“the fair humanities of old religion.”
In the pursuit of the gods we have to look back far beyond the age whence the gods emerged. Like the rivers that come to our feet at full flood so are these very human gods, they represent men in the fulness of power, and disclose not the long course, the broad expanse of time, the toilsome difficulties, through which that power has been attained.
The Greeks attributed to Apollo the invention of the lyre, the eight-stringed lyre a completed and perfect instrument of music. In the British Museum there is a magnificent marble statue of Apollo, and in his hand the sculptor has fashioned a lyre of noblest pattern, such as his fellow worshippers believed the god had designed and given to them. We, of later days, well know that so accurate a leap to perfection does not accord with human experience, and moreover are able to trace the stages by which in the course of centuries the lyre had arrived at that complete condition. So by the help of the Greeks themselves, by their literary records, by their representations in sculpture and in paintings, I hope that we shall be able to recognise the process by which men worked in their own day of life from generation to generation for the accomplishment of their aims in the art and pleasure of music.
The great god Pan, beloved of the Greeks, and more widely worshipped to-day under another name, gave men the little river reed to make their music with, and marvellously has the gift flourished; the simple tiny pipe, growing with the growth of centuries, has become a pipe speaking with the voice of Jove, has reared itself upward until its heighth would make it fit to stand beside the hand of the great Phidian statue of the Olympian god. Simple as a Pan’s pipe is the great diapason that reaches upward to the vaulted roofs of our temples. Not more impossible to the mind of the ancient Greek the conception of the thing of music we call an organ, than is to us the realization of the faith in those divinities of mountains, woods, and streams, of those early dwellers in a green world. Yet how we linger over the legends of the past, and almost wish we could believe they once were true. Alas, in our well worn world, fancy is a poor exchange for faith. The legend of Pan reads how a nymph, Syrinx by name, whom Pan was pursuing, prayed the Naiades (the nymphs of the water) to change her into a bundle of reeds, just as Pan was laying hold of her, who therefore caught the reeds in his hands instead of the desired nymph. The winds moving these reeds to and fro caused mournful but musical sounds, which Pan perceiving he cut them down, and made of them the pipes first known as the Syrinx, and afterwards called by his name,—
“The pipe of Pan to shepherds
Couched in the shadow of Menalian pines
Was passing sweet.”
Fig. 2. Ancient Greek players on Flute and Pan’s pipes.
The Pan’s pipes as a musical instrument made its mark in history; in almost every land in some form or other it has existed as a popular instrument, and therefore a source of pleasure. Varied in form, and with pipes few or many, it is found on ancient sculptures and in paintings. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America show specimens of the instrument ancient, and often modern; for the use survives among some people not yet spoilt by premature civilization. The British Museum possesses a very peculiar specimen made of stone, which was found in Central America. Another, of which there is a cast in the Berlin Museum, was discovered placed over a corpse in a Peruvian tomb; it was made of a greenish stone, a kind of talc, and had eight pipes which gave their notes as in ancient days.