Essays in Portraiture (14)

And as for Orpheus and Amphion, who exercised so very potent a spell upon their auditors that even inanimate things answered the call of their song, they themselves in my opinion would have abandoned their lyres, had they heard her, and would have stood by in silence, listening. That scrupulous observance of time, so that she makes no mistakes in the rhythm, but her singing throughout keeps measure with a beat that is accurate in its rise and fall,[*] while her lyre is in full accord, and her plectrum keeps pace with her tongue; that delicacy of touch; that flexibility of modulations—how could all this be attained by your Thracian, or by that other who studied lyre-playing on the slopes of Cithaeron in the intervals of tending cattle?[*]

Therefore, if ever you hear her sing, Lycinus, not only will you have learned by experience, through being turned into stone, what the Gorgons can do,

but you will know also what the effect of the Sirens was like; for you will stand there enchanted, I know right well, forgetful of country and of kin; and if you stop your ears with wax, the song, in spite of you, will slip through the very wax! Such music is it, a lesson learned of some Terpsichore or Melpomene, or of Calliope herself, fraught with a thousand witcheries of every sort. I may sum it up by saying: “Imagine that you are listening to such singing as would naturally come from such lips and from those teeth.” You yourself have seen the lady in question, so consider that you have heard her.