“But if a picture is not a thing — I grant you the matter of the book — where does the painter’s merit lie?”
“In knowing how to convey to you what he sees, just as the poet’s skill consists in making his thoughts pass through your brain. The poet’s ideas live longer because the symbols which convey them can be reproduced and are used by everybody. The artist’s symbols are his own, and no one else can use them in the same way to express the same idea.”
“We were talking about the Sirens,” remarked Heine, suddenly. “If we could only find their ‘symbols,’ as you call them—”
“Music is not a symbol. It is an ever-living reality,” said Chopin. “It is a reality that makes itself felt without being always defined.”
“Your music is your thought,” replied Lionardo. “You gave it shape by your skill, and thus transmitted it to others. Therefore it is the symbol of your ideas.”
“The expression, not the symbol. There is a vast difference between the two.”
“The symbol is the means of expressing,” argued the artist. “A sequence of symbols constitutes a whole expression.”
“Not in music. The written notes are the symbols. The strain of living music is the expression. Otherwise you would have a right to say that I derive as much pleasure from looking over a page of music, because I know how it would sound, as I get from actually hearing the same music performed.”
“That is true,” said Lionardo, thoughtfully. “Is music after all the greatest of the arts? Perhaps it is.”
“No,” answered Chopin. “As great as the rest, but not greater. But it is more real, because in music the expression is inseparable from the idea. You cannot imagine a prose translation of music. And yet there are prose translations of poems, which are still capable of moving the heart; and there are copies and drawings of pictures and statues, which still give some part of the pleasure a man would feel in seeing the original. You either hear music, or you do not hear it. There is no compromise for the uninitiated, like a translation, nor any substitute for those who cannot enjoy it directly, such as copies or drawings.”
“Music is like action,” said Cæsar. “What is the description of a great deed, compared with the deed itself? What is an action that is only thought of and never performed? Nothing, unless it furnish a little matter for speculation, and inquiry into its possibility.”
“And love,” suggested the king, “what is it, until a man feels it? It is like music that has never been sung.”
“Music is love, and hate, and peace, and war, and all great passions and great deeds,” replied Chopin. “It is the only art which can express everything that is infinitely noble and grand, and yet which need never define anything.”
“Sir,” said Johnson, “music suggests that which cannot be expressed, nor defined either, by any art with which man is now acquainted. Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe, that those pleasing aspirations, which harmony is so eminently capable of inspiring in the human heart, are only awakened in certain hearers whose organisation is especially fitted to receive a musical impression. To my mind, sir, music is not even a cheerful noise; but I once heard certain solemn music played on French horns at Rochester, and the impression made upon me was of a melancholy kind.”
“If you were affected by the sound of a French horn,” remarked Heine, “it is impossible to say what you might feel if you heard a Siren.”
“We shall see, sir,” replied the doctor, curtly.
“I hope so,” said Gwendoline. “Do you not think we could go about now?” she asked, turning to Augustus.
“Yes,” he answered. “It will be safer, too. There is something brewing down there in the southeast.”
He whistled to the men forward to mind the jibs, and he put the helm down. A man came aft immediately to manage the sheet, as the cutter’s head came up to the wind. Augustus expected to see him start with astonishment at the sight of the strange guests. Then, glancing round, he saw that they had disappeared.
“Let her go a little free of the wind,” said Heine’s voice, as the breeze caught the sail and the vessel went over on to the port tack. The sailor instinctively obeyed the order, allowing a few feet more of the sheet to run through the blocks, but he turned his head sharply round, and stared at Augustus.
“Excuse me, sir, but did you give that order, sir?” he asked, in queer tones.
“No — well — it’s all right, Jameson. You can make fast. And keep your eye on that stuff down there,” added Augustus, pointing to the clouds that were piling up over the Calabrian hills.
“Ay, ay, sir,” answered the man, somewhat reassured. He went forward again, and as he disappeared the figures of the dead men became once more clearly visible in the moonlight.
“You nearly frightened the fellow out of his wits,” said Augustus, with a laugh. “I thought that when you had disappeared you were gone altogether, and could not have made yourselves heard.”
“We are never gone,” replied the poet. “But the power of your currents is diminishing. You yourself will soon no longer see us, nor hear us. I wonder that my voice could still reach that man who is not in the same chain as you.”
“Are you really going? So soon?” asked Diana in sorrowful surprise.
“Very soon — too soon,” answered Heine, sadly.
Again that deep and melancholy sigh swelled, hovered on the breeze and floated away over the rippling water, as though it were itself a spirit burdened with grief, that sought rest and found not where to lay its head.
For a long time there was silence. As the yacht ran farther from the land the night wind lost its strength, and the vessel moved slowly in her course. Almost unconsciously Augustus steered for the three sister islets. The moon’s rays caught the uneven surfaces of the rocks and made them stand out of the white distance. Though the cutter seemed to be hardly moving, the islands came nearer and nearer, and gradually grew more distinct. At last the sails hung idly down, flat and unstirred by any breath. The shore was now not a hundred yards distant and the yacht had scarcely any way on her. At less than twenty yards from the beach she stopped, and lay motionless in the perfect calm.
The shore was low and flat, covered with dark wet sand in which the moonlight found tiny points of reflection, that glistened like diamonds. In the background, and at both ends, the rocks rose up in weird, irregular shapes, full of deep black shadows. A little way down the beach a row of jagged timbers stuck out of the sand, and were all that remained of some poor fishing vessel wrecked long ago.
But as the eyes of all on board gazed at the quiet scene, three moving figures grew up out of the misty moonlight. Three white women sat grouped together on a projecting boulder, three women wonderfully fair, and each so like the other, that their faces were as one face seen from three different aspects. Their hair, golden, even in the moonlight, seemed wet with the sea water, and their lips were red with life. As they looked out to seaward their deep eyes gleamed like a constellation of soft southern stars. One of them held in her hands a coral pipe with two stems, the other a tiny lyre made from a conch shell; the third clasped her ivory fingers together and sat between the others, her lips just parted as though her song were trembling to come forth.
“The Sirens,” said Gwendoline under her breath. But no one else spoke, and all was still.
And so, as the white-winged vessel lay motionless in the enchanted moonlight, those three pale faces were turned upwards, and from the mysterious lips there issued a wild and changing harmony, and words of a half-forgotten speech, which by some strange magic were yet wholly understood by those who heard: —
The moonlight bathes the sea
And the ripples wash the sand,
The song of our hearts goes free
Down the shelving silver strand.
Neither goddesses are we, nor women,
Nor angels nor spirits of death;
We are maidens of evil omen
And we breathe the sea spray for our breath.
The souls of drowned men in hell
Curse us, from mom till even,
For the songs we sing so well.
We are neither alive nor dead,
We know not of death nor of life
But the life of man is our bread
And the tears of widowed wife.
When the Mother of all, before the light,
Labouréd to bring forth gods to Chaos,
Wrapped in the pall of ancient night —
No mother had we in her bosom to lay us,
To dandle and fondle, caress us and nurse us,
For we sprang out of moonlight and soft sea mist
And we sing that the sailors may love us, and curse us,
And die in the song of the lips they have kissed.
In the thick darkness the ages moaned
When the Mother travailed, the shapeless god,
The awful father, Chaos, groaned
Shaking the vaults of space as he trod.
Then the Mother laid hold on the pillars of night
And bowed herself and shrieked aloud,
Till the firmament rocked beneath her might
And split, and was rent into streamers of cloud;
The broad black waste of space was torn,
The arch of heaven was burst to the day,
The sun leapt up, and the gods were born,
And Chaos the father passed away.
But gods and men have bodies and souls,
And they live and they know that their lives are sweet,
While the dear sun shines and the blue tide rolls
While the heart is full and the pulses beat.
The beasts of the forests, the flocks on the mountain,
The bright-winged birds and the fish in the deep,
All drink of the water of life’s clear fountain —
All die at the last and are lost in sleep.
We are bodiless, spiritless, mingled together
Of the rays of the moon that deceive men to sin,
Of the spray of the sea and the salt sea weather,
Of mists out of depths that suck men in.
Our hands are transparent as white alabaster,
Our fingers are skilled to the holes of the pipe,
Our song swells sweet, as the oars dip faster
And the long ash bends in the sailor’s gripe.
While the strange voices from the shore were singing their unearthly song, the great clouds in the southeast had grown blacker and more angry. A small portion of the mass, detached and driven by some upper current of wind, far to westward, obscured the moon. A cool stream of moist air rushed over the water, low and swift, not reaching the yacht, where she lay in the lee of the rocks, but crisping the water at the end of the little island and making the ripples ring against the jagged stones. Suddenly a bright flash of lightning illuminated the distant cloud-bank and a far-off peal of thunder rolled out through the night and reverberated along the shores of the great gulf. Louder and clearer, faster and wilder, the song of the Sirens swelled in the gloom: —
In the crags of the south the dark cloud-heaps are piling up mountains, The storm slaves of Æolus howl to be looked from their caves, The dark depths of the waters well up from their fathomless fountains, From the brooding breast of the sea, and the womb of the waves.
There is sullen wrath in the voices that distantly rumble, In the dark, the white plumes gleam and flash, as the sea-horses plunge Through the masterful waves and the billows, that heavily tumble Where the storm-riders charge into battle, meet, buffet and lunge.
The sharp screech of the swift-streaming storm cleaves the deep sounds asunder, And the blade of the lightning stabs the deep sea with a dash, Then the wail of the wounded waves is drowned in the thunder That bursts out and rumbles and roars down the track of the flash.
The wild tide, massed in mountains of back-driven waters defiant, Rears, towers and totters, then falls all its terrible height, Roaring forward and pounding the shore like a great, maddened giant Tossed out of the caldron of storms to devour the night.
In the crashing and flashing of thunder and blazing lightning The whirlpools are rattling the ships like dice in a bowl, The taut weather shrouds are all parting, the wet rigging tightening Snaps like grass at the blocks and drags down by the board at each roll.
In the match between gods and sea-giants for souls of sailors The stiff triple-reefed sail bursts the bolt-ropes and sprains the slant yard, While the slave in his chains, doomed to drown at his oar with his jailors, Bows his back and pulls desperate strokes in the dark, straining hard.
For the sea is Death’s garden and he sows dead men in the loam, When the breast of the waters is ploughed like a field by the gale, When the ocean is turned up and rent in long furrows of foam By the coulter and share of the wind and the harrow of hail.
The distant thunder gradually subsided, as it so often does in those southern seas, borne away in a new direction by the changing currents of the wind. The streamer of cloud, that had hidden the moon for a few moments, now disappeared and showed her far down upon the western horizon. Her beams fell full upon the white, supernatural beauty of the sisters’ faces. Suddenly their song changed, and twining their smooth arms about one another’s necks they moved slowly forward till they stood on the edge of the sand, so that the gently rippling water washed their gleaming feet. And thus they sang: —
Hail, summer’s moon, pale with soft deathly love!
The silent stars, thy messengers and slaves,
Thy faithful linkmen in the roads above,
Show thee the paths that lead o’er dead men’s graves —
O’er the great grave of all, through which they drove
Their raking craft, mid storms and lashing waves,
Hither, whence dying gales on languid wing
Waft seaward through the night the song we sing.
Come, weary mariners! Come, tired souls,
Faint with the watch and labour of the sea,
With tugging at the oar where mad surf rolls,
With staring for the light upon the lee,
Worn out with waking when the watch-bell tolls —
Here is the land you seek! Rest and be free!
Slack sheet and halyard, furl and stow your sails,
Smooth gleams the harbour and the storm wind fails.
Long have you toiled upon the hard oak seat,
Your limbs are stiff and aching with the blast,
Your hands are cramped with grasping the wet sheet,
Your eyes are dim with watching from the mast
For some faint light amidst the driving sleet I
Now sinks the storm, now is the tempest past.
Run the long ship securely on the sand,
Stretch your strong limbs and leap upon the land!
The moon is low, the heavy hours that toiled
So slow about the dial of the night,
When wave yawned back from wave, and hissed and boiled,
Bathe now their crystal coronets in light.
Poseidon’s trooping monsters now have coiled
Their slimy length to sleep, far out of sight.
To distant depths subsides the storm-god’s roar
And tuneful ripples tinkle on the shore.
Think not, as o’er the swinging ash you bend,
These rocks too rough, or this wet strand too cold!
Dread not the reef, as with long sweep you send
Your ship abeach! Nor keel, nor laden hold
Shall grate upon one sea-shell that offend
The smooth long planks, the deep sweet sand shall fold
Your tired bark as in a sea-bird’s nest,
And on our velvet shore your limbs shall rest.
Fear not the shadows flitting in the gloom!
Think not that some forlorn, unhappy ghost,
Of mariner unburied, from his doom
Has risen to haunt the cranni�
�s of our coast;
Nor that from unknown depths of ocean’s tomb
Dead men come back, a ghastly, dripping host!
Those are not faces, those dim forms are wreathed
In ivory moonlight through the sea-mist breathed.
Nay shrink not! These are not white bleaching bones
Of drowned men — that is not a sailor’s skull!
The moonbeams paint strange pictures on the stones —
That jagged thing is not a rotting hull!
Lend not your ears to melancholy tones
Blown out of low-mouthed caves when tempests lull!
Our song is soft, our voices swell, our lips
Shall teach you sweet things, ere the young moon dips.
Look on us maids, for we are young — and fair!
Nor misty as we seem; a woman’s arm
Is warm and smooth, and pillowed in her hair
A sailor’s weary head may rest from harm.
What? Are ye men, and do you then not dare
To yield your bodies to a woman’s charm?
Ah, mariners! we love you — let these tears
Warm your chilled hands and melt away your fears!
Waste not your looks on shadows, in our faces
Read the sweet signs and oaths of woman’s love!
Read, that these hearts are yours, these sea-born graces,
These lips of ours, that kissed the gods above —
This golden hair, tangled in misty laces
Fine as the Lydian web Arachne wove —
All yours, love’s kisses and entrancing powers
Yours, and in being yours, we make you ours!
The gods, exiled beyond this sweet earth’s life,
Envied the love withheld from cold immortals,
And longed for love and hope, and human strife,
Till, gazing down from heaven’s golden portals,
They burned to clasp a breathing, living wife.
So love we you, ye brave and strong-limbed mortals
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 320