On these points we shall notice that much that differentiates the two peoples will tend to show that the Chinese broke away from the Euphrates earlier than the Egyptian kindred, before indeed the anthropomorphic religious ideas became superimposed upon the naturalistic. This is an important index to the distance in time when the migration eastward began. Imagine that vast valley peopled as Berosus the old Babylonian historian states,—“There was originally in the land of Babylon a multitude of men of foreign race who had settled in Chaldea.” These people consisted of numerous tribes, previously dwellers in the forests in the highland range eastwardly bounding the valley, and through long centuries they had multiplied exceedingly; to be called in after time by several distinguishing names. In this early period they were all Akkads from the northern mountains, and Sumerians from the southern range as these names originally imply. Presumably, these people would sort themselves into kindreds, so that when the pressure from increase of population caused them to swarm, they went off in bodies all of the same type. The Red type we may call Egyptians, the Yellow type, or black-haired we call Chinese, the great remaining bulk of dwellers on the soil became the people called Chaldeans, Babylonians, Assyrians and other names. How long ago was it when “the black-haired people” swarmed off? The Chinese chronologers go back 43,000 years B.C. for the earliest tidings of their race, and no doubt their records are but dim traditions, not of China, but of this their primitive home by the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their astronomical calculations are shewn not correct for the land of China but must be referred to the land of Medea and of Southern Asia. The black-haired people took with them a knowledge which was common with all the tribes around them in that valley; their religion, the Sumerian, “the Spirit of Heaven,” “the Spirit of Earth,” nothing more, no gods or goddesses, agriculture and canalization they learnt there, and the building of dwellings of the reed-thatched type from which they have not departed, and the worship of ancestors common to that early world remains with the Chinese in its most primitive stage, as a traditionary usage almost instinctively connected with the family claims, as a posthumous honouring, not as a feeling of religion. The polytheistic ideas developed later with the other tribes had not then arisen, consequently we find the Chinese settled in their new home with only simple, vague notions of “Spirits” good and harmful, and being a people singularly wanting in imagination, they present still, notwithstanding their long history, an aspect, as a nation, of archaic survival.
These considerations help us to understand how it is that in their music they have shewn so little growth. They drew from the same musical roots as other nations yet remain stunted; socially and intellectually the Chinaman of to-day is the same as the man who was obedient to the rule of Yao, and Hwang-ti, and when the latter formulated the rules that were held to govern the music, the Chinese were content that for ever after music was fixed; they appear to delight in keeping things in a dwarfed state as they take a pride in dwarfed trees, and we of the Western world find it so difficult to understand them, but we still go on trying.
In these hints I think you will find fair justification for my belief in the very remote antiquity of a musical scale, a set sequence of sounds by choice adopted, it may be of four or five sounds, common in its rudimentary stage amongst all the tribes aggregated in Southern Asia, where we have for many scientific reasons a conviction that civilization originated.
The great migrations of peoples were caused by famines, plagues, inundations, overcrowding of population, but apart from these the instinctive desire of man to better himself in place and position and possessions was an ever inciting force.
An old Akkadian hymn, perhaps the oldest piece of writing in the world, commences,
“Mankind is born to wander,”
a simple sentence—a premonition of all history. Imagine, if you can, the ages of civilized life necessary to bring the human brain to a conception so philosophic and true as this. Earth is old now. Earth was very old then.
The Chinese affirm that the Emperor Hwang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, invented the scale of twelve semitones, called the twelve lüs, and according to the record of date this was 4590 years ago. The pitch of the notes of all ancient systems was described by lineal measurements; hence every interval accepted was either the excess or defect resulting from the division of a greater measure, the octave, or the fourth. In some way or other the derived proportions have been grateful to human ears, perhaps because they denote absence of conflict, or presence of symmetry.
The discovery by the Yellow Emperor as narrated reads somewhat fabulous. It is stated that he sent his minister Ling Lun to the valley west of the Kuênlun mountains, where bamboos of regular thickness grow; that Ling Lun cut the piece of bamboo which is between the knots, and the sound emitted by this tube when blown across he considered the bass or tonic; that is our way of naming, not his. The length was equal to one Chinese foot. He then cut a second pipe two thirds of the length of the first, which gave a sound a fifth higher, and continued similar relations from pipe to pipe, and so on, he completed the series of twelve sounds according to the idea of his master, and for evermore fixed the musical scale handed down from generation to generation through thousands of years.
I have shown that Amiot misled us in assigning it to the Sheng, and I expect he has given currency to other errors. What I do note, and have assigned the cause for in the argument of the previous chapter, is the peculiar crowding of the scale with intervals less than a semitone between f and a; and perhaps this crowding has helped towards inducing the belief, without question, that the semitonal scale was intended, but that the making of the instrument was not done with due exactness, or that the instrument was out of order if it did not bear out the theory of an equal tempered semitonal succession through an octave. The theoretical existence of such a scale is not here called in question: my contention is that the ancient instruments give no confirmation of having been planned in view of such a principle. Stranger still, the very scheme to which the learned writers refer as the basis of the principle, and carefully guarded by them as an authentic ancient treasure, gives a complete denial to the whole assumption. I take their own statements, the evidence of their own authorities, and wonder, when I examine the twelve lüs, why they never examined them, why from curiosity alone they sought no corroboration of their statements from the lüs themselves.