You will now be able thoroughly to understand something of the Chinese systems of music, and their rigidly scholastic basis; and should you think that the explanation that you have read requires to be supplemented by explication, I may say that the authorities at the British Museum have now shelved for public use in the King’s Library the five thousand and twenty volumes of the Chinese Encyclopædia, to which I refer you.
This is said to be the only complete copy known in Europe of a work commenced how many centuries ago I forget; and as the Chinese had at hand four hundred and eighty-two learned treatises on music, no doubt the subject is exhaustively drawn out, and will repay your search in the various sections and sub-sections. It is said that in 2277 B.C. there were twenty-two authors on dance and music, twenty-three on ancient music, twenty-four on the playing of the kin and the chi, twenty-four on solemn occasions, and twenty-six on scale construction. The sages alone comprehend the canons, and the mandarins of music are considered superior to those of mathematics. The College of Mandarins at Pekin is within the imperial palace. The head musician in China represents the five capital virtues,—humanity, justice, politeness, wisdom and rectitude. How very old these people are! Certainly, we have colleges—a few!—but for some reason or other we are not sufficiently advanced to have such a head musician; and, in consequence of lack of such representation, the profession may possibly be minus some of the virtues in these ways: which, as the saying goes, accounts for it.
You know that old Confucius wrote about the ancient music in the Shoo-king, and that was about 551 B.C., or about the time when Ezra was occupied in collecting the parchments of the laws of Moses. In the great destruction of books all copies of Confucius disappeared, but happily one complete copy was found secreted in the wall of the house that he dwelt in; and that was in 140 B.C., when the house was pulled down. But you must think of a time far back, far as the times of the Pharaohs who built the pyramids, a time when the Chinese were already writing learned works on the music and the instruments, the existence of which necessarily implied long periods of early civilization. The earliest Chinese book that we know of is “The Book of Changes,” 1150 B.C. Ah, and what changes since! All history is a record of changes.
CHAPTER XVI.
By the Yellow River.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SHENG.
The Sheng as the parent of organs, the original exemplar of free reeds, always greatly interested me, and I was desirous of obtaining a knowledge of its scale and methods; but I found such contradictory statements, such confusion of different systems of succeeding times, that the unravelling seemed hopeless. No doubt, as time went on, certain accommodations were made to conform to new orders and imperial decrees, and the pedants of the schools seem to have been chiefly concerned in the demonstration of doctrines of similitude, and contrasts, and affinities, and mystical comparisons with all things in heaven and earth, and abstruse relations with numbers; sometimes one set of teachings gaining prominence, only to be overturned in favour of the next set that forced its way into law or custom.
The curious principle of inspiring in order to obtain the action of the reed, and the still more peculiar characteristic of closing the aperture at the side before the sound could form itself in the tube, raised a multitude of questions of origin and purpose, and therefore I set about the investigation with the idea of working out the evolution of the Sheng from the evidence, so to speak, of its own skeleton that to-day is living.
I want to take you back in imagination ages beyond these dates, to find the man who made this little organ, this little Sheng that to-day can arrest our attention with absorbing interest. There was some first dreamer, inventor, originator; some one who played and toyed with the bamboos that grew beside his path, and thought out this little thing that was to descend from generation to generation, and become a household name in huts and palaces and temples. In the far east the bamboo is everywhere the resource of man for the supply of his daily needs. With it he hunts and fishes, and builds his house and ploughs his land; he is as much beholden to it now as in most primitive days of nomadic life.