II
If Spencer's theory is æsthetically and psychologically inconceivable, he is hardly happier in the pseudo-historical evidence by which he seeks to support it. His notion seems to be that all ancient music, and the Oriental and savage music of the present day, represent the art at the second or recitative stage of development—a kind of half-way house between excited speech and full-blown song. Thus the Chinese and Hindoos "seem never to have advanced" beyond recitative. "The dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs [53] of civilised races"—which is surely a quite illegitimate comparison. Again, "hence it follows that the primitive (Greek) recitative was simpler than our modern recitative, and, as such, much less remote from common speech than our own singing is." These typical quotations will serve to show how blandly Spencer assumes the very thing he has to prove. The dance-chants of savages are not as highly organised as our European songs; but does this indicate that there is not the same psychological difference between the song and the speech of the savage as there is between the song and the speech of the European? The ancient Greek music was not so complex as ours; but will Spencer be bold enough to say that a man of Athens, listening to contemporary music, did not feel under it precisely the same kind of æsthetic pleasure as we feel when we listen to a song by Brahms or a symphony by Beethoven—a kind of pleasure different in essence and in temperature from any that can be given by speech? Did the Greek, that is, listening to Greek music, feel as I do when I listen to an eloquent preacher or an intoning Quaker, or as I do when I listen to music in the real sense of the term? Surely there can be no doubt in the matter. Setting aside the difference due to the enormous development of our art on the formal and technical side, there can be no question that the Greek took pleasure in his music quâ music, not quâ "recitative." [54] And as with the Greeks, so with Orientals and savages. How Spencer can imagine that Oriental music as a whole, and particularly that of China and India, has for the most part remained stationary at recitative, is a mystery to me, in face of the mass of evidence that may be had from any history of music or any collection of travels. There is, indeed, in much Oriental music, that dubiety of scale (according to our notions) which has misled unwary travellers into the belief that the native singing cannot be real music, because it is so different from ours. But nothing can be better established than the fact that melodies pure and simple, tunes written and sung merely to express that pensée musicale to which I have already referred, are common in the music of all Oriental nations. Spencer's statement "that the music of Eastern races is not only without harmony, but has more the character of recitative than of melody," and that "the chant of the early Greek poet was a recitative with accompaniment in unison on his four-stringed lyre," is a fair sample of the uncritical way in which he has assumed anything that would be likely to bear out his theory. His confusion of two or three distinct things by dubbing them all "recitative" is one of the main sources of his errors on this question. As for his attempt to limit harmonic music to modern Europe, I will only say, with Naumann, that wherever we have, as in the old Egyptian paintings, a representation of a concert with many instruments of various shapes and sizes, it is incredible that the performers should all have been playing the same notes. The result, of course, could not have been harmony in our acceptation of the word, for this is to a large extent dependent upon theory for its development; but it was conceivably one of the roots from which harmony could grow. And as Spencer admitted that his theory contained no explanation of harmony, that theory is obviously weakened by any fact indicating that the desire for harmony is innate in the human breast, like the love of tones, sequences of tones, and relations between tones. We must dismiss from our minds all the misleading connotations of the term "harmony," as we must with the term "recitative"; and when we do this there is ample evidence to show that the harmonic sense—the joy in hearing two tones sounded together—is as innate, and as independent of the stimulus of speech, as the melodic sense. The mere sweeping of the harp-strings during singing is not what we would call harmony; but if it does not point to a rudimentary feeling that tones in combination are more pleasurable than single tones, it is difficult to say what it does indicate. Everywhere, in truth, we come down to the really fundamental fact, that there is even in primitive man a real musical sense, independent of speech in origin, and, as far as we can see, much earlier than speech in the order of time, for man certainly expressed his feelings in pure indefinite sound long before he had learned to agree with his fellows to attach certain meanings to certain stereotyped sounds.