The barbarian, to turn the Greek masterpiece into a stupid wail! Was it irreverence on his part? No, but it was incapacity. His ear, trained in accordance with other rules, was unable to take pleasure in artless sounds which had become strange and even disagreeable owing to their great age. What my friend lacked, what we all lack is the perception [[253]]of those primitive niceties which have been stifled by the centuries. To enjoy the Hymn to Apollo, we should have to go back to the simplicity of soul which one day made me think the buzzing of the onion-stalks delightful. And that we shall never do.
But, if our music need not draw its inspiration from the Delphic marbles, our statuary and our architecture will always find models of incomparable perfection in the work of the Greeks. The art of sounds, having no prototype imposed on it by natural facts, is liable to change: with our fickle tastes, that which is perfect in music to-day becomes vulgar and commonplace to-morrow. The art of forms, on the contrary, being based on the immutable foundation of reality, always sees the beautiful where previous centuries saw it.
There is no musical type anywhere, not even in the song of the Nightingale, celebrated by Buffon[2] in grandiloquent terms. [[254]]I have no wish to shock anybody; but why should I not give my opinion? Buffon’s style and the Nightingale’s song both leave me cold. The first has too much rhetoric about it and not enough sincere emotion. The second, a magnificent jewel-case of ill-assorted pearls of sound, makes so slight an appeal to the soul that a penny jug, filled with water and furnished with a whistle, will enable the lips of a child to reproduce the celebrated songster’s finest trills. A little earthenware machine, warbling at the player’s will, rivals the Nightingale.
Above the bird, that glorious production of a vibrating air-column, creatures roar and bray and grunt, until we come to man, who alone speaks and really sings. Below the bird, they croak or are silent. The bellows of the lungs have two efflorescences separated by enormous empty spaces filled with formless sounds. Lower down still is the insect, which is much earlier in date. This first-born of the dwellers on the earth is also the first singer. Deprived of the breath which could set the vocal cords vibrating, it invents the bow and friction, of which man is later to make such wonderful use.
Various Beetles produce a noise by sliding [[255]]one rugged surface over another. The Capricorn moves his corseleted segment over its junction with the rest of the thorax; the Pine Cockchafer,[3] with his great fan-shaped antennæ, rubs his last dorsal segment with the edge of his wing-cases; the Copris[4] and many more know no other method. To tell the truth, these scrapers do not produce a musical sound, but rather a creaking like that of a weathercock on its rusty pin, a thin, sharp sound with no resonance in it.
Among these inexperienced scrapers, I will select the Bolboceras (B. gallicus, Muls.),[5] as deserving honourable mention. Round as a ball, sporting a horn on his forehead, like the Spanish Copris, whose stercoral tastes he does not share, this pretty Beetle loves the pine-woods in my neighbourhood and digs himself a burrow in the sand, leaving it in the evening twilight with the gentle chirp of a well-fed nestling under its mother’s [[256]]wing. Though habitually silent, he makes a noise at the least disturbance. A dozen of him imprisoned in a box will provide you with a delightful symphony, very faint, it is true: you have to hold the box close to your ear to hear it. Compared with him, the Capricorn, Copris, Pine Cockchafer and the rest are rustic fiddlers. In their case, after all, it is not singing, but rather an expression of fear, I might almost say, a cry of anguish, a moan. The insect utters it only in a moment of danger and never, so far as I know, at the time of its wedding.
The real musician, who expresses his gladness by strokes of the bow and cymbals, dates much farther back. He preceded the insects endowed with a superior organization, the Beetle, the Bee, the Fly, the Butterfly, who prove their higher rank by complete transformations; he is closely connected with the rude beginnings of the geological period. The singing insect, in fact, belongs exclusively either to the order of the Hemiptera, including the Cicadæ, or to that of the Orthoptera, including the Grasshoppers and Crickets. Its incomplete metamorphoses link it with those primitive races whose records are inscribed in our coal-seams. It [[257]]is one of the first that mingled the sounds of life with the vague murmuring of inert things. It was singing before the reptile had learnt to breathe.
This shows, from the mere point of view of sound, the futility of those theories of ours which try to explain the world by the automatic evolution of progress nascent in the primitive cell. All is yet dumb; and already the insect is stridulating as correctly as it does to-day. Phonetics start with an apparatus which the ages will hand down to one another without changing any essential part of it. Then, though the lungs have appeared, we have silence, save for the heavy breathing of the nostrils. But lo, one day, the Frog croaks; and soon, with no preparation, there are mingled with this hideous concert the trills of the Quail, the whistled stanzas of the Thrush and the Warbler’s musical strains. The larynx in its highest form has come into existence. What will the late-comers do with it? The Ass and the Wild Boar give us our reply. We find something worse than marking time, we find an enormous retrogression, until one last bound brings us to man’s own larynx.
In this genesis of sounds it is impossible to [[258]]talk authoritatively of a steady progression which makes the middling follow on the bad and the excellent on the middling. We see nothing but abrupt excursions, intermittences, recoils, sudden expansions not foretold by what has gone before nor continued by that which follows; we find nothing but a riddle whose solution does not lie in the virtues of the cell alone, that easy pillow for whoso has not the courage to search deeper.
But let us leave the question of origins, that inaccessible domain, and come down to facts; let us cross-examine a few representatives of those old races who were the earliest exponents of the art of sounds and took it into their heads to sing at a time when the mud of the first continents was hardening; let us ask them how their instrument is constructed and what is the object of their ditty.