brisk and lively, or perhaps even that it is defiant
or stirring; but how insensible you are to the delicate shades of its
meaning! How hidden is the song in the heart of the composer till he
gives you the key! You hear as though you heard not. You hear the
thunder, and the cataract, and the crash of the avalanche; but the song
of the nightingale, the chirp of the katydid, the murmur of the
waterfall never reach you. This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must hold
in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his its
corresponding susceptibilities. Music is language, and language implies
a people who employ and understand it. But music, even by its professor,
is as yet faintly understood. Its meanings go on crutches. They must be
helped out by words. What does this piece say to you? Interpret it. You
cannot. You must be taught much before you can know all. It must be
translated from music into speech before you can entirely assimilate it.
Musicians do not trust alone to notes for moods. Their light shines only
through a glass darkly. But in some other sphere, in some happier time,
in a world where gross wants shall have disappeared, and therefore the
grossness of words shall be no longer necessary, where hunger and thirst
and cold and care and passion have no more admittance, and only love and
faith and hope and admiration and aspiration shall crave utterance, in
that blessed unseen world, shall not music be the every-day speech,
conveying meaning not only with a sweetness, but with an accuracy,
delicacy, and distinctness, of which we have now but a faint conception?
Here words are not only rough, but ambiguous. There harmonies shall be
minutely intelligible. Speak with what directness we can, be as
explanatory, repetitious, illustrative as we may, there are mistakes,
misunderstandings, many and grievous, and consequent missteps,
calamities, and catastrophes. But in that other world language shall be
exactly coexistent with life; music shall be precisely adequate
to meaning. There shall be no hidden corners, no bungling
incompatibilities, but the searching sound penetrates into the secret
sources of the soul, all-pervading. Not a nook, not a crevice, no maze
so intricate, but the sound floats in to gather up the fragrant aroma,
to bear it yonder to another waiting soul, and deposit it as deftly by
unerring magnetisms in the corresponding clefts.
Toot away, then, fifer-fellow! Turn your slow crank, inexorable Italian!
Thrum your thrums, Miss Laura, for Signor Bernadotti! You are a long way
off, but your foot-prints point the right way. With many a yawn and sigh
subjective, with, I greatly fear me, many a malediction objective, you
are "learning the language of another world." To us, huddled together in
our little ant-hill, one is "_une bête_," and one is "_mon ange_"; but
from that fixed star we are all so far as to have no parallax.
But I come down from the golden stars, for the white-robed one has
raised her wand again, and we float away through the glowing gates of
the sunrise, over the purple waves, over the vine-lands of sunny France,
in among the shadows of the storied Pyrenees. Sorrow and sighing have
fled away. Tragedy no longer "in sceptred pall comes sweeping by"; but
young lambs leap in wild frolic, silken-fleeced sheep lie on the slopes
of the hills, and shepherd calls to shepherd from his mountain-peak.
Peaceful hamlets lie far down the valley, and every gentle height blooms
with a happy home. Dark-eyed Basque girls dance through the fruitful
orchards. I see the gleam of their scarlet scarfs wound in with their
bold black hair. I hear their rich voices trilling the lays of their
land, and ringing with happy laughter. But I mount higher and yet
higher, till gleam and voice are lost. Here the freshening air sweeps
down, and the low gurgle of living water purling out from cool, dark
chasms mingles with the shepherd's flute. Here the young shepherd
himself climbs, leaping from rock to rock, lithe, supple, strong, brave,
and free as the soul of his race,--the same iron in his sinews, and the
same fire in his blood that dealt the "dolorous rout" to Charlemagne a
thousand years ago. Sweetly across the path of Roncesvalles blow the
evening gales, wafting tender messages to the listening girls below.
Green grows the grass and gay the flowers that spring from the blood of
princely paladins, the flower of chivalry. No bugle-blast can bring old
Roland back, though it wind long and loud through the echoing woods.
Lads and lasses, worthy scions of valiant stems, may sit on happy
evenings in the shadow of the vines, or group themselves on the
greensward in the pauses of the dance, and sing their songs of battle
and victory,--the olden legends of their heroic sires; but the strain
that floats down from the darkening slopes into their heart of hearts,
the song that reddens in their glowing cheeks, and throbs in their
throbbing breasts, and shines in their dewy eyes, is not the shock of
deadly onset, glorious though it be. It is the sweet old song,--old, yet
ever new,--whose burden is,
"Come live with me and be my love,"--
old, yet always new,--sweet and tender, and not to be gainsaid, whether
it be piped to a shepherdess in Arcadia, or whether a princess hears it
from princely lips in her palace on the sea.
But the mountain shadows stretch down the valleys and wrap the meadows
in twilight. Farther and farther the notes recede as the flutesman
gathers his quiet flock along the winding paths. Smooth and far in the
tranquil evening-air fall the receding notes, a clear, silvery
sweetness; farther and farther in the hushed evening-air, lessening and
lowering, as you bend to listen, till the vanishing strain just cleaves,
a single thread of pearl-pure melody, finer, finer, finer, through the
dewy twilight, and--you hear only your own heart-beats. It is not dead,
but risen. It never ceased. It knew no pause. It has gone up the heights
to mingle with the songs of the angels. You rouse yourself with a start,
and gaze at your neighbor half bewildered. What is it? Where are we?
Oh, my remorseful heart! There is no shepherd, no mountain, no girl with
scarlet ribbon and black braids bound on her beautiful temples. It was
only a fiddle on a platform!
Now you need not tell me that. I know better. I have lived among fiddles
all my life,--embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from cornstalks,
that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers waving in the
sunshine of long ago,--sympathetic fiddles that did me yeomen's service
once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and broke my head, and the
frightened fiddles, not knowing what else to do, came and fiddled to me
lying on the settee, with such boundless, extravagant flourish that
nobody heard the doctor's gig rolling by, and so _sinciput_ and
_occiput_ were left overnight to compose their own quarrels, whereby I
was naturally all right before the doctor had a chance at me, suffering
only the slight disadvantage of going broken-headed through life. What I
might have been with a whole skull, I don't know; but I will say, that,
even in fragments, my head is the best part of me.
Yes, I think I may dare affirm that whatever there is to know about a
fiddle I know, and I can give my affidavit that it is no fiddle that
takes you up on its broad wings, outstripping the "wondrous horse of
brass," which required
"the space of a day natural,
This is to sayn, four and twenty houres,
Wher so you list, in drought or elles showres,
To beren your body into every place
To which your herte willeth for to pace,
Withouten wemme of you, thurgh foule or faire,"--
since it bears you, "withouten" even so much as your "herte's" will, in
a moment's time, over the seas and above the stars.
A fiddle, is it? Do not for one moment believe it.--A poet walked
through Southern woods, and the Dryads opened their hearts to him. They
unfolded the secrets that dwell in the depths of forests. They sang to
him under the starlight the songs of their green, rustling land. They
whispered the loves of the trees sentient to poets:--
"The sayling pine; the cedar, proud and tall;
The vine-propt elme; the poplar, never dry;
The builder oake, sole king of forrests all;
The aspine, good for staves; the cypresse funerall;
The lawrell, meed of mightie conquerours
And poets sage; the firre, that weepeth stille;
The willow, worne of forlorne paramours;
The eugh, obedient to the benders will;
The birch, for shaftes; the sallow, for the mill;
The mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wounde;
The warlike beech; the ash, for nothing ill;
The fruitful olive; and the platane round;
The carver holme; the maple, seldom inward sound."
They sang to him with their lutes. They danced before him with sunny,
subtile grace, wreathing him with strange loveliness. They brought him
honey and wine in the white cups of lilies, till his brain was drunk
with delight; and they kept watch by his moss pillow, while he slept.
In the dew of the morning, he arose and felled the kindly tree that had
sheltered him, not knowing it was the home of Arborine, fairest of the
wood-nymphs. But he did it not for cruelty, but tenderness, to carve a
memorial of his most memorable night, and so pulled down no thunders on
his head. For Arborine loved him, and, like her sister Undine in the
North, found her soul in loving him. Unseen, the beautiful nymph guided
his hand as he fashioned the sounding viol, not knowing he was
fashioning a palace for a soul new-born. He wrought skilfully, strung
the intense chords, and smote them with the sympathetic bow. What burst
of music flooded the still air! What new song trembled among the
mermaiden tresses of the oaks! What new presence quivered in every
listening harebell and every fearful wind-flower? The forest felt a
change, for tricksy nymph had proved a mortal love, and put off her
fairy phantasms for the deep consciousness of humanity. The wood heard,
bewildered. A shudder as of sorrow thrilled through it. A breeze that
was almost sad swept down the shady aisles as the Poet passed out into
the sunshine and the world.
But Nature knows no pain, though Arborines appear never more. A balm
springs up in every wound. Over the hills, and far away beyond their
utmost purple rim, and deep into the dying day the happy love-born one
followed her love, happy to exchange her sylvan immortality for the
spasm of mortal life,--happy, in her human self-abnegation, to lie close
on his heart and whisper close in his ear, though he knew only the
loving voice and never the loving lips. Through the world they passed,
the Poet and his mystic viol. It gathered to itself the melodies that
fluttered over sea and land,--songs of the mountains, and songs of the
valleys,--murmurs of love, and the trumpet-tones of war,--bugle-blast of
huntsman on the track of the chamois, and mother's lullaby to the baby
at her breast. All that earth had of sweetness the nymph drew into her
viol-home, and poured it forth anew in strains of more than mortal
harmony. The fire and fervor of human hearts, the quiet ripple of inland
waters, the anthem of the stormy sea, the voices of the flowers and the
birds lent their melody to the song of her who knew them all.
The Poet died. Died, too, sweet Arborine, swooning away in the fierce
grasp of this stranger Sorrow, to enter by the black gate of death into
the full presence and recognition of him by loving whom she had learned
to be.
The viol passed into strange hands and wandered down the centuries, but
its olden echoes linger still. Fragrance of Southern woods, coolness of
shaded waters, inspiration of mountain-breezes, all the secret forces of
Nature that the wood-nymph knew, and the joy, the passion, and the pain
that throb only in a woman's heart, lie still, silent under the silent
strings, but wakening into life at the touch of a royal hand.
Do you not believe my story? But I have seen the viol and the royal
hand!