Voices

THERE is a vibration of command in the fine-strung human voice. It demands the answering auditory quality, thereby completing the circuit.

And yet, any articulate demand of value cannot stop at the verge of the sensitory powers. Its rhythmical questionings go sounding over the wafers of our being, stirring the long sea-grasses of our fancy, that seem so fragile, and are yet deep-rooted and vigorous. They are dependent on the sturdy waves that flutter open the petals of their submental flowers, as the surges by our shore unfold the rock-anemone.

Such is the eternal curiosity of this blinded depth, that it awaits the tide of sound with the avidity and wistfulness of a Helen Keller, spelling out messages from the touch of a hand.

Each new voice, to a sensitive listener, betrays the owner. By its largesse, capricious leaps, sedate levels, overflows of laughter, undertones of days lived and lovable, promises, assurances, and reserves, you are already far on the road to acquaintance, when this new sprite of a voice knocks first at your door. He cannot help it! Better flee than attempt disguise. All that is subtle beneath, the silver tongue has just hinted. Whatever is there of sad or slow-blossoming he can scarcely disguise. We say, “ Dear me, how he has suffered!” We cry, “Ah, there’s a happy man for you!” and neither knows that he is limned as clearly to us through his resounding syllables as the special character of elm and willow through our window-pane. In spite of this, degrees and possibilities are still to be discovered, and cynicism or a brave heart, a fad or willful reserve, may build the close-fitted armor protecting his depths even as the barrier in certain eyes is like a veil over the soul.

I think Jeanne d’Arc listened for her voices with no deeper eagerness than we when the newcomer nears our circle. W e are interested each in the other. Irretrievably inclosed in our shell of beautiful tissues and moving blood, the lonely soul within the clay, informed of all that passes, enlarged or restricted as that clay may be modeled, is listening constantly from that central solitude for whatever may cheer, awaken, or illuminate.

The woodland beasts that crept around Apollo and found voice for their inarticulacy in that divinity of sound, needed no more to be entreated than does the human when it scents the divine.

Certain voices level away the steeps of darkness; all is light. Like Vittoria singing against the black pines, her voice calm and full as the white moon’s calmness there, they shine. Like Elsa above Ortrud’s guilty shadow, they are syllables of light. Or, like bells touched in the late night, they are clear, round-throated, calling up the dawn across dim shadowy hollows, where cold mist hovers about dew-frosted thyme and ivy by mills yet silent.

Voices of such resonant vibration have absolutely the quality of the bell in the tower, already silent, still quivering, but filling the air with a melodious humming of bronze — the bees of sound at work at their honey-making about the airy hive.

Such the voice of power. Not incomplete, or unawakened. However restricted once the personality now seeking expression, we are sure that no light experience of years must have perfected chimes like these. Whatever is mellow in their ringing, or far-piercing, or poignant, there the fire brought it, left it, — fire of the gods. Heroes are tempered therein, and the sober sound that flames utter on wintry hearth is theirs and also the soft singing that apple-boughs are wont to break into there, — of dead summers when drought and heat lay on the land, and yet the apple ripened.

But one can imagine only with difficulty the complete voice. It should range throughout life and life’s mysteries, crudities, solemnities, noble rages, ignoble terrors, — and as the sound races in our ears, it should be so much larger a fancy than our own, so incalculably dominant, that we, too, are on foot and away, illimitable ourselves, at the moment. Controlled, it must be, yet thereby no stranger to life. He that rides all day from dawn to the gray of evening has heard many a cross-road cry and many a Philomela. He has faltered and fallen. He is knight and rescuer, slow plodder under storm, willing traveler beside ambulant pilgrim or priest. Betrayed,’succored, never betraying, never quite losing kerchief or shield, he wanders near at last, bringing the world to our ears through his voicing of its medley.

“ I care not whether you listen,” says the Voice Beautiful. “ Soon or late, you cannot resist me. Varied as the Magician commanded am I. Perhaps I am fathoming for you a beauty deeper than that I simulate. I am not quite perfection. I am the instrument that suggests to you the ideal; through my scope you dream. Are you unsouled like the Ice-Queen, it is for me to unlock those crystal portals through which your heart shall feel the warmth of my aria. Surely, at times I belong to beings of no great or peculiar power. I speak in the sunny phrases of the hill-women when they have basked long on the massive shoulder of Italy, and musical are the slow words they let fall as you pass. I am the voice of Calvé, blotted against the great stage wings, seductive, velvet. I am the shepherd tongue that counts its iambs at twilight, the pastoral tongue of content. Sir Philip Sidney am I, in thirst and honor dying, or the hundred Lohengrins of life, those young Swans that float away. Pilgrims and penitents have known my voice as theirs. Many a nymph have I inspired; many a dryad, leaf-crowned by old Pan, has, with him, shared my whispering. I range from the reed of a poet to the bolt of a Jove of mankind — leader, exkorter, law-giver. I croon with the cow-boy as he holds the restive cattle by his chant under the stars on the unbarred prairies, where the far mesa casts no shadow at dawn. When your dearest lie down to sleep, I am that faint Goodnight ! When they are drifting forever from you, my own voice is that last breathing of your name. When the priest calls up the beauty of deed and life of one in rest before him, my peace dwells in his tone. For some one of you I become, at last, most intimate, most dear, in the note that, with you and the Spirit, closes the chord.”

Get you dreams — ye work-a-day! Hark to the Voice! But only by intui lion, by sympathy, by holy love, may you win.

The full power of the Vox Humana calls, and at last ye understand, for life has taught you. But at first ye understood not, though from earliest time it called.

Curious the effect of many voices in a crowd. The sibilance and reiteration of similar sounds rattle at last in the ear, hiss and subside, and rear again the hydra-heads. And suddenly, a single voice is born out of this tumult. You are instantly quite secure in a little special peaceful atmosphere of your own and some one’s else, produced entirely by the key of tone to which your own sensitiveness is attuned, and which in some mysterious way, under all its dailiness, says Beautiful! to you. And the voice heard from a distance, the owner quite invisible, is the veritable voice reduced to its own merits; no lift of eyebrow, no familiar flicker of the lips, no laughter below the crumpling eyes. Swiftly adaptive and flexible, the supple throat follows the convolutions of its deft mind, and you stand as if with eyes closed, hearing the soul play close to unseen lips, they translating all sorts of hidden languages and folk-lore and loveliness to you, though bare words themselves are unheard.

There are harp strings in the human throat. Personality plays upon them. When its hands are firm, white, and accustomed, you shall hear marvelous melodies. And if they throb and thrum for one alone, he shall know the vibration of the spheres.

The young voice, a disembodied treble floating over all that is to be, as yet, latent, unborn, — is curiously clear, unstirring and limpid, as if you looked into a spring so untroubled that it cast back the pure spaciousness above quite undisturbed. It is so untried that it cannot vibrate yet with the strength of endeavor and the pride of victory. There is no shadow-wing of defeat, retreating across the sky. However passionless and irresponsive these child-like vocables, they hold you to an upper scale of charm, to the highlands of youth, where the young lambs play and the sun rises early and has many hours to run! Well may you dream of dew and freshness, for here is the real morning voice.

But the voice that is awakening and trying its chords, running, half-fearfully, on scales that are swiftly responsive, astoundingly vigorous, develops magical assonances, startling and novel rearrangements of jaded harmonies. When such a voice is not yet overlaid with usage, custom, weariness, or bitterness, the daily rites of dissimulation and fact, the accretions of other accents, other minds, when it speaks in its own clarity and purity on a range as yet slight, it is most musical, most haunting in its brief cadences and springing laughter. So, while such a young soul is unconsciously uttering itself, all turn to hear, for conqueror and conquered alike are thirsty for the sound.

However, the great instrument that is utterly alive and awake has a richness comparable to nothing daily. Only wild and rare similes may suffice. Somewhat exotic it has, like the flash of a Bird of Paradise in the forest. Or it curves to dazzling extremes of color, like the necklace of Isabella d’Este, — “ black amber beads and gold and enamelled roses,” luxuriously sliding one against the other. It is Miriam. It is that Vittoria of Colonna when he of the Chapel .was listening to her. It is Beatrice. And, not least of these — Diana Warwick.

There was once a Padre Giovanni in Rome who sang with such charm and potency that Jealousy stilled that voice to the world. Yet the other soul, the evil one, died too. What of the voice of Jealousy still singing from such depths of hatred and murder within? But how many accents have perished through a dying soul! What wrecks of men lie below the shambling tones, the irrational vagaries of diction we hear! Through dry rot and mildew, parasite and slothful sap, they failed and, at last, the great wind in the night broke them at the woodland border, strewing the lane with litter for the pot, that creaked but woefully as it fell.

Saddest of all is to hearken to the voice — young, and yet never to be young again — passing below in the night of a great city. Pleading, sobbing, half-wild, wholly alone forever, it yet clings to what it has best known. The poignancy and terror of such silver weeping sweep across the brief segment of dark, an answering deep note soothing, sustaining, pleading as well, while the ghostly duo fades into that night from which it sprang. It is like an apparition from Dante’s brain. And that grave mind that saw so deeply into hearts and passions of men must have pitied, had it ever heard such sobbing in the night.

Golden is the gift of Silence, for the golden tongue is rare. Rare the orator, the speaker, who shall own both pearls of diction, and well of experience. If he croak or lisp, hesitate or drawl, then his jewels are set in such clumsy wise they must, of need, be reset in type, shining then with fairer lustre, farther thrown. Yet at times he is born to hold and charm his people with a voice fully expressive of his own powers. If he speak of farthest Thibet or Nyanza, describe to you the flickering Aurora or the camp-fire flaming on rough totems; if he divine some accustomed poet or interpret anew the world’s old wisdom; or if at last, he chant so clearly the laws of being, of living, doing, and loving, that all tired or hopeless eyes see suddenly the culmination of a Happy Age; if he stir men to deeds, or shock them from selfishness; arouse from sloth, shame the miser’s hand from grip on purse-strings, lead some to peace and others to nobility, what shall be more truly golden than an organ such as this ?

How, in the night, the sounds of memoried voices go leaping through one’s brain!

Blind Jean croons by the espaliered pear in the old Breton garden. In low crypts and under naves where painted glass turns gray walls to prismatic sunlight, the kneeling women whisper softly. In San Marco, the antique saints about the domes hang above chants rising from beside that glowing altar of transparencies, gems and gold. Voices in dark alleys caroling. The gruff cries of coal-heavers below harbored ships at night. Fishermen calling across the little bay, as twilight shuts down upon their furling sails. The mast-head cry. The tone of her that still is “ stepping westward.” Reuben in the swamp, calling the red cow home from redder sumach. Beagles in dry autumn grass, and the gay halloo behind. The shepherd, brown upon his browner moor, — a faint touch on its immensity, — his voice a plover cry across it. And the roundelays in harvest field or vineyard.

A few bees make populous the brown moor. It is no longer lonely. A single thrush in the greenest hollows of the woods makes the palisaded glooms companionable. It shall go hard if you share not your rock by the sea with one voice of the untamed wing.

But the Voice Impalpable! It is that which lives not, yet is immortal, which has never quite died, having been once born, bearing a fame like that of the arms of Helen, the peak of Ætna, the shoulders of Olympian Hermes, Hylas below the trailing maiden-hair — things that sang not, yet are sung and voiced forever.

Such potencies are the springs of poets. These are their Alps. The glacier of Time stores all things in its subterranean heart. But he who watches far off where Time’s laggard stream drops the freshness of its reservoirs in his own springs, hears the Voice Impalpable from those dim caverns, and the very intoxication of their antique wine hangs about the lips that, in a divinity of passion, speak of ideal loneliness, or strength, or purity of soaring line, or fables of the elder world.

The real singers were primal Pan and his forest friends. Polyphemus, too, lamented by the sea, and his rough voice is beauty now. Bacchantes cried out, ranging the forest. The Strayed Reveler whispered under the white portico. There were voices in Athens, burning tongues in Rome. There was the hushed murmur in the narrow dark crowded streets about that first picture of Cimabue. What gasping words of hatred when Scotch Mary’s breath was cloven! What sound was that of the long wolf howl by the Bastile! What acclamations rose from serf and slave when told of freedom!

Of the Voice Impalpable is one living thing, —the Voice of Song. It is eternal. One tiniest rough scrap of clay has given it tongue. For in one of the oldest and poorest streets of that city in France once called Marsalia, running above the crowded port where the beaks of great ships hang above the quai, is the shop of Rafael. He was born in Amalfi, in that sunny town of the great church steps and cliff viale, built along the islanded sea below Ravello’s Moorish Towers and the steep salite where hill-women bear heavy burdens on their shoulders. And here, in this alien town, in a shop so restricted that one small table by a single window must hold his primitive moulds and tools, he has found space to hang a few colored prints of his home, and his face will light up when you notice them.

He is an artist of the Santons or Santouns — the clay images made in thousands for the Christmas crèches and sold along the boulevards in the December fair. But he goes not to the fair with his work — being an artist!

And when you have finished looking at the curious little pots of color, earthy in foundation, the tiny brushes, moulds, clay models, and saints as yet untoned, that litter the dim little bench, you find all the Santons arranged on shelves, of two or even three sizes, from the smallest pink baby Jesus who could lie so sweetly in a tiny manger, to a swarthy stalwart King, all spotted ermine and gold, clasping a vase of treasures. Here is Mary, adoring. Here, the countrywoman, come to admire, with her gift of poultry. There, the wanderer with bagpipe and swathed legs like the Campagna peasants, or a cluster of angels, ready to suspend from some neat wire. And there, that day, stood the Voice of Song. He was a little shepherd. You could see he was sitting on a rock of the hillside, flocks not far away. The pipes were at his childish lips, and his little face had so young and fair an aspect that you could imagine it looking up into that clear bright heaven where hung the Star above Judæa. To the Deliverer, the Expected, the Good, was he piping, and yet, just the love of the double throat was really at the bottom of this heart; and in that breathing-out of art fulfilled, lay his joy over the Unknown and the Good.

There is a Paradisal murmuring in the voice that demands the aureole of the Star. Bound on the forehead, it sanctifies the lips.

The little Voice of Song, — it sleeps all night below the Star.