Our organ pipe custom is solely a determination of ear, or feeling, as regards the aggregate of sounds; for we gain in brightness and fluency by not delaying the acceptance of the half diameter until the second octave, which geometrically would be its true position,—viz., at the twenty-fifth note. Thus, and by holding control in regard to the amount of wind, and regulating by voicing, we are able to blend the total accord of sounds in harmony, in the way pleasurable to the trained ear or cultivated taste, according to the perceptivities of the Western peoples.
CHAPTER XV.
In the Flowery Kingdom.
THE BIRD’S NEST.
Music by inspiration. Yes, that is it,—the very thing we want, what we are all longing for; so little of the truly inspired music comes newly to refresh us as the birth of the days we live in. Only the old seems the ever new. How inspiring it is to listen to the themes of the old masters, and feel the old melodies pass through us like a current of life, awakening thrills of delight, the memory of the first hearing of them blending with and enhancing the emotions of the present. To inspire, “to drink in.” How we drink in the life renewing melodies of Beethoven and Schubert: their potency never fails, and in our exultation we call them divine. How strangely inevitable are the ideas we associate with the words “divine” and “inspiration.” Apply them as we will to frail human effluences, there is no escape from the higher exalted sense, from the ideal signification. Inspiration,—it is a grand word. Somehow the ideal clings around words, in however “matter o’ fact” way they come to be used; like the eastern vase that has been filled with roses, in after time
“The scent of the roses will cling round it still.”
One thought leads to another thought. I have a little instrument before me, dignified by the name “organ,”—a very little organ, but the name comes to it because it is one of the earliest of the race from which our present day organ has sprung. Was its inventor a genius? A poor human nomad wandering the wilds of Tartary, inspired to begin the foundations of that which was to be an empire of sound,—one of those
“Who builded better than he knew,”
Was he inspired, I wonder? True it is that the invention has been claimed for some emperor, but that is so natural an appropriation that we give no heed to it. Certainly it is the unknown man who is the true great man, though history has obliterated his name and graven a royal cartouche in its place. The mythical is always later than the real.
This curious instrument: what a juggle of words it has led me to. The inspiration I have to talk of is done by inspiring,—its music is made as the lark’s music is, by inspirating. Note you how the bird sings by drawing in breath, by inspiring; and higher and higher he mounts, filling the air with melody for a half mile around him; soaring, singing and singing as he soars, never tiring for the hour together, because every effort invigorates the little body instead of exhausting its strength; he drinks in oxygen at every note, and so is refreshed by singing. Would that human singing were equally refreshing to the singer and the hearer!