A Serenade
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.
II
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.
III
But it seemed to me that the extraordinary emotion awakened by that tropical melody needed an explanation more qualitative than the explanation above attempted. I felt sure that the dead past to which the music had made appeal must have been a special past,—that some particular class or group of emotional memories had been touched. Yet what class?—what group? For the time being, I could not even venture a guess.
Long afterwards, however, some chance happening revived for me with surprising distinctness the memory of the serenade;—and simultaneously, like a revelation, came the certainty that the whole spell of the melody—all its sadness and all its sweetness—had been supremely and uniquely feminine.
—“Assuredly,” I reflected, as the new conviction grew upon me, “the primal source of all human tenderness has been the Eternal Feminine.... Yet how should melody uttering only the soul of woman have been composed by man, and bestir within man this innominable quickening of emotional reminiscence?”
The answer shaped itself at once,—
—“Every mortal man has been many millions of times a woman.”
Undoubtedly in either sex survives the sum of the feelings and of the memories of both. But some rare experience may appeal at times to the feminine element of personality alone,—to one half only of the phantom-world of Self,—leaving the other hemisphere dormant and unillumed. And such experience had found embodiment in the marvellous melody of the serenade which I had heard.
That tremulous sweetness was never masculine; that passional sadness never was of man:—unisexual both and inseparably blended into a single miracle of tone-beauty. Echoing far into the mystery of my own past, the enchantment of that tone had startled from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, and set the whole delicate swarm fluttering in some delicious filmy agony of revival,—set them streaming and palpitating through the Night of Time,—like those myriads eddying forever through the gloom of the vision of Dante.
They died with the music and the moon,—but not utterly. Whenever in dream the memory of that melody returns, again I feel the long soft shuddering of the dead,—again I feel the faint wings spread and thrill, responsive to the cooing of those spectral flutes, to the throbbing of those shadowy mandolines. And the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakes me; but always with my wakening the delight passes, and in the dark the sadness only lingers,—unutterable,—infinite...!