As in Old Chaldea, the people of that vast valley of Mesopotamia, and from far up in Assyria, crowded their dead to Erech, their primitive home, and the burial place of all their race; century after century all who could do so sent their dead down the great river ways to repose near the mouth of the Euphrates, to Erech the sacred city of the dead. The dying trusted their kinsfolk to do this last duty. Even to-day the Chinaman will take his coffin and perhaps a small handful of earth with him, when he leaves his country for Australia or California, and looks to some of his kin to send him home when he dies in a foreign land, and they perform the trust, labelling their countryman’s coffin “dry goods” to get him home at the cheapest rate.
This worship of ancestors is not only the chief feature of the Chinese religion; it pervades the daily life of millions, and is believed in with a strength of sentiment and in a way which we find it difficult to comprehend. Yet, as we know, ancestor worship is perpetuated with us to this day,—witness “Almanac de Gotha,” and “Debrett’s Peerage.” Oddly enough comes slipping into my memory a reminiscence of a day long past, hearing of an old dame I knew saying to her grandson: “Ah, Willie, my boy, if your father had only married Miss B—— instead of your mother; your life would have been very different; you might have been riding in a carriage.” And she, poor simple old soul, she wondered why the laugh went round. Yes, the “might have been” is a haunting idea from which few altogether escape in life. Would you know my thought? I was thinking that had I lived in antique times—and some would say, how know you that you did not so live?—then verily I should have been irresistibly impelled to the worship of one’s ancestors, and should have comprehended how it entered into the heart and the conscience, and with music and symbolism set up a real and binding obligation not to be gainsaid; instead of which I am drawn to worship the offspring of somebody else’s ancestors, and find that to be the greater mystery. Ah, me! what a queer topsyturveydom civilization brings about. Did you ever ever try to get behind a child’s mind, to see into the inner recesses of its realistic consciousness? Watch the little girl with her favourite inanimate doll, how she holds important serious conversations with her; how the doll has to be good, attentive to her lessons, dressed and undressed, with a most serious belief in its participations in eating and drinking and playing day after day. What if no words come in response; if the food prepared is not eaten? The belief suffers nothing; the little lady will supply the fitting speeches in reply, and will eat up the offerings of sweets herself. Yes, the bewitching creature will go on believing. She lives in a world of lunacy all her own, with which our bigger world has nothing to do; and unless we can become as little children, it passes our understanding. This is the stage of mind at which the Chinese stay—checked, undeveloped. The development of the mind of the child life that is growing around our feet we watch with never-failing interest, well knowing that childish things will be put away, and its illusionary world will fade and be as a world of dream. Yet the future of the Chinese we cannot so interpret by any signs of the present outlook, nor imagine how many centuries must pass before their minds can be fitted to work in parallel grades with European thought and culture.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Evolution of the Lyre, Harp, and Lute.
THE BOW WITH THE BOAT.
Art is always the superfluous. Food and shelter are the first necessaries, they drive man into direct courses of activity; he becomes a fruit gatherer, a hunter in forests, a hut builder, or cave dweller; his intelligence prompts him to the making of bows and to using of arrows, and this is an advance in mechanical perception; beyond the mere force of darts or spears in this new aid to his strength. After his chief wants are satisfied he has leisure, and his instinct, after rest, is towards activity of some kind, and what he does then is pass-time. To please himself, that is the object of his exertion, willingly he undergoes much to this end.
The man who first fixed a second string to his bow began the art of making stringed instruments of music. In the chase this second string is of no use to him. He put it there solely for his pleasure. Many a morn preparing his bow for the chase, many an eve, ere setting it aside unstrung, he has “heard the tense string murmur,” has listened and the sound has pleased him; it is the voice of the string; a chance wish comes into his quiet mood, and from desire to gain another sound, he adds another string to please him more.
The beginning of a lyre is in the bow; but something beyond is needed for the endurance of the sounds, and the aid required is found in the boat allied with the bow. When the hunter came down from the mountains and the dark forests, into the vast fertile valleys of the great rivers, he naturally turned his industry to cultivation of the land, and here, amongst the water-courses set himself to the task of constructing boats, that he might go hither and thither. Perhaps the bark of old fallen trees prompted his first ventures, or as native races do at this day, he made a boat of papyrus stems, plaiting them together; the flowering ends of the stalks closely gathered up, naturally curved forming the prow, and in this way, leaving the after portions to be spread out, filled in between a floor of reeds in such a fashion as would produce a floating raft, or a carrying vessel capable of bearing him and the produce he would convey upon the waters. Singularly enough this simple craft presents an appearance that may have furnished the idea of a prow. The prow is so persistent a feature in the build of ancient vessels, that possibly its ornamental retainment maybe due to the early rudimentary possession.
Sir Harry Johnston saw this kind of papyrus boat in Uganda, floating on a little lake in the forest, making so pretty a picture that he photographed it.
Trees were hollowed by burning out the interior, long before tools had been devised, and the next suggested stage would be when young trees riven, yielded planks that could be bent into form for boat-building. Soon after he had attained this mastery we should find that the original cave-dweller became in course of time a boat dweller. Thus we imagine it happened that the earliest lyre took the form of a boat, or rather of a half-boat, the dwelling half, roofed or covered in, wherein the family lived mainly, as has been the immemorial custom in the great river regions—a custom existing even to this day. The skill acquired in developing the lines in boat-building was precisely the skill that was applied to equal advantage in lyre-building, and thus the sounds were housed.