| Meledosa’s Flutes Complete. |
Fig. 18.
My idea is that this bulb form was adopted for the sake of using a concealed reed. That the bulbs were hollow, I am perfectly sure; because of the witness of a most precious fragment, preserved in a case in the Greek and Roman saloon, belonging to one of two pipes of a later date, found in a tomb near Athens. The Greeks called the double pipes diaulos, and these have been considered to be the representative of such; but they are not so, being distinct pipes used separately, as I shall have in another chapter to elucidate. Only about three quarters of a bulb remains, but one pipe still holds a broken portion. The length of that bulb, I should say, was originally in about the same proportion to the pipes as we see upon the vases; so that there is no doubt about the hollow bulb, as a real thing. Now, considered by itself the one bulb was a distinct invention in art, and as such it was complete in itself, yet after a time the invention was carried further, and the wonder is why? what end did it serve to introduce more?
The purpose of having two or three bulbs went beyond that of the original invention of the subulo pattern, and was, I imagine, an ingenious device to provide that the player should be able to transpose the reed from one bulb to the other in order to play in a different mode or key, virtually without altering the disposition of the fingers; lengthening the pipe by transferring the reed higher, or shortening the effective sounding length of the pipe by placing the reed in the next lower or in the lowest bulb of the three: thus the player would have the choice of three modes or keys, whilst his pipes would remain outwardly the same. The bulb forms an artificial mouth, as was the custom many centuries later in the cap of the cromorne. The position of the reed determines the effective length of the pipe; the difference of pitch would be in each case one tone, as I find that the length of bulb corresponds with the distance between two finger holes of the pipe. Does this solve the mystery? Be that as it may, I have found in these vases a source of ever renewed pleasure.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Tombs, tombs of a dozen buried cities, once gay with life, full of the daily sympathy of pleasure, and no less of sorrow. They gave the dead their gold and silver and jewels; they gave them food, fruits, oil and wine, and left them to silence and slow time. These lovely Amphoræ buried, these festal Kraters empty,—and once brimmed with wine! We think, irresistibly drawn to think of them, with Keats’s longing wish:—
O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep delvèd earth.
The chamber had been rifled a thousand years or more; gold and ornaments gone, only the dust and the skeletons of men and women, young men and maidens,—the most perishable of things, the vases the most enduring. The owners bought their burial land “in perpetuity;” and, like the old Egyptians, they builded for a very brief and rudely broken eternity.