For the living present, I reflected, is the whole dead past. Our pleasures and our pains alike are but products of evolution,—vast complexities of sentiency created by experience of vanished beings more countless than the sands of a myriad seas. All personality is recombination; and all emotions are of the dead. Yet some seem to us more ghostly than others,—partly because of their greater relative mystery, partly because of the immense power of the phantom waves composing them. Among pleasurable forms, the ghostliest are the emotion of first love, the emotion following the perception of the sublime in nature—of terrible beauty,—and the emotion of music. Why should they so be? Probably because the influences that arouse them thrill furthest into our forgotten past. Frightful as the depth of the abyss of Space is the depth of one thinking life,—measureless even by millions of ages;—and who may divine how profoundly in certain personalities the mystery can be moved. We only know that the deeper the thrilling, the heavier the wave responding, and the weirder the result,—until those profundities are reached of which a single surge brings instant death, or makes perpetual ruin of the delicate structures of thought.
Now any music that makes powerful appeal to the emotion of love, awakening the passional latency of the past within us, must inevitably revive dead pain not less than dead delight. Pain of the conquest of will by a mystery resistless and pitiless, the torture of doubt, the pangs of rivalry, the terror of impermanency,—shadows of these and many another sorrow have had their part in the toning of that psychical inheritance which makes at once love’s joy and love’s anguish, and grows forever from birth to birth.
And thus it may happen that a child, innocent of passion or of real pain, is moved even to tears by music uttering either. Unknowingly he feels in that utterance a shadowing of the sorrow of numberless vanished lives.
III
But it seemed to me that the extraordinary emotion awakened by that tropical melody needed an explanation more qualitative than the explanation above attempted. I felt sure that the dead past to which the music had made appeal must have been a special past,—that some particular class or group of emotional memories had been touched. Yet what class?—what group? For the time being, I could not even venture a guess.
Long afterwards, however, some chance happening revived for me with surprising distinctness the memory of the serenade;—and simultaneously, like a revelation, came the certainty that the whole spell of the melody—all its sadness and all its sweetness—had been supremely and uniquely feminine.
—“Assuredly,” I reflected, as the new conviction grew upon me, “the primal source of all human tenderness has been the Eternal Feminine.... Yet how should melody uttering only the soul of woman have been composed by man, and bestir within man this innominable quickening of emotional reminiscence?”
The answer shaped itself at once,—