au soleil: on sensing the world

The faint but clear sounds were wafted through the night in a murmur of operatic music.

A voice near me said: “This is Sunday, and the band is playing in the public park of San Remo.”

I heard this with astonishment, thinking I must be dreaming. I listened a long time, and with growing delight, to the strains of music carried so far through space. But suddenly, in the middle of a well-known air, the sound swelled, increased in volume, and seemed to gallop toward us. It was so strange, so weird, that I rose to listen. Without doubt it was drawing nearer and louder every second. All was coming toward me, but how — on what phantom raft would it appear? It seemed so near that I peered into the darkness excitedly, and suddenly I was bathed in a hot breeze fragrant with aromatic plants, the strong perfume of the myrtle, the mint, and the citron, with lavender and thyme scorched on the mountain by the burning sun.

It was the land breeze, overcharged with the breath of the hills, that was carrying toward the sea, intermingled with the Alpine odor, these harmonious strains of music.

I was breathless, intoxicated with delight, pulsating in every sense. I could not tell whether I were hearing music and breathing perfumes, or sleeping in the stars.

This perfumed breeze blew us out to sea, where it floated away in the night. The sounds died out gradually, as the ship moved on.

I could not sleep, and I wondered how a modern poet, of the so-called school of symbolism, would have explained the confusing, nervous vibration which I had just experienced, and which seems to me, to plain language, untranslatable. No doubt, some of those poets who take such pains to give expression to the artistic sensitiveness of thought would have come out with honor, giving in euphonious rhymes, replete with intentional sonorousness, the unintelligible though perceptible meaning of these perfumed sounds, this starry mist, and the sweet land-breeze, scattering music to the winds.

I recalled a sonnet from their patron, Baudelaire;

“Nature is a temple where living columns
Sometimes allow jumbled words to escape.
Man walks through forest of symbols
That watch him with familiar looks.
Like long-drawn echoes mingling in the distance,
In a dark and deep unity,
As vast as night, as vast as light,
Perfumes, colors, and sounds, answer each other.
There are perfumes as sweet as a child’s lips,
Sweet as a clarinet, green as the meadows,
And others, again, strong and overpowering,
Having the breadth of infinite space,
Like ambergris, musk, benzoin, and incense,
Which exalt the enraptured mind and senses.”

Had I not just felt, in my inmost soul, the meaning of this mysterious line:

“Perfumes, colors, and sounds answer each other.”

And not only do they answer each other in nature, but the answer is also given within us, and they mingle “in a dark and deep unity,” as the poet says, by the pressure of one organ against another. This phenomenon, however, is known to medical science, and a great many articles have been written on the subject, under the title of “Colored Hearing.”

It has been proved that in certain nervous and highly-strung natures, when one sense receives a shock that affects it, the concussion spreads like the ripples of a wave to the other senses, which respond each in its own way. Thus music, with certain people, evokes colored visions; it must then be a kind of sensitive contagion, transformed according to the normal action of each nerve-center.

In this way can be explained a sonnet from Arthur Rimbaud, who declares that there are shades and colors in vowels, an article of faith which has been adopted by the school of symbolism.

Is he right or wrong? To the breaker of stones on the highway, and even in the opinion of many of our great men, this poet is either a fool or a dreamer. But, in the mind of many others, he has discovered and expressed an absolute truth, though these explorers of minute perceptions must differ in their opinion of shades and mental pictures evoked in us by the mysterious vibrations of vowels or of music.

If it is a recognized fact, according to science, — the science of to-day, — that musical sounds acting on certain organisms can give out color, if sol can be red, fa, lilac or green, why would not these identical sounds carry taste to the palate or odors to the nostrils?

Why should not fastidious though somewhat hysterical natures enjoy everything with every one of their senses at the same time, and why could not symbolists reveal a delightful sensitiveness to beings of their own kind, incurable and privileged poets that they are? This is decidedly more a question of artistic pathology than even one of true aestheticism.

Can it be, however, that some of these interesting writers, who have become neurotic through their very enthusiasm, have reached such a degree of excitability that every impression, received creates in them a sort of concerted unison of all the perspective faculties?

For is not all this expressed in their strange poetry of sounds, which, although somewhat unintelligible, attempts, nevertheless, to run the whole gamut of sensations and prove by the very harmony of words, much more than by their rational union and their known significance, the existence of meanings that are obscure to us, but clear as day to them?

Artists have come to the end of their resources, there is nothing more to publish, nothing unknown in the way of emotions or figures of speech. Since the beginning of time, all the flowers of this particular field have been culled. And so, in their powerlessness to create, they feel in an infinite way that for man there may still be a broadening of the soul and of the senses. And the mind having five gates, half-open and chained, called the five senses, it is at these portals that the men who are enamored of the new art keep continually tugging with their utmost strength.

The mind, that blind and hard-working Unknown, cannot learn, understand, or discover anything except through the senses. They are its providers, the only agents between it and nature. The mind works on the materials furnished by them alone, which they themselves can gather only according to their sensitiveness, their strength, and acuteness.

The value of thought must then depend directly on the value of the organs, and its breadth is limited according to their number.

M. Taine, however, has handled and developed this idea in a masterly treatise. There are only five senses. These reveal to us, by interpreting them, certain properties of surrounding matter and an unlimited number of other phenomena that we are unable to perceive.

Let us suppose that man had been created without ears; he would exist in very much the same manner; but to him the universe would be silent; he would have no idea of noise, of music, which are both transformed vibrations.

But suppose he had been given other organs, powerful and sensitive, capable of transforming into acute perceptions the actions and attributes of all the inexplicable things that surround us, how much more varied would be the extent of our knowledge and emotions!

It is into this inscrutable domain that every artist attempts to enter, by tormenting, violating, and exhausting the mechanism of his thoughts. Those whose brains have given way, Heine, Balzac, Baudelaire, the wandering Byron, — seeking death, disconsolate at the misfortune of being a great poet, — Musset, Jules de Goncourt, and so many others besides, did they not all break down under the strain of attempting to overthrow the material barrier in which is imprisoned the human mind?

Yes, our organs are the nourishers, the masters of artistic genius. The ear begets the musician, the eye creates the painter. Every organ co-operates in helping the poet. With the novelist, the sense of vision usually predominates. It predominates to such an extent that it becomes easy to detect, on reading a sincere and well-written novel, the physical qualities and attributes of the author’s glance. The magnifying of details, giving their importance or their insignificance, whether they encroach on the general scheme or not, — all these illustrate, in a decided manner, the degree and difference of short-sightedness. The proportion of the lines, the perspective offered to the most minute observation, the fact of neglecting to point out some slight information which very often would be the clue to the characteristics of a person or a locality, — do not these indicate the far-seeing though careless glance of the passer-by?