Such Is Life Joseph Furphy (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

For the music thus impassively anatomised by Science is a voice from the Unseen, pregnant with meaning beyond translation. A mere ripple of sound-vibration, called into existence by human touch; a creation, vanishing from its birth, elusive, irreclaimable as a departing soul, yet strong to sway heart and hand as the tornado sways the pliant pine. It is a language peculiar to no period, race, or caste. Ageless and universal, it raises to highest daring, or suffuses with tenderness, today and here, as once on Argo’s deck, or in the halls of Persepolis. Purely material in origin and analysis, easily explicable in mere physical operation, its influence is one of the things that are not dreamt of in the philosophy of science. Why should a certain psychological effect ensue upon certain untranslatable sounds being placed in a given relation to each other, and not when the same sounds are placed in another relation?⁠—and why should that effect be always upward? Why should the composer be perforce a prophet of the sphere above earth’s murky horizon⁠—the musician his interpreter⁠—charged with embassy of peace, and fortitude, and newborn ardour, to the troubled, and weary, and heavy-laden? Has ingenuity never distilled from music any spirit of evil?

None. Euterpe alone of the Muses defies seduction. Harmony is intrinsically chaste. There is no secular music; all music is sacred. Whatever the song the Sirens sang, its music was pure; and no less pure were the notes which breathed from Nero’s lute, whilst the blaze of ten thousand homes glutted his Imperial lust for spectacle. Divorce the unworthy song, stay the voluptuous dance, and the music suffers no clinging defilement; the redeemed melodies, stainless as fresh-fallen snow, may be wedded to songs of gallant aspiration or angelic sympathy, which shall raise the soul awhile above earth’s sordid infection, disclosing the inextinguishable affinity of the divine part of man’s dual nature with the dreamlike possibility of Eden⁠—purity, and fearless faith, and love unspeakable.

The story of the Thracian lyre soothing the horrors of the underworld, and melting to relentment its gloomy king⁠—the story of the shepherd-minstrel’s harp chasing the shapeless penumbra of looming insanity from the first Hebrew brow crowned in Jehovah’s despite⁠—the story of the mighty prophet Elisha, fettered to earth by wrath and scorn till, at his own command, the music swelled, and his enfranchised spirit rose on its viewless wings to behold the veiled future already woven from the tangled skein of the troubled present⁠—the thousand-fold story of music’s magic and mystery, stretches back into the forgotten past, and onward into the imagined future.

Onward into the fathomless eternity; for though “the heaven of each is but what each desires”⁠—though the Aryan heaven be a place of gradation and precedence, a realm to reign in⁠—though the heaven of the Jewish apostle-seer burn with the gold and sparkle with the gems dear to his race⁠—though the paradise of the sun-scorched Arab be dark with shade of evergreen trees, and cool with ripple of never-failing streams⁠—yet is the universal art so intertwined with ideal bliss that no heaven of conscious enjoyment has been pictured by belated humanity but music rings forever there. For alas! what else of mundane achievement can fancy conceive as reproduced in regions of eternal perfection, or transplanted thither? Science is of the earth; ever bearing sad penalty, in toil of mind and body⁠—and what art, save music, has man dedicated to Deity-worship, without disappointment and loss? Doubtfully, architecture; and for such consecration we have found no more expressive name than “frozen music.”

This unknown anchorite’s playing was both a mystery and a revelation. I had never before heard anything to compare with it, nor do I expect ever to hear the like again. Talent, taste, feeling, were there, all in superlative degree, and disclosed with the unassuming confidence of power; whilst long and loving practice in solitude had averted a certain artificiality which, in the judgment of the uninitiated, generally accompanies musical skill. His was no triumphant mastery of a complicated and perplexing score; he was a sympathetic interpreter, a life-breathing, magic-lending exponent of his composer’s revelations, now his own. Solitary practice, with no one but himself to please, would unavoidably give a distinct character to his performance, and this character was evident from the first; it was melancholy⁠—a weary, wistful melancholy, beyond repining or tears, beyond impatience or passion; it was the involuntary record of a gentle heart breaking slowly under discipline untempered by one ray of earthly hope.

My own incompetence to identify by name a tune which I spiritually recognise is, perhaps, the most disgraceful manifestation of my neglected musical education⁠—at all events, it is the one which causes me most uneasiness. Experience has warned me never to ask a player for the “Marseillaise,” or “Croppies Lie Down,” or whatnot; for he is pretty sure to say, “Why, that’s just what I’ve been giving you,” or words to similar effect. Alf at last grew tired of my noncommittal remarks and replies, and, with a tact which impressed me more afterward than at the time, named each tune before and after playing it. For instance, the yearning tenderness of an exquisitely rendered air would seem to bring back some lost consciousness of an earlier and happier existence, suffusing my whole being with a pensive sadness not to be exchanged for any joy. I would feel the notes familiar, but whether of five years or five million years before, or whether in the body or out of the body, I couldn’t tell. Alf, on concluding, would simply murmur, “Home, Sweet Home,” and all would be explained. Then, perhaps, he would say, “The Last Rose of Summer”; and I would be able to follow him intelligently right through.

But he didn’t confine himself to the comfortable vulgarity of popular airs. He played selections from Handel, Mozart, Wagner, and I don’t know whom; while the time passed unnoticed by both of us. At length he laid