Finally, in Sir Hubert Parry's own pages Spencer could have found evidence of yet another element of pure musical enjoyment in the savage mind—none other than an incipient desire for harmony. Speaking of the rise of harmony in the Middle Ages, and of the curious device of making two wholly different tunes go together by the process of "easing off the corners and adapting the points where the cacophony was too intolerable to be endured," Sir Hubert shows the existence of this same practice among savages. "This," he says, "may seem a very surprising and even laughable way of obtaining an artistic effect, but in reality the actual practice of combining several tunes together is by no means uncommon. Several savage and semi-civilised races adopt the practice, as, for instance, the Bushmen at the lower end of the human scale, and the Javese, Siamese, Burmese, and Moors about the middle. In these cases the process usually consists of simultaneously singing or playing short and simple musical figures, such as savages habitually reiterate, with the addition in some cases of a long sort of indefinite wailing tune which goes on independently of all the rest of the performance. The Javese carry such devices to extremes, producing a kind of reckless, incoherent, instrumental counterpoint, very much like a number of people playing various tunes at once, with just sufficient feeling for some definite central principle to accommodate the jarring elements. The practice of combining tunes seems to have become universal quite suddenly, and it led very quickly to fresh developments. And it is worth noting that one of these developments was precisely the same in principle as that adopted by the Bushmen and the Javese, and other semi-savage experimenters in such things; which was to accompany the main combination of two melodies by a short musical figure which could be incessantly reiterated as an accompaniment." Phenomena like these undermine the crude and hasty inference that Orientals and savages have no notion of harmony; they prove that, as low down in the human scale as our investigations will carry us, man tries to make harmony because it pleases his musical sense. How far he succeeds depends upon other things than his mere desire.
So that, to sum up, we can dismiss speech altogether from our hypothesis of the origin of music, seeing that, while no man can represent to us either the psychological or historical processes by which music has grown or could grow out of speech, we find innate in the human organism every element out of which music can grow, independently of speech—the delight in tone, the delight in successions of tones, the delight in combinations of tones, the delight in rhythm, the delight in design. Even Spencer himself, in the chapter on "Developed Music" in his Facts and Comments, sees that these elements are sufficient to account for certain kinds of music, though his total analysis, particularly in the distinction between merely symmetrical music and poetical music, is æsthetically incomplete and à priori. To Spencer's oft-reiterated question, "If my theory does not explain the origin of music, how else can its genesis be explained?" we may reply that his theory really explains nothing; it only asserts. It points to certain resemblances between speech and song, and then dogmatically lays it down, without an atom of proof, that the one has arisen from the other. Per contra, an analysis of primitive music shows us that in the rudest savage we have, in embryo, every element that goes to make the most complicated music of modern times—some of these elements, indeed, appearing even in animals. If we are to believe that these in themselves could not develop into music, we must have a reason why; and if we are to believe that an imitation of the accents of speech was necessary before primitive man could express what he felt in mere indefinite sound, we must have not only some proof that it ever occurred, but some demonstration of how the process is possible; for to me, at least, it is psychologically inconceivable. When Spencer says that "song emerged from speech," he is, I contend, merely using a verbal formula that conveys nothing representable to us; it is of the family of those "pseudo-ideas" upon which he himself has emptied the vials of his scorn in First Principles.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] Ueber die Bedeutung der Aphasia für den musikalischen Ausdruck (Vierteljahrsschr für Mus-Wiss., September 1891).
[40] Article cited, p. 57.
[41] Ibid., p. 60.
[42] For example: "One patient, from the beginning of his disease to his death, could say nothing but Yes and No.... One morning a patient began to sing 'I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.' The speechless patient joined in and sang the first verse with the other, and then the second verse alone, articulating every word correctly."—Ibid., p. 61.
[43] Article cited, p. 53, note: "Many idiots, who are scarcely capable of other impressions, are extraordinarily susceptible to music, and can remember a song which they have once heard."
[44] "A peasant, who as the result of a heavy blow on the head lay unconscious for three days, found, when he came to himself, that he had forgotten all the music he ever knew, though he had lost nothing else."—Ibid., p. 64 (quoted from Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 4th edit., p. 443).