Concerning Unheard Melodies

‘SUPPOSE, children, nobody had ears, suppose no living thing had ears,’ Teacher said, looking hard out of her brown eyes at the row of attentive faces before her, ‘would there be any sound in the world?’

Silence — into which presently a bumblebee, fresh from the sweets of the scraggly lilac bush outside the schoolhouse window, boomed his sturdy disapproval of speculative niceties. The third boy from the door dragged a copper-toed shoe across the bare floor, and nodded doubtfully. Then there was a chorus of nods — practical unanimity,

‘Sure there would be,’ quoth freckled John Smith, emboldened by the nods. What courage of conviction is ever so recklessly cocksure as that inspired by conscious cohesion with the uninspired majority? ‘’T would n’t make no difference. The noise’d be there just the same, whether anybody heard it or not. ’Course it would — why would n’t it?’

Another boy, minus forty-odd years of enlightening experience, seconded John Smith. ‘S’posen, now, a gun was set some way, so’s it’d go off in — in the middle of the Desert of Sahary. Would n’t it bang, same as it does here?’

Teacher smiled oddly, and the controversialist was seized with geographical searchings of heart.

‘ Well, s’posen a thunder shower was to come up in the middle of the night, and nobody waked up — nobody ’t all anywhere — then it’d be just heatlightnin’, would it? Huh! And could n’t the deafest man ever was see a dog’s mouth go, and know the bark was cornin’? Well, I rather guess he could!’

But Teacher convicted us of scientific heresy from a torn volume of Webster’s Unabridged, though our uninstructed common-sense still stood stubbornly on the defensive. Sound was a sensation, produced through the medium of the ear, she explained; hence, if there were no ears, there could be no sound — no sound of any sort.

Freckled John Smith drew a long breath, making an incredulous wheeze through his nose.

‘But there’d be the stuff to make it of,’ he contested; and Teacher conceded that much, with cautions about the materialistic suggestions of ‘stuff.’

This reminiscence of my boyhood was recalled by Mr. and Mrs. Follett’s essay on Henry James in the June, 1916, Atlantic, especially by that line, aptly quoted to such a theme, concerning ‘unheard melodies,’ which granting we trust the poetic intuition — are sweeter far than any which filter through the tympanum, and get themselves duly recognized as melodious in the positive degree. I confess that that line, and its suggestions, have always troubled me a good deal. For if a melody is unheard, how does anybody know that it is a melody, and not a discord? Does an exceptionally keen ear catch a glinting note now and again, and boldly vouch for the quality of what ears in general are oblivious to? And, even then, is n’t ‘just, plain sweet,’ with the popular vote in its favor, vastly preferable to the superlatively saccharine, with its severely select audience, or no audience at all? Again I seem to see Teacher’s brown eyes looking at me over the dog-eared pages of Webster’s Unabridged, as she patiently explains that ‘if there were no ears, there could be no sound, no sound of any sort.’

It is Browning who has given the strongest color of reality to the myth of the ‘unheard melody,’ because, in listening to his song, new, rich notes repeatedly vocalize out of the silence. I never take up my Browning without an awed sense of treading on brinks of unsuspected discovery, which goes to prove the contention of Mr. Chesterton that things undreamed of, or, better still, vaguely surmised, whether these be in heaven or earth, or in Sordello, have a ‘certain poetic value.’ This value depreciates notably, however, when the ‘unheard melody,’ long listened for, unravels itself out of the brooding silence only to prove a familiar street ballad in a Browningese setting— not particularly apt, but only incoherent. And this, alas, happens oftener than one might wish!

Furthermore, despite Browning societies numberless, and a perfect Midrash of illuminating or distracting commentary, there are lines in Browning which still whet the daring of the adventurous. What is under there, we ask — Kohinoor or brook-smoothed pebble? And sometimes we add, with a dash of petulance, Why should so much be left underground, anyhow? Is this which baffles the fairly intelligent reader, after a third reading, or even a fourth, the ecstatic utterance of a soul which has drunk so deep of the Pierian spring that the common tongue of the street and the drawing-room fails in its struggle for self-expression; or is it merely the blundering obscurity of a ‘ great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech’?

Mr. Browning is credited with the belief that it would be rather difficult to express some of the thoughts in Sor-dello in a perfectly lucid manner. Well, be it so, but is not literary artistry admittedly difficult, and is it not the chief glory of the poet’s craft to fit apt and understandable phrases to unknown or dimly comprehended truths? The true poet is burdened with his seer’s vision, but is he not burdened also with the interpretation thereof? If Browning be ‘ clearly one of that class of poets who are also prophets,’ shall it not, then, be frankly counted a defect that his message will never be delivered in its entirety, and that only a few stray lines of cheerful optimism will ever reach the common ear? After Sordello, ‘the most involved, bewildering, and altogether incomprehensible poem ever written by Browning,’ there was ample time left to cultivate the ‘ winning graces of simplicity,’ had such a course seemed desirable. Was it desirable? Was it possible? Or is genius of a high order always erratic, and more or less bewildering?

It is the fashion of critics to mention Meredith after Browning, and the later Henry James after Meredith. For writers of prose, these two last certainly sported to the verge of peril with the ‘unheard melody,’ so far, at least, as a popular hearing is concerned. It is said that Meredith wrapped his toga wrathfully about him, and shook the dust of the arena from his sandals, when his second book, Evan Harrington, failed to win the plaudits of the giddy populace. Whether the deserted public afterwards shed bitter penitential tears over the distressing complexities of Diana of the Crossways, bewailing too late what was now lost forever, or simply ‘threw up its hands in despair’ and went its light-hearted, care-free way to the literary music-hall on the next corner, is a question for those better versed in Meredithiana to decide.

And when all is said, was Meredith’s style influenced in the least by a public frigid to his fires, or by what flippant critics thought of him, or does genius of his peculiar type have a natural trend, which it cannot but follow? Can we conceive a Meredith praised and petted into a Meredithian Thomas Hardy? Or if the worst must be told, did the three of them — Browning, Meredith, and Henry James — count ‘the common sort, the crowd’ a negligible quantity, and thus allow a good many truths, neither hopelessly profound, nor especially intricate in themselves, to ‘suffer stifle in the mist,’ from which a modicum of trouble might have extricated them? In short, was the reproach of ‘perverse obscurity’ easier to be borne than the odium of ‘playing to the pit’?

And, most important of all, are we dealing here with a literary tendency likely to persist? Shall we have presently a cult of the ‘unheard melody’ and of the ‘ story that cannot be told’? As Romanticism was a revolt against time-honored classic models, do we see here a revolt against the conventional audience— the audience of Dickens and Scott? That would be a sad pity, just at this time, too, when the alluring ‘best seller’ is still in the land, with a vast deal of doubtful ethics stored away under red cloth and white lettering. A writer with a gracious message ought to be heard, not only by open wood fires, and in dim-lighted libraries, but in cottages and on streetcorners as well.