Look for a moment at the two theories and their implications side by side. We know that primitive man, like the animal, [52] is susceptible to tone, sequences of tone, colour of tone, and rhythm; and that, from purely physiological causes, a number of his feelings tend to express themselves in vocal sounds. Now these are all the elements we require in order to construct modern music. The composer feels strongly, and is impelled to find an outlet for his emotions in tone. According to the line of his emotion, so to speak, is the line of his music—the pure feeling takes hold of the sounds through which alone it can utter itself, and shapes them, in form, in colour, in sequence, in intensity, after its own image. We have in primitive man, in a rude and undeveloped stage, all these elements out of which the modern music-maker builds his gorgeous palaces. According to the intensity of the emotion of the savage will be the width of the intervals of his voice, the resonance, the colour of it; according to the shade of his feeling will be the shade of his rude melody; and from the ensemble of the qualities of the sounds in which he is uttering himself will his hearers be able to guess what mood it was that animated his song. Here, then, are all the elements out of which music could grow, even if man had never learned to speak three connected words. Yet we are asked by Spencer to believe that these elements, sufficient in themselves to give birth to music, remained dormant in the human breast for untold centuries, until man had evolved a fairly elaborate system of speech—for it must be remembered that Spencer's theory presupposes not the rude and merely utilitarian speech of the man only one remove from the beast, but a comparatively highly organised language, capable of expressing connectedly a savage's thoughts about something more than his daily physical wants. Some such abstract, æsthetic, reflective form of speech we are compelled to postulate if we are to grant the probability of music arising, as Spencer says it did, from the excited speech of man. Then, when man has slowly and painfully learned to speak, and had plenty of practice in speaking excitedly, we are invited to believe that by some mysterious process music arose, the expression of feeling in organised tone, the delight in tone quâ tone, in sequences and relations quâ sequences and relations. And all this time the elements out of which this organised system of sound could grow, which were innate in man from the very first, by reason of the fact that he had nerves, muscles, and vocal organs, have been doing absolutely nothing! Though they required only the stimulus of feeling to call them into being, and though they were receiving this stimulus day by day, hour by hour, they had to deny themselves for centuries upon centuries, until they could receive precisely the same kind of stimulus after man had learned to speak! Is this credible?
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.
III
The music of savage tribes is, however, the last stronghold of Spencer; and if his theory fails to find proper support in that quarter, it can hardly resist all the weight of evidence that may be brought against it from others. Here, he says, he has Sir Hubert Parry on his side, "who adopts the view I have here re-explained and defended," and who "has in his chapter on Folk-Music exemplified the early stages of musical evolution, up from the howling chants of savages—Australians, Caribs, Polynesian cannibals, etc.—to the rude melodies of our own ancestors. I do not see how any unbiassed reader, after examining the evidence placed by him in its natural order, can refuse assent to the conclusion drawn." Well, the final refutation of Spencer can be had out of the mouth of Sir Hubert Parry himself. What Sir Hubert's own theory of the origin of music may be I do not know; but certainly neither the facts nor the arguments he has adduced in his Art of Music give any colour to the theory that music first arose as a modification of the attributes of emotional speech. Let us examine Sir Hubert Parry's evidence.
We begin at the beginning with the descending chromatic howl of the Carib which he quotes on page 49 of his book—the "howling chant" to which Spencer refers; and if, as the philosopher will have it, this represents "the early stages of musical evolution," his case has gone by the board at once. There could be no more conclusive testimony to the fact that music has its origin not in speech, but in the venting of mere vague emotion in mere vague sound; for where Spencer sees the previous influence of speech in this howl of the Carib I cannot imagine. He might as well suppose that speech antedates the howl of a dog or the roar of a lion. On what grounds does he find support for his theory here? Simply that a howl of this kind, like the song of the Omaha Indians, is distinguished by indefiniteness of intervals! "Now this," he says, "is just one of the traits to be expected if vocal music is developed out of emotional speech; since the intervals of speech, also, are indefinite." Was there ever a more palpable non sequitur? Because A has one of the characteristics of B, therefore A must have grown out of B! Here is a complete justification of my previous remark that Spencer has converted a mere likeness into a cause. The real reason for music exhibiting some of the traits of speech is that, music and speech being the expression of allied orders of feeling, and both finding voice through the same muscular apparatus, they simply cannot help having a great many features in common. But we really require something more than a demonstration that the intonations of music, being affected by the same physical organs, point to very much the same mental and physical phenomena as the intonations of speech, in order to convince us that music had its origin in speech.
Take now the further examples given by Sir Hubert Parry, and discover in them, if you can, any evidence that does not go to show that they are born directly of a primitive pensée musicale, without any sign of the previous intervention of speech. Written over them all, indeed, is conclusive proof that when primitive man sings, or even croons, to himself, he is unconsciously guided by a rudimentary musical sense. Savages contrive, says Sir Hubert, "little fragmentary figures of two or three notes, which they reiterate incessantly over and over again. Sometimes a single figure suffices. When they are clever enough to devise two they alternate them, but [naturally] without much sense or orderliness"; and he shows, later on, how even among savages there is a continuous growth in this primitive sense of design. Now all this is in accordance with the theory of the origin of music already advanced in this essay; and these phenomena of savage music will easily account for all the most complex modern developments of the art, which Spencer half admits his theory will not account for. Savage man, merely because he is a physical organism, expresses himself in sound. Again, merely because he is a physical and psychical organism, he takes pleasure in sounds, in successions of sounds, and in the co-relations of sounds; and, to complete the list of the elements necessary to constitute all the music that has ever been written in the world, Sir Hubert Parry shows that, even in the savage whose rude attempt at song is little more than a howl, there is a rudimentary sense of form, of balance, of design. "When little fragments of melody [55] become stereotyped," says Sir Hubert, "as they do in every savage community sufficiently advanced to perceive and remember, attempts are made to alternate and contrast them in some way; and the excitement of sympathy with an expressive cry is merged in a crudely artistic pleasure derived from the contemplation of something of the nature of a pattern." Is there any support for the speech-theory here? Is it not, indeed, an interloper pure and simple, obscuring a trail that is perfectly clear and open if left alone?
The one fact upon which Spencer always seems to rely is that the intervals of speech and the intervals of the most primitive chant are both indefinite. Even here, however, Sir Hubert Parry's book is unpropitious to him, for Sir Hubert insists on the obvious fact that indefiniteness of intervals in early music is entirely a matter of lack of instruments by which to fix the various notes of a scale. "It is extremely difficult to make sure what intervals savages intend to utter, as they are very uncertain about hitting anything like exact notes till they have advanced enough to have instruments with regular relations of notes more or less indicated upon them." To pass from an indefinite howl to a definite series of notes, when an instrument has been invented that guides the voice and fixes its tones, may be the work of a day. Wherein then comes the function of speech and recitative, which are supposed to occupy the intermediate stages of evolution between the howl and the song—for I suppose Spencer would hardly contend that man learned to speak before he learned to howl? And at what stage appears this elementary feeling for musical design which the savage exhibits? Can this be conceived to grow out of the habit of speech? If not, if it is independent of speech, if it is something that concerns itself with pure sound alone, what was it doing in all the ages when man was making sounds, but had not yet made himself a language? "The crudest efforts of savages," says Sir Hubert Parry, "throw light upon the true nature of musical design, and upon the manner in which human beings endeavoured to grapple with it." Again, "the savage state indicates a taste for design, but an incapacity for making the designs consistent and logical; in the lowest intelligent stage, the capacity for disposing short contrasting figures in an orderly and intelligent way is shown." Once more, can speech be logically conceived as playing the leading part in this long but continuous drama of evolution?