To read or recite poetry as we moderns do is to alter its proper nature, for the purpose of poetry was to be chanted. But this very chanting or singing grew out of talking. On listening carefully to the talk going on around us, we may observe that it does not run in an unchanged monotone, but that all sentences are intoned to an imperfect tune, a rise and fall of pitch marking the phrases, distinguishing question and answer, and touching emphatic words with a musical accent. This half-melody of common speech may be roughly written down in notes; it is not the same in English and German; and indeed one way in which a Scotchman’s talking is known from an Englishman’s is the different intoning of his phrases. When speech becomes solemn or impassioned, it passes more and more into natural chanting, which at devotional meetings may be heard nearly passing into distinct tune. The intoning in churches arose from the same natural utterance of religious feeling, but in course of time it became fixed by custom, and was forced into the regular intervals of the musical scale. So the artificial recitative of the opera is a modern musical working up of what has come down by tradition of the ancient tragic declamation, which once swayed the listening throng of the Greek theatre.
We are apt to take it as a matter of course that all music must be made up of notes in scale, and that scale the one we have been used to from childhood. But the chants of rude tribes, which perhaps best represent singing in its early stages, run in less fixed tones, so that it is difficult to write down their airs. The human voice is not bound to a scale of notes, for its pitch can glide up and down. Nor among nations who sing and play by musical scales are the tones of these scales always the same. The question how men were led to exact scales of tones is not easy to answer fully. But one of the simplest scales was forced upon their attention by that early musical instrument the trumpet, rude forms of which are seen in the long tubes of wood or bark blown by forest tribes in South America and Africa. A trumpet (a six feet length of iron gas-pipe will do) will sound the successive notes of the “common chord,” which may be written c e g c, on which the trumpeter performs the simple tunes known so well as trumpet-calls. This natural scale, perfect so far as it goes, contains the most important of musical intervals, the octave, fifth, fourth, and third. Another scale, of more notes than this, though of fewer than our full scale, is not less familiar to English ears. This is the old five-tone scale, without semitones, which can be played on the five black keys of the pianoforte, and the best-known form of which may be written c, d, e, g, a, c. Old Scotch airs are on the five-tone scale, which indeed may still be met with across the world, as where some traveller in China watching a funeral procession has been surprised to hear a melancholy dirge like what he last heard played by a piper on the shore of a Highland loch. Engel, in his Music of Ancient Nations, shows that music of this pentatonic or five-toned kind has belonged since early times to other Eastern nations, so that any genuine Scotch melody like “Auld Lang-syne” may give some idea of the music of antiquity. The more advanced seven-tone scale which prevails in the modern world is nearly taken from that of the musicians of classic Greece, who accompanied the singer’s voice on the eight-stringed lyre. Pythagoras, who first brought musical tones under arithmetical rule, had the curious fancy that the distances of the seven planets are related as the seven tones of the octave, an idea which still dimly survives among us in the phrase “music of the spheres.”
Modern music is thus plainly derived from ancient. But there has arisen in it a great new development. The music of the ancients scarcely went beyond melody. The voice might be accompanied by an instrument in unison or at an octave interval, but harmony as understood by modern musicians was as yet unknown. Its feeble beginnings may be traced in the middle ages, when musicians were struck by the effects got by singing two different tunes at once, when one formed a harmony to the other. It is still a joke among musicians to sing together in this old-fashioned way two absurdly incongruous tunes, for instance, “The Campbells are coming” and “The Vesper hymn,” so arranged that one makes a sort of accompaniment to the other. The old rounds and catches, still popular, thus make one part of the tune serve as a harmony for the other. The Roman church part-music, and the Protestant singing by the congregation, with the organ to accompany them, had great effect in making the change by which the mere melody of the ancients grew into the harmonized melody of the moderns. This great step once understood, the student can follow in the history of music its successive stages in part-singing and orchestral composition, in the church and the concert-room, till in the hands of the great composers of the last three centuries the full resources of modern musical art were developed.
The musical instruments of the present day may all be traced back to rude and early forms. The rattle and the drum are serious instruments among savages; the rattle has come down to a child’s toy with us, but the drum holds its own in peace and war. Above these monotonous instruments comes the trumpet, which, as has just been seen, brings barbaric music a long step further on. The pipe or flageolet appears in its simplest form in the common whistle, and is improved by holes, by which the player alters the length of the pipe so as to give several notes. From very remote times, and far and wide over the earth, the familiar pipe is found, played single or double, and sometimes blown with the nostril instead of the mouth. Already in the ancient world it was often provided with a skin wind-bag which made it into the bagpipe, or, held sideways and blown across the mouth-hole, it became the flute. Another way of bringing out a range of notes is seen in the Pan’s pipes, the row of reeds of different lengths, in old classic days associated with the grace of rural poetry, but now come down to sound the vulgar pipings of the street showman. In the modern orchestra, the cornet is a trumpet provided with stops. The clarionet is a development of the grass-stem with a vibrating slit or tongue such as children cut in the fields in spring. The whole class of musical instruments to which the harmonium belongs, work with these vibrating tongues, which by their name of “reeds” still keep up the memory of their origin. The organ carries out in the widest range and grandest proportions the principle of the simple pipe or whistle, so that there is scientific correctness in the disrespectful name of “kist o’ whistles” given it by the Scotch, who disliked its use in church. Not less primitive are the rudest forms in which stringed instruments appear. It is told in the Odyssey (xxi. 410) how the avenging hero, when he has strung his mighty bow compact of wood and horn, gives the stretched string a twang that makes it sing like a swallow in a soft tone beautifully. One might well guess that the strung bow of the warrior would naturally become a musical instrument, but what is more, it really is so used. The Damara in South Africa finds pleasure in the faint tones heard by striking the tight bowstring with a little stick. The Zulu despises the bow as a cowardly weapon, but he still uses it for music; his music-bow, shown in [Fig. 75] a, has a ring slid along the string to alter the note, and is also provided with a hollow gourd acting as a resonator or sounding-box to strengthen the feeble twang. Next, looking at b in the figure, it is seen how the ancient Egyptian harp may have been developed from such a rude music-bow, the wooden back being now made hollow so as to be bow and resonator in one, while across it are strung several strings of different lengths. All ancient harps, Assyrian, Persian, even old Irish, were made on this plan, yet we can see at a glance that it was defective, the bending of the wooden back putting the strings out of tune. It was not till modern ages that the improvement was made of completing the harp with the front-pillar, as seen in c, which makes the whole frame rigid and firm. Looking at the three figures, it is seen how the course of invention was by gradual growth; the harp with the pillar could not have been first invented, for no men could have been so stupid as to go on making harps and leave out the front-pillar when once the idea of it had come into their minds. The harp, though now made more perfect than of old, is losing its ancient place in music; but the reason of this is easy to see, it has been supplanted by modern instruments which have come from it. The very form of a grand piano shows that it is a harp laid on one side in a case, and its strings not plucked with the fingers but struck with hammers worked from a keyboard. It is the latest development from the bowstring of the præhistoric warrior.
Fig. 75.—Development of the Harp, a, music-bow with gourd resonator (South Africa); b, ancient harp (Egypt); c, mediæval harp with front-pillar (England).
Dancing may seem to us moderns a frivolous amusement; but in the infancy of civilization it was full of passionate and solemn meaning. Savages and barbarians dance their joy and sorrow, their love and rage, even their magic and religion. The forest Indians of Brazil, whose sluggish temper few other excitements can stir, rouse themselves at their moonlight gatherings, when, rattle in hand, they stamp in one-two-three time round the great earthen pot of intoxicating kawi-liquor; or men and women dance a rude courting dance, advancing in lines with a kind of primitive polka step; or the ferocious war-dance is performed by armed warriors in paint, marching in ranks hither and thither with a growling chant terrific to hear. We have enough of the savage left in us to feel how Australians leaping and yelling at a corrobboree by firelight in the forest can work themselves up into frenzy for next day’s fight. But with our civilized notions it is not so easy to understand that barbarians’ dancing may mean still more than this; it seems to them so real that they expect it to act on the world outside. Thus among the Mandan Indians, when the hunters failed to find the buffalos on which the tribe depended for food, every man brought out of his lodge the mask made of a buffalo’s head and horns, with the tail hanging down behind, which he kept for such an emergency, and they all set to dance buffalo. Ten or fifteen masked dancers at a time formed the ring, drumming and rattling, chanting and yelling; when one was tired out he went through the pantomime of being shot with bow and arrow, skinned, and cut up; while another, who stood ready with his buffalo-head on, took his place in the dance. So it would go on, without stopping day or night, sometimes for two or three weeks, till at last these persevering efforts to bring the buffalo succeeded, and a herd came in sight on the prairie. The description and sketch of the scene will be found in Catlin’s North American Indians. Such an example shows how, in the lower levels of culture, men dance to express their feelings and wishes. All this explains how in ancient religion dancing came to be one of the chief acts of worship. Religious processions went with song and dance to the Egyptian temples, and Plato said that all dancing ought to be thus an act of religion. In fact, it was so to a great extent in Greece, as where the Cretan chorus, moving in measured pace, sang hymns to Apollo, and in Rome, where the Salian priests sang and danced, beating their shields, along the streets at the yearly festival of Mars. Modern civilization, in which sacred music flourishes more than ever, has mostly cast off the sacred dance. To see this near its old state the traveller may visit the temples of India, or among the lamas of Tibet watch the mummers in animal masks dancing the demons out, or the new year in, to wild music of drums and shell-trumpets. Remnants of such ceremonies, come down from the religion of England before Christian times, are still sometimes to be seen in the dances of boys and girls round the Midsummer bonfire, or of the mummers at Yuletide; but even these are dying out. The dances of choristers in plumed hats and the dress of pages of Philip III.’s time, still performed before the high altar of Seville Cathedral, are now among the quaintest relics of a rite all but vanished from Christendom. Even sportive dancing, as a graceful exercise, is falling off in the modern world. The pictures from ancient Egypt show that the professional dancers were already skilful in their art, which perhaps reached its highest artistic pitch in classic Greece and Rome. Something of the old-fashioned picturesque village-dancing may still be seen at festivals in most countries of Europe except England, but the ball-room dances of modern society have lost much of the old art and grace.
At low levels in civilization it is clear that dancing and play-acting are one. The North American dog-dance and bear-dance are mimic performances with ludicrously faithful imitations of the creatures’ pawing and rolling and biting. So the scenes of hunting and war furnish barbarians with subjects for dances, as when the Gold Coast negroes have gone out to war, and their wives at home dance a fetish-dance in imitation of battle, to give their absent husbands strength and courage. Historians trace from the sacred dances of ancient Greece the dramatic art of the civilized world. Thus, in the festivals of the Dionysia, the wondrous life of the Wine-god was danced and sung, and from its solemn hymns and laughable jests arose tragedy and comedy. In the classic ages the player’s art divided into several branches. The pantomimes kept up the earliest form, where the dancer acted in dumb show such pieces as the labours of Herakles, or Kadmos sowing the dragon’s teeth, while the chorus below accompanied the play by singing the story; the modern pantomime ballets, which keep up remains of these ancient performances, show how grotesque the old stage gods and heroes must have looked in their painted masks. In Greek tragedy and comedy the business of the dancers and chorus was separated from that of the actors, who recited or chanted each his proper part in the dialogue, so that the player could now move his audience by words of passion or wit, delivered with such tone and gesture as laid hold on all who listened and looked. Greek tragedy, once begun, soon reached its height among the fine arts, so that the plays of Æschylos and Sophokles are read as examples of the higher poetry, and the modern acted imitations like the Phèdre of Racine give an idea of their power when the genius of the actors can rise to their height of emotion. The modern drama belongs not so much to the sacred mystery-plays of the middle ages as to the classic revival or renaissance of four centuries ago. Those who have seen the ruins of classic theatres at Syracuse, or on the hill-side of Tusculum, will best understand how a modern playhouse shows its Greek origin not only in the arrangement, but in the Greek names of its parts—the theatre, or spectators’ place, which still keeps its well-planned horse-shoe shape; the scene with its painted background and curtain in front; while the orchestra or dancing-place, which was formerly for the chorus, is now given up to the musicians. The change in the tragedy and comedy performed in the modern theatre from those of the classic world is partly due to their having dropped the stiff solemn declamation which belonged to them while they were still religious ceremonies, and their personages divine. In the hands of modern dramatists, of Shakspere above all, the characters came to be more human, though representing human nature in its most picturesque extremes, and life in its intensest moments. Modern plays are not indeed bound to be strictly natural, but can still call in the supernatural, as where now fairies or angels may hover over the scene where in classic days the gods used to pass in mid-air borne in their machines. In the modern comedy the persons dress and talk as near as may be like daily life; yet, even here, when the audience gravely fall in with the pretence that some of the speeches, though spoken aloud, are “asides” not heard by the actors close by, this shows that the modern world has not lost the power to make-believe, on which all dramatic art is founded.
On this same power of make-believe or imagination are founded the two other fine arts, sculpture and painting. Their proper purpose is not to produce exact imitations, but what the artist strives to bring out is the idea that strikes the beholder. Thus there is often more real art in a caricature done with a few strokes of the pencil, or in a rough image hacked out of a log, than in a minutely painted portrait, or a figure at a waxwork show which is so like life that visitors beg its pardon when they walk up against it. The painter’s and sculptor’s art seems to have arisen in the world from the same sort of rude beginnings which are still to be seen in children’s attempts to draw and carve. The sheets of bark or skins on which barbarous tribes have drawn men and animals, guns and boats, remind us of the slates and barn-doors on which English children make their early trials in outline. Many of these children will grow up and go through their lives without getting much beyond this childish stage. The clergyman of a country parish some years ago set the cottagers to amuse themselves with carving in wood such figures as men digging or reaping. They produced figures so curiously uncouth, and in style so like the idols of barbarous tribes, that they were kept as examples of the infancy of sculpture, and are now to be seen in the museum of Kew Gardens. Yet mankind, under favourable circumstances, especially with long leisure time on their hands, began in remote antiquity to train themselves to skill in art. Especially the sketches and carvings of animals done by the old cave-men of Europe have so artistic a touch that some have supposed them modern forgeries. But they are admitted to be genuine and found over a wide district, while forgeries which have been really done to palm off on collectors are just wanting in the peculiar skill with which the savages who lived among the reindeer and mammoths knew how to catch their forms and attitudes. Two of these ancient carvings are drawn in [Figs. 3 and 4], and others in Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times. The art of colouring would naturally arise, for savages who paint their own bodies with charcoal, pipeclay, and red and yellow ochre, would daub their carved figures and fill in their outline drawings with the same colours. Travellers in Australia sheltering from the storm in caves, wonder at the cleverness of the rude frescos on the cavern-walls of kangaroos and emus and natives dancing, while in South Africa the Bushmen’s caves show paintings of themselves with bows and arrows, and the bullock-waggons of the white men, and the dreaded figure of the Dutch boer with his broad-brimmed hat and pipe. Among such people as the West Africans and Polynesians, the native sculptor’s best skill has been used on images of demons and gods, made to receive worship and serve as bodies in which the spiritual beings are to take up their abode. Thus the idols of barbarians, as specimens of early stages of sculpture, have a value in the history of art as well as of religion.
In the ancient nations of Egypt and Babylonia art had already risen to higher levels. Indeed Egyptian sculpture reached its best in the earlier rather than the later ages, for the stone statues of the older time stand and step with more free life in their limbs, and the calm proud faces of the colossal Thothmes and Rameses portraits (like [Fig. 19]) show the grandest ideal of an eastern despot, half tyrant, half deity. In the sculpture halls of the British Museum, it is seen that the early school of Egyptian sculptors were on their way to Greek perfection, but they stopped short. With trained mechanical skill they wrought statues by tens of thousands, hewing gigantic figures of the hardest granite and porphyry which amaze the modern stonecutter, but their art, bound by tradition, grew not freer but more stiff and formal. They might divide their plans into measured squares, and set out faces and limbs by line and rule, but their conventional forms seldom come up to the Greek lines of beauty, and their monuments are now prized, not as models of art, but as records of old-world history. In the British Museum also, the alabaster bas-reliefs that adorned the palace-courts of Nineveh give a wonderfully clear idea of what Assyrian life was like, how the king rode in his chariot, or let fly his arrows at the lion at bay, or walked with the state umbrella held over his head; how the soldiers swam the rivers on blown skins and the storming party scaled the fortress, while the archers shot down among them from the battlements, and the impaled captives hung in rows full in view outside the walls. But in such scenes proportion did not much matter if only the meaning were conveyed. It did not seem artistically absurd to the Assyrians to make archers so big that two fill a whole parapet; nor did the Egyptians feel the comic impression made on our modern minds by the gigantic figure of the king striding half across the battle-field and grasping a dozen pigmy barbarians at a grip, to slash their heads off with one sweep of his mighty falchion. It was in Greece that the rules of art were developed which reject the figures of the older nations as stiff in form and unlifelike in grouping. Greek art is sometimes written of as though it had itself begun in the rudest stage, with clumsy idols of wood and clay, till by efforts of their own surpassing genius the Greek sculptors came to hew in marble the forms which are still the wonders of the world. But great as Greek genius was, it never did this. The Greek nations had been for ages in contact with the older civilizations of the Mediterranean; their starting-point was to learn what art could do in Egypt, Phœnicia, Babylonia, and then their genius set them free from the hard old conventional forms, leading them to model life straight from nature, and even to fashion in marble shapes of ideal strength and grace. The Egyptian sculptors would not spoil polished granite with paint, but many of their statues were coloured, and there are traces of paint left on the Assyrian sculptures and on Greek statues, so that we are apt to have a wrong idea of a Greek temple, as though its marble gods and goddesses used to be of the glaring whiteness of a modern sculpture-gallery. The Greek terra-cotta statuettes in the British Museum are models of antique female grace in form and costume, only wanting the lost colour restored to make them the prettiest things in the world.