As I mused, I felt the Port Watch gazing at me again over his siphon. I believe he would pour out his story, were I to permit it. But I do not choose to hear. After all, I am not a romancer, but a scientific man. My concern is not with the curious and personal tangle of human affairs, but with impersonal fact and sober deductions therefrom.
Sir Robert was now defining culture as the touchstone of civilization—from the British point of view, of course. God, that voice! And then, without a thought in my head as to where the talk was leading—suddenly—he plumped squarely down on my subject. It was the first time in the twelve days of our voyage. Until this moment, the tribal god referred to in his national anthem had spared him. My subject! The one thing I know more about than any other human being. I had him.
“The surest test of the culture of a people,” said he, ex cathedra, “is the music of that people. Primitive races invariably express their emotions in primitive music. They try to tell me that the Chinese are a civilized people. 'Very well,' I say then; 'let me hear their music.' No nation has progressed far along the great highroad of civilization without coming into an understanding of the diatonic system. The Chinese civilized? When their finest musical instrument is the little sheng, a crude collection of twelve pipes that are not even in tune? When they have failed to arrive at even a rudimentary perception of tonality and scale relationships? No; I tell you, the Chinese civilization is to the European as the little sheng is to the grand piano. The piano, on which all scales are related, all harmomes possible, is the supreme artistic achievement of the highest civilization.”
This was enough. I got right up and went over to the round table. My forehead was burning; I must have been red as fire.
“You do not know what you are talking about,” I cried out. I had to lean over the shoulder of one of the weak-minded in order to catch Sir Robert's eye. “It is the piano that has killed music in Europe! The piano is a lie from end to end of the keyboard. Bach confirmed that lie with his miserable triumph of the well-tempered clavichord. And in finally fastening his false scale upon us he destroyed in us the fine ear for true intervals that is to-day found only in your primitive peoples. The Chinese have it. The Javanese have it. The Siamese, most wonderful of all, have a true isotonic scale. But we of the cultured West (I put a wonderful sneering emphasis on that word) can not even hear true fluid music to-day, because our tone perception goes no farther than the barbarous mechanical compromise of the piano keyboard. You do not know what you are talking about. You are a fool!”
When I am excited my voice rises and becomes shrill. I talked rapidly, so that no one could interrupt. And the weak-minded ones sank back in their chairs. They were actually afraid, I think now. In fact, when I paused the whole smoking-room was still as death.
I swept my eye about—commandingly, I think. The fat vaudeville man—he sat behind Sir Robert—was grinning at me with delight in his eyes, and was softly clapping his hands behind the fan-tan bowl. The Port Watch with red face and suddenly twinkling eyes, had clapped his hand over his mouth as if to smother an outright laugh. Sir Robert was looking up at me, his left eyelid drooping, a sort of perplexed uncertainty on his face—his old face that was all lines and wrinkles.
Now that I had the floor, it seemed worth while to make a thorough job of it, so I swept on:
“You make the piano the test of civilization. Greece had a civilization—where were the pianos of Greece? Oh, I am tired of your talk. I have listened to you for twelve long days and nights. I have suspected your accuracy, but I could not be sure, for you luckily avoided my subject. But now I have you! And I know you for a fraud on all subjects! I see confusion in your face. You are groping for something to say about the music of Greece. Very well; I will say it for you. The Greeks had no piano, because they had no harmony. They did not know that harmony was possible. And if they had heard it, they would not have liked it.”
“Ah,” cried Sir Robert, flushing under the parchment of his skin, and (I must say) taking up the gage of battle, “but Greece gave us our diatonic system. The root of our scale, the tetrachord, came to us from the Greeks.”