I find in my Oriental catalogues “Villoteau—Mémoire sur la Musique de l’antique Egypte.—Paris: Maisonneuve & Cie, 1883 (15 fr.).” Wonder if you have the work in any of your public libraries. If you have not, and you would like to get it, I can obtain it from Paris duty-free next time I write to Maisonneuve, from whom I am obtaining a great number of curious books.
You must have noticed in the papers the real or pretended discovery of an ancient Egyptian melody,—the notes being represented by owls ascending and descending the musical scale. Hope you will get to see it. I have been thinking that we might some day, together, work up a charming collection of musical legends: each legend followed by a specimen-melody, with learned dissertation by H. Edward Krehbiel. But that will be for the days when we shall be “well-known and highly esteemed authors.” I think I could furnish some singular folk-lore.
Meanwhile “Bìlâl” has been finished. I wrote to Harper’s Magazine;—the article was returned with a very complimentary autograph letter from Alden, praising it warmly, but recommending its being offered to the Atlantic, as he did not know when he could “find room for it.” Find room for it! Ah, bah!... I am sorry: because I had written him about your share in it, and hoped, if successful, it would tempt him to write you. It is now in the hands of another magazine. I used your Koran-fragment in the form of a musical footnote.
I notice you called it a “brick.” Are you sure this is the correct word? Each sura (or chapter) indeed signifies a “course of bricks in a wall;” but also signifies “a rank of soldiers”—and the verses, which were never numbered in the earlier MSS., are so irregular that the poetry of the term “brick” could scarcely apply to them. However, I may be wrong.
I was delighted with your delight, as expressed in your beautiful letter upon the Hebrew ceremonial. Hebrew literature has been my hobby for some time past: I have Hershon’s “Talmudic Miscellany;” Stauben’s “Scènes de la Vie Juive” (full of delicious traditions); Kompert’s “Studies of Jewish Life,” which you have no doubt read in the original German; and Schwab’s French translation of the beginning of the Jerusalem Talmud (together with the Babylonian Berachoth), 5 vols. I confess the latter is, as a whole, unreadable; but the legends in it are without parallel in weirdness and singularity. Such miscellaneous reading of this sort as I have done has given new luminosity to my ideas of the antique Hebrew life; and enabled me to review them without the gloom of Biblical tradition,—especially the nightmarish darkness of the Pentateuch. I like to associate Hebrew ceremonies rather with the wonderful Talmudic days of the Babylonian rabbonim than with the savage primitiveness of the years of Exodus and Deuteronomy. There are some queer things about music in the Talmud; but they are sometimes extravagant as that story about the conch-shell blown at the birth of Buddha—“where of the sound rolled on unceasingly for four years!” The swarthy fishermen of our swampy lakes do blow conch-shells by way of marine signalling; and whenever I hear them I think of that monstrous conch-shell told of in the Nidānakathā.
As I write it seemeth to me that I behold, overshadowing the paper, the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes. Now in New York! How the old night-forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher toward the supreme hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East; whence as legendary word hath it—“lightning ever cometh.” Remember me very warmly to my old comrade Tunison.
But I think it more probable I shall see you here than that you shall see me there. New York has become something appalling to my imagination—perhaps because I have been drawing my ideas of it from caricatures: something cyclopean without solemnity, something pandemoniac without grotesqueness,—preadamite bridges,—superimpositions of iron roads higher than the aqueducts of the Romans,—gloom, vapour, roarings and lightnings. When I think of it, I feel more content with my sunlit marshes,—and the frogs,—and the gnats,—and the invisible plagues lurking in visible vapours,—and the ancientness,—and the vast languor of the land. Even our vegetation here, funereally drooping in the great heat, seems to dream of dead things—to mourn for the death of Pan. After a few years here the spirit of the land has entered into you,—and the languor of the place embraces you with an embrace that may not be broken;—thoughts come slowly, ideas take form sluggishly as shapes of smoke in heavy air; and a great horror of work and activity and noise and bustle roots itself within your soul,—I mean brain. Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul.
I am afraid you have read the poorest of Cable’s short stories. “Jean-ah Poquelin,” “Belles-Demoiselles,” are much better than “Tite Poulette.” There is something very singular to me in Cable’s power. It is not a superior style; it is not a minutely finished description—for it will often endure no close examination at all: nevertheless his stories have a puissant charm which is hard to analyze. His serial novel—“The Grandissimes”—is not equal to the others; but I think the latter portion of “Dr. Sevier” will surprise many. He did me the honour to read nearly the whole book to me. Cultivate him, if you get a chance.
Baker often talks with me about you. You would never have any difficulty in obtaining a fine thing here. Perhaps you will be the reverse of flattered by this bit of news; but the proprietors here think they can make the T.-D. a bigger paper than it is, and rival the Eastern dailies. For my part I hope they will do it; but they lack system, experience, and good men, to some extent. Now good men are not easily tempted to cast their fortunes here at present. It will be otherwise in time; the city is really growing into a metropolis,—a world’s market for merchants of all nations,—and will be made healthier and more beautiful year by year.
Good-bye for the present