This brief incursion into general history has been made, not to prove anything, but to bring forward a few facts which may be found suggestive. The Southern colonists during the seventeenth century were predominantly English people of the first and second generations. They were fairly representative of contemporary English society, though the proportion of 'gentlemen' was higher among them than at home. They came, as we have seen, from a country where music was practised enthusiastically by all classes. It is preposterous to think that in the new country they discarded their musical tastes like a worn-out garment. There is no reason why they should have done so. After the first years of famine and turmoil and death they were comparatively peaceful and prosperous. There were among them, it is true, a certain number of stern-faced Puritans, melancholy preachers of the sinfulness of pleasure; but on the whole the attitude of the Southern colonists toward life was that of the gay, gallant, laughter-loving cavaliers. There is little doubt that these same gallant gentlemen kept up in the colonies that devotion to the joyeuse science for which they had been famed since the days of Cœur de Lion. In the announcements of the early concerts at Charleston in the first half of the eighteenth century we find that the orchestra was often composed in part of neighboring gentlemen, who were good enough to lend their services for the occasion, or sometimes that certain gentlemen, of their courtesy, obliged with instrumental or vocal selections. Whence we may infer that the custom of keeping a chest of viols in his house for the use of his family and his guests, so generally observed by the English gentleman at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was still honored by the colonial gentleman at the beginning of the eighteenth.
The cultured colonists followed English fashions very closely in all things, and the music they played was doubtless the music in vogue in London drawing-rooms and concert halls. The humble colonists, presumably, were less concerned with the mode, and sang and played the old English tunes which they and their fathers and their grandfathers had brought across the sea. American historians have taken for granted, with a good deal of smug complacency, that there was no real musical life among these people. The assumption seems to be based—if it has any basis—on the fact that the population of the South was preëminently rural. But that there was little urban life does not mean that there was little community life. On the contrary, life in the South was much more intimately gregarious than is usual in towns and cities, and it is in hospitable social gatherings rather than in stiff-backed attendance at concerts and operas that the musical soul of a people finds real expression. Furthermore, the Southern colonists had a communal consciousness, as we may see from their early essays in public education, and it is probable that this consciousness expressed itself in other ways of which we have no evidence. The churches brought them together, also, perhaps for social as well as religious gatherings. It is, indeed, a plausible surmise that musical reunions of some sort, apart from purely private entertainments, were not unknown to them.
The music of the colonial proletariat was English, that of the gentlefolk largely so. Among the common people this music may have undergone some alteration in the course of time, and certain gifted ones among them may have made original music of their own. We can conceive that the gentlefolk occasionally occupied themselves with musical composition, and some of their efforts, perchance, percolated through the classes and became the property of all the people. We cannot say, but it is possible; it is even probable. If English music did not undergo a change in Virginia and Maryland and Carolina, we can be sure that it altered somewhat in the hands of the pioneers who carried it to Kentucky, to Missouri, to Texas. One hears in the Southwest many quaint, characteristic old songs and tunes of unmistakably English origin. We can safely assume that by the time they reached Missouri and Texas from England they had absorbed quite a little local color.
Nor must we forget that the music of the American negroes is the music of the English colonists strained through the African temperament; or perhaps we should say the African temperament strained through the music of the English colonists. In any case, Afro-American music is a blend, and the mixing, we may suppose, began with the beginning of slavery in the Southern colonies. The negro slaves were an ignorant, impressionable people set down in the middle of a white civilization from which they naturally and immediately began to absorb the things that were appreciable to their senses. The most easily appreciable, perhaps, of these things was music, and such music as the negroes heard among the white people they absorbed and, to some extent, assimilated.[6]
Just how much all this has to do with American music we cannot say, any more than we can say just what is American music. National music, we take it, is the composite musical inheritance of a people, molded and colored by their composite characteristics, inherited and acquired. And the music of the South is undoubtedly part of the musical inheritance of the American people. How much of that inheritance we have rejected and how much retained will not appear until some historian arises with enough scholarship to analyze our musical heritage in detail; with enough genius in research to trace its elements to their sources; and with enough patriotic enthusiasm to lend him patience for the task. In the meantime, surface conditions fail to justify the arbitrary ruling out of the South as an utterly negligible factor in our musical development.
III
In approaching the history of the New England Puritans one is in danger of making serious mistakes, due to temperamental prejudices and to a misconception of the Puritan attitude toward life. The term Puritan itself is more or less indeterminate, covering all sorts and conditions of men with a wide diversity of views on things spiritual and temporal.[7] There is a very general impression, totally unsupported by historic evidence, that the Puritans frowned intolerantly on every worldly diversion, including music. Many of the zealots did, it is true—in every movement there are extremists—and the general trend of thought was influenced somewhat by their thunderous denunciations of all appearance of frivolity. In such circumstances the average human being, uncertain how far he may safely go, is inclined to avoid the vicinity of danger and seek the haven of a strictly negative attitude toward everything about which may hang the very slightest suspicion of impropriety. We have many instances in history of this same tendency. The early Christians, taking Christ's warning against the world and the flesh in its most extreme literalness, adopted a course for avoiding hell and gaining heaven which, if consistently followed, would soon have left the world barren of any beings from whom the population either of heaven or of hell might be recruited. We are apt, however, to exaggerate the self-denying habits of the Puritans. On many points of conduct and dogma they were fiercely and uncompromisingly intolerant. Their Sabbath observance was strict to the point of absurdity. But in general they were not disposed to deprive the world of innocent pleasure.
The New England Puritans were more or less of a piece with their English brethren, and we have every evidence that the latter tolerated music, even cultivated it with assiduity. Milton's love of music is well known.[8] John Bunyan, a typical lower-class Puritan, speaks of it frequently and appreciatively in the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' 'That musicke in itself is lawfull, usefull and commendable,' says Prynne in his 'Histrio-mastix,' 'no man, no Christian dares deny, since the Scriptures, Fathers and generally all Christian, all Pagan Authors extant do with one consent averre it.' Even the anonymous author of the 'Short Treatise against Stage-Playes' (1625) admits that 'musicke is a cheerful recreation to the minde that hath been blunted with serious meditations.' Not only Cromwell, but many other Parliamentary officers, including Hutchinson, Humphrey, and Taylor, were sincere devotees of the art. Colonel Hutchinson, one of the regicides, 'had a great love to music,' according to the 'Memoirs' of his wife, and often diverted himself with a viol, 'on which he played masterly; he had an exact ear and judgment in other music.' In the retinue of Balustrode Whitelocke, who was sent by Cromwell as ambassador to Queen Christina of Sweden in 1653, were two persons included 'chiefly for music,' besides two trumpeters. Whitelocke himself was 'in his younger days a master and composer of music.' On one occasion, during his stay at the Swedish court, the queen's musicians 'played many lessons of English composition,' and on another occasion, after the ambassador's party had played for her, Christina declared that 'she never heard so good a concert of music and of English songs; and desired Whitelocke, at his return to England, to procure her some.'
Ecclesiastical music was indeed vigorously suppressed, but solely for reasons touching the propriety of its employment in the worship of God. Outside the churches the Puritans showed no particular objection to the art. In fact, the practice of music was common enough among them, if we are to believe the statement of Solomon Eccles, a professional musician, who was successively a Presbyterian, an Independent, a Baptist, and an Antinomian, and always found it easy to make a living by his profession. Notwithstanding the ban on theatres, public operatic performances were inaugurated in London in 1656 and were continued without interference. The publishing of music flourished under the Commonwealth as it never did before in England, and large collections of Ayres, Dialogues, and other pieces remain to us from that period. Such activity in music publishing could have been stimulated only by a corresponding demand, and a demand for printed music could not have co-existed with a neglect of musical practice.[9]
However, we must not jump to the conclusion that the American Puritans were as freely inclined to the practice of music as their brethren across the sea. As a matter of fact, they had no musical life whatsoever. There are some points in the psychology and condition of the New England colonists which may help to explain this seeming anomaly. A large proportion of the people of England were Puritans merely because it was not safe or convenient for them to be anything else, and they changed their moral and theological complexions just as soon as a change in fashion rendered the transformation desirable. Many of the most prominent members of the Parliamentary party were drawn into the movement more through political ambition or democratic ideals than for religious reasons. Cromwell's famous 'Trust in God and keep your powder dry' might well express the mental attitude of more than a few of them. Even among the religious leaders were a goodly number whose only desire was to reform what they considered the ritualistic abuses in the English church of their time and who had not the slightest ambition to suppress the harmless pleasures of life or the ordinary manifestations of human instincts. The New England Puritans, on the other hand, were a select group of people who were driven across an inhospitable ocean to the barren shores of a strange land by the indomitable zeal of their convictions, the stern intractability of their consciences and the adamantine obstinacy of their independence. They were not Puritans merely in externals; they were Puritans to the core. Their view of life was uncompromisingly serious. The world was not to them a place for dalliance; it was a place for work, for the earnest sowing of seeds that might bring forth a harvest of grace and godliness, a harvest worthy to be garnered by the Master into His eternal storehouse. So, however kindly they may have looked upon music, they could not conscientiously have allowed it to engage much of their attention. They could with consistence postpone the gratification of their musical tastes to the next world, where, for all eternity, the practice of music would be their chief occupation. Besides, the life of the first settlers in New England was not such as to encourage any indulgence in unnecessary relaxation. What with the stubborn barrenness of the soil, the ferocity of the Indians, and the extreme inclemency of the climate, they had little opportunity for the cultivation of those gentler arts toward which by taste and temperament they were not, in any case, very strongly inclined.