“Ah! its music sleeps in the whorls and dimples of that little ear, as the voice of old seas haunts the shell; but from the ear to the lips is a journey impossible to most—even to lips so sweetly eloquent as hers. Yet I fain would hear that honeysuckle strive to repeat its lesson of the sun and dew, however brokenly—” he sighed dismally—“but it is not for me.”
“The legend,” I said, “stands therefore incomplete so far as I am concerned. Will you not do me the favour, Monsieur, to supply the broken link?”
“You wish for the song?”
“Assuredly, if you will be so good.”
“It was extempore—but that is nothing.” He looked at me—there is no other word for it but balefully. “You wish, no doubt,” he said, “to snigger in your sleeve over what you will be pleased to call the meretricious rhapsodies of an improvisatore? It will certainly be more sound than sense, you think, taking refuge from reason under a professed imaginativeness. So are some built, impervious to the spirituality underlying all things, blind to what they cannot see, deaf to what they cannot hear. I tell you, Monsieur, that those who are for ever questioning the truth of literature are incapable of understanding the truth of life.”
He seemed almost in a passion. It was positively petrifying.
“I am quite at a loss, Monsieur,” I said, “for the reason of this jeremiad, or to understand how it is justified by anything I said. I am certainly no captious critic of either life or literature, and as to Imagination, I try myself to be her humble minister. But leave the song by all means unrepeated. The loss, being mine, need not trouble you.”
He was really a little ashamed of himself, I think; though he would not admit it.
“No, Monsieur,” he said, gnawing his knuckles—“no. In justice to myself and the completeness of my art I will gratify you. Listen, then: it went somewhat this way.”
He chaunted rather than spoke the lines, lyric interspersed with prose, a song of the fashion called in Provençal “Cansounetto émé parla.” I do not attempt to reproduce the verse, which was quite picturesque and musical. Its sense was more or less as follows:—