“Cosi vid’ io venir, traendo guai
Ombre portate della detta briga.”
This is not to insist on the obvious that Italian is a musical language and Dante a star apart. Every language that has served literature will be found to hold its own words of magic. It is not the moment to quote German, but we think Trauer tolls across the senses like the passing-bell, while the French Glas falls upon the soul with a frozen misery indescribable outside itself.
Those fortunate scholars who have mastered as much of the secrets of Greek as the modern can master, tell us that it is impossible to convey in any other tongue the richness, the value, the wide meaning and exquisite shades of the ancient Greek language. We know that they had words in each of which a whole picture could be set before the mind. To read Gilbert Murray’s fascinating “Ancient Greek Literature” is, however, to find a revelation which severer and more extensive writings fail to convey. A poet, he alone has caught and interpreted the echo of those lyres still ringing across the ages. And he, too, computes his impressions in terms of music. “Many lovers of Pindar,” he says, “agree that the things which stay in one’s mind, stay not as thoughts but as music.”
Of course, the Greeks wedded words and music after a fashion unknown to us, who merely set words to be sung to music in our operas and songs. It is a lost art.
But it seems conceivable that there may be an actual music hidden in language itself, something that the senses of the mind apprehend, quite apart from the idea incorporated. The late Sir Henry Irving, just before his famous production of Macbeth, discussing his intention of introducing music at the moments of crisis, defended this much criticized point by saying: “I mean to do it, because music carries the soul beyond words, even beyond thought.”
We are not sure that he was right, except in so far as the appeal to the gallery was concerned, which, after all, every actor-manager, however artistic and perceptive, is bound to consider first of all. In fact, we are quite certain that he was wrong. The music of Shakespeare should not have been overlaid by any sound of violin or trumpet.
We can conceive no sorrow of muted strings which could intensify the poignancy of Macduff’s cry: “All my pretty ones, did you say all?” A cry, too, so spontaneous in its truth and simplicity that, according to a current phrase in the theatrical profession, the part of Macduff acts itself.
Who would want to add more melody to the following
“That strain again—it had a dying fall: