which I must endeavour to make my discussion intelligible to those who
have only a practical knowledge of this subject. In most histories of
Greek art, music is simply omitted; in the special works upon it, there
is much that is not only so difficult, but so dry and technical that the
average student of Greek life can hardly be expected to approach it.
As regards existing specimens, we are just as miserably provided as we
are in the case of painting. We have recovered a few scraps of the
musical notation accompanying poetical words; and as we understand this
notation, it is an easy task to reproduce the so-called melody. We have
also a scrap or two in the notation of instrumental music (apparently an
accompaniment), a notation, strange to say, differing from the oral. But
here the melody is missing. And let me tell you at once that no living
musician could attempt to supply it with the smallest verisimilitude.
The same is the case with our texts of melody. There was a much lauded
hymn found a few years ago on the wall of one of the houses uncovered at
Delphi. In some places the surface of the stone was broken; so that
there were gaps here and there of a bar or two in the music. No living
musician who knows his business would undertake to supply any one of
these gaps.[30] Were it a modern composition, we could with certainty
offer two or three alternatives, and we could exclude a vast number of
restorations as absolutely impossible. Such is not the case with the
Greek specimens we know, neither do they appeal to our modern taste. To
say that these specimens, when played for us, are hideous, is merely the
expression of that violated taste. There are many, perhaps even some in
this audience, who would say the same thing of the plain song which the
present Pope has ordered to be used in Roman Catholic churches to the
exclusion of more modern music.
The real conclusion is that so far Greek music is to us unintelligible;
and yet in all the other arts nothing is more intelligible to modern
minds than the products of Greek taste which are our best and clearest
models. Is it that a highly artistic nation may be wanting in one
particular department? We have before us the case of the modern
Japanese, whose artistic work in most directions is of great excellence
and fully appreciated by the world, but who confess (at least I have
heard one most intelligent native confess) that their music is far below
the level of European compositions. But here we probably start from a
difference of scale, whereas the Greek scales (or at least the diatonic)
are the parents of all modern European scales.
And now that you have before you the actual problem raised by the extant
remnants of Greek music, let us turn to the Greeks themselves, and see
what light their writings throw upon the matter. In the first place
music was not only popular but universal among the Greeks. Those who did
not cultivate it were worse than Shakspere’s “man that has not music in
his soul.” All Greek poetry, even the epic of Homer, was recited
musically; the lyric poets were as much musicians as poets; great
tragedians composed the music for their choral odes, and indeed a Greek
tragedy when performed must have far more resembled an Italian opera
than a play in our sense. This is the combination which Richard Wagner
strove to realise. But to be gifted in two directions of art is indeed
very rare. The music of Æschylus and Sophocles was probably as inferior
to their text as Wagner’s text is inferior to his music. All Greek
educators imply that every boy can learn music; we never hear a word
about want of ear, a want of musical faculty. This was to me in former
years a great puzzle, for, like all of you, I was brought up in a
society where a few had gifts for music, and the remainder were
incapable of singing in time or in tune, or of learning to play an
instrument with intelligence--and so we drifted away from the older
fashion of making at least every girl play or sing as an inevitable
infliction on society, and now only those who show a keen desire for it
spend their time at music. But in the new schools, where choirs are
taught on the tonic _sol-fa_ system, I am informed by the most competent
teachers that an inability to appreciate music, or to sing in tune, is
quite rare, and that the great body of our children can be taught to
make and to appreciate good music. If this be so, the Greeks were again
right, and we in our older generation less wise than they.
In their opinion, this general possibility of learning music was a
necessary condition of another settled conviction among educators, which
is foreign to us--I mean the conviction that the practice of music has a
direct and powerful effect upon the morals of average men. On this point
the Greek educators were very explicit, and it is of great practical
importance to us nowadays to consider what they say. It was not at all
identical with a very widespread belief among modern parents that the
pursuit of music generally is a refined pleasure, and will save the
young from some lower or more mischievous recreation. That view was
quite familiar to the Greeks. But their distinctive theory was this:
that the performing or hearing of certain kinds of music had a direct
effect, either moral or immoral, upon the mind, and that therefore wise
educators must encourage the right sort of music only, and banish the
rest from their pupils. I know very well that there were stray voices,
especially from the Epicurean philosophers, saying that this is all
nonsense, that music can have no such effect, and that the only moral or
immoral part of the performance lies in the words.[31] But this only
shows that the opinion of the vast majority and of the wisest men was
not adopted without criticism, and without the other side of the
question being clearly before them. The modern world is under mental
conditions such as the Epicureans. We have generally assumed that music
as such had no influence in moulding morals. We feel that it may be so
in the accessories--that the constant singing of love duets and the
associating with theatrical company may do harm and the associating with
serious musicians may do good--but modern people seem hardly to dream
that music such as Wagner’s, apart from the words, may have a direct
effect upon morals. And yet it is here that we might have incurred a
great and honourable debt to the Greeks, and have used their wisdom to
save our youth from serious danger. This is a conviction of mine, not of
to-day or yesterday, but of forty years’ standing, derived indeed from
the suggestions of Plato, but verified by frequent contact with music
and musicians. I will here give you one striking illustration. Anyone at
first hearing of Wagner’s _Tristan und Isolde_ would perceive that it
was a most immoral subject, expressed in highly emotional music. It is
an artistic glorification of adultery, palliated by the old and vulgar
excuse of a magical love-potion. All this is so obvious that I wonder
sober people would not keep their children from witnessing the work just
as they endeavour to keep them from reading immoral novels. To me it
seemed even worse, for I could not but perceive, and had often and long
since asserted, that the composer himself wrote the music under the
influence of some such moral aberration, and that, apart from the words,
it was intended to express his criminal longings and disappointments. It
is only a year or two since the correspondence of a lady, published
after her death, showed that this anticipation was literally true, that
these phrases of love-sickness were actually composed and sent to her
because she had awakened in him a passion which she was not wicked
enough to satisfy.
I know there are people who think transcendent genius such as that of
Napoleon, or, in his way, of Wagner, affords a justification, or at
least an excuse, for such lawlessness. And you have heard much talk
about the _Superman_, whose main attribute seems to me _infra_ human,
when the rights of others are concerned. To me the veritable Superman is
not the slave of his own passions, who satisfies them at the expense of
others, but the master of himself, who, because he is pure, feels and
helps the weakness of his neighbours. Not Sir Lancelot but Sir Galahad
is the ideal of chivalry. Of the one,
“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true”;
but of the other,
“My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure!”
Perhaps, during this digression, the objection may have been rising in
your minds that if Greek music was so universally believed to have a
moral or immoral influence, this was because it differed wholly in
quality from that which we pursue, and that therefore an inference from
one to the other is very hazardous. This is supported by the fact
already adduced, that the actual remains of Greek music, though legible
and intelligible in the literal sense, have no power whatever to speak
to our musical emotions. We must therefore turn back from practice to
theory and prove to you that, in spite of these difficulties, Greek
music was distinctly the source and forerunner of our own. And I may say
by way of preface to this part of my discourse that the simplicity of
music, far from being a cause of its lesser emotional effect, may be the
very reason why the great mass of people feel it more deeply. The
intricacy and difficulty of our modern music tend to estrange it from
the feelings of the larger public and to confine its influence to the
special class of trained musicians. The Greeks left us no practical work
on music, no criticism of existing compositions, no comparison of the
effects produced on audiences by this or that artist, by this or that
kind of instrument. We find only obvious generalities, such as the flute
being more exciting than the harp. There is indeed one passage where
Plato goes deeper and inveighs against purely instrumental music as more
exciting and therefore possibly more mischievous than vocal music with
an accompaniment, showing that he did not lay the stress of the emotion
upon the words. Those who have gone deeply into modern music will agree
with him; they feel that the emotions produced by a symphony of
Beethoven are more subtle, and, because more subtle, deeper and more
lasting than those produced by any vocal music, unless it be eight-part
music, which approaches the richness of an orchestra.
But this suggestive remark is quite an exception. The extant musical
tracts are wholly theoretical, and are concerned with the scientific
basis of music, not its application to practice. And the first problem
to which they applied themselves, which they solved, and have handed
down to us, their heirs in art, is the determination of the proper scale
or scales in which music should be composed. This was no easy thing to
do, and if you take the trouble to hear the music of any people who have
not adopted the Greek solution, or one like it, you will at once
perceive the difference. I well remember persuading, with great
difficulty, a band of gipsies, in Hungary, to play for me not the music
of the Hungarians, for which they are so celebrated, but some of their
own Oriental stuff, which they play among themselves in private. I found
it wholly unintelligible on account of the scale, which seemed to have
thirteen or fourteen notes within the octave. All this the Greeks had
contemplated, and in some of their early scales they used quarter-tones
and intervals strange and disagreeable to us. But, after much
hesitation, they fixed upon the diatonic scale, which became the basis
of their music, and in due time of ours. The varieties of this scale
which they used were far greater than ours. We are contented with the
variation of major and minor, and repeat the same intervals in the same
order with a mere difference of pitch, very slightly modified by the
temperament of our tuning. The Greeks thought the position of the two
semitones far more important, and considered that the quality of the
scale, quite apart from pitch, was produced by the variety in the
placing of these intervals. But I must repeat that our extant treatises
are so absolutely scientific and not practical that it would be
impossible to attempt an analysis of them in a popular lecture. The
discovery of the scientific basis of concord or harmony and its
difference from discord had been made very early by the Pythagoreans,
and I have often thought that their famous theory that numerical
relations were the key of the universe was much stimulated and fortified
by finding that octaves, fifths, and fourths, which are recognised by
the ear as concords, can be produced by stopping a vibrating string at
the points dividing it into portions represented by 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4.
They did not acknowledge our favorite major ⅓ as a concord, the
proportion being more complex, _viz._ 4:5 or 5:6; and indeed if the
major ⅓ on our instruments be tuned to its full height of two full
tones, it sounds sharp and very disagreeable. In this as in most detail
we can follow and understand the Greek theory. When Aristotle tells us
that the middle note of the scale is that to which the melody always
returns, he is evidently speaking of the unaccompanied melody, and there
are scores of our melodies that move up and down round this keynote,
which may in these cases well represent the central note of the scale.
It is not possible for me to delay longer on this topic. I therefore sum
up the result thus: the Greeks had a music to some extent homogeneous
with ours; they attributed to its varieties great and direct effects on
the morals of men. Seeing that in all their other arts they were so
singularly modern and reasonable, it is surely well worth the careful
consideration of educators whether similar effects be not latent in our
music, _e.g._ whether the study of Handel, Corelli, Palestrina, may not
have a strengthening effect on the mind, whereas the study of Chopin, of
Verdi, even of Beethoven, with all the vague _Weltschmerz_ which they
contain, the unsatisfied longings, the unreasoning discontent, the
suspended harmony, may not contribute directly to the vices of modern
society, vices not unknown in the fashionable cities of this
Commonwealth.
We now turn to the subject of household furniture and decoration, in
which you will find that there are many and the best of our ideas
borrowed from the Greeks.
We have not had the good fortune to unearth a Greek town of the best
epoch from under lava or from beneath the débris of an earthquake. But
it is likely that even if the ruins of Antioch were cleared of the great
rocks that tumbled down upon it, in the many earthquakes of the early
centuries of our era, some splendid houses might be discovered. So far,
however, I do not know that, except at Delos, we have been able to find
clear evidences that the wall decorations and the furniture of a Greek
house were the same in kind as those which a century and a half of
excavation has brought up from the dead in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
These towns, as well as Naples, which was well known to Cicero as an
essentially Greek town, were in close proximity to Puteoli, which again
was for several centuries the great port for all Alexandrian luxuries
since the second Ptolemy had made friends with the Romans. Through
Puteoli, then, Greek artists and Greek designs made their way to that
coast, and even the worship of Isis, and the frequent use of the ibis
and the crocodile in their designs, show that the Hellenistic artists
had felt the influence of native Egyptian work, just as the workman of
the French “Empire” felt the breath of old Egypt, when Napoleon’s
Commission brought out its splendid work on that mysterious country.
Although, therefore, all the little texts scrawled upon the walls by
children are in Latin, I take it the furniture and decoration of the
smart houses or villas uncovered are in Greek style, and may thus give
us some suggestion of the inside of a Greek house. And let me add at
once, that the discoveries of such ruins and remains at Rome in the time
of the Renaissance moulded all the taste of that age, and produced house
decoration, in direct imitation of the antique, which has been copied
down to the present day.
NOTE.--I thought that I could not bring before the audience the
character of this decoration adequately, except by showing some of
the designs, and some of the furniture, on a screen. Some of the
pictures were taken from Niccolini’s magnificent _Art of Pompeii_
(Naples, 1876-92), the Curator having allowed me to use the
expensive process of photographing in colours, in order to show not
only the design, but the rich colours of the Pompeian walls.
VI
SCIENCE: GRAMMAR--LOGIC--MATHEMATICS--MEDICINE
When I speak to you of Greek Science, of course I use the word in the
old and proper sense to include all strict reasoning, especially of the
deductive kind, particularly therefore pure Mathematics, and not merely
the inferences from observation and experiment which now commonly assume
and even monopolise the title of Science. I often see in educational
programmes Science and Mathematics contrasted as distinct things, which
indeed in this case they are, only because the Science so-called is
often unworthy of the name. Sciences of observation were, I think, not
formulated by the Greeks except in the case of Medicine, in which their
results are still quoted with respect; in the case of Hydrostatics, as
Heron’s great book shows; and in the case of Natural History, in which
they made the first collection of facts that modern men of science can
use; but we have lost what they said on their artistic observations,
namely their minute observations of the anatomy of the human body,
which, as I have told you, their sculptors learned to represent with
such accuracy that no modern anatomist can find a flaw in their work.
This was done by careful external observation, for the practice of
dissecting the human body would have seemed to them impious and
horrible. But, whenever it was possible, the Greeks went back to first
principles and framed a theory from which they deduced the facts; and
this it is which has made their science so valuable. It will not be hard
to show you how in Logic--the Science of Reasoning,--in Arithmetic, and
in Geometry--the science of the laws of lines, of figures, and of solid
bodies in space--they are our teachers to the present day.
It is well to approach the subject of Logic through the avenue by which
the Greeks approached it, through the analysis of ordinary language and
as the natural expression of thinking. The early poets and great prose
writers had so far perfected the use of language that the Greeks in the
catalogue of human acquisitions came to put their speech on a very high
pedestal. Delighted with it, and despising all other tongues as
barbarous, they convinced themselves that the Greek word adequately
expressed the nature of the thing it signified, and therefore that to
understand their language properly was to understand the nature of
things. Λὁγος meant not only speech (_oratio_), but reason (_ratio_),
and so, after first seeking to obtain clear conceptions of abstract
ideas, they advanced to the structure of sentences and analysed speech
in so accurate a way that their technical terms are our technical terms
of to-day. When you talk of _infinitives_, or _genitives_, or
_participles_, you are only using words borrowed from Latin
translations, often mistranslations, of the Greek. You find these
logical studies in their beginning, but by no means in their infancy, in
the _Dialogues_ of Plato. Whole conversations are employed in trying to
fix the connotation of important moral terms, such as _holiness_, or
_valour_, or _temperance_. And we also find in some of the dialogues an
appreciation of the difficulties contained in the form of simple
propositions, the meaning of affirmation or negation, and the nature of
the deduction of one proposition from another.
But I need not detain you with particulars about these early
preparations for science, when we have before us in Aristotle various
treatises on the analysis of speech from its logical side, and the
laying down of the laws of formal thinking with such accuracy and
completeness that nothing of importance has ever been added to it. We
hear it often said that a single man apprehended and systematised these
laws. That is not true; there were plenty of tentative essays before his
time. But if there be one achievement which has made his name and fame
everlasting, it is his treatment of the theory of Reasoning.
The mediæval universities knew this well, and so do the modern
universities of Europe which are worthy of the name. I need not bear
witness to the vast importance of common Logic by telling you that in my
own youth nothing ever woke me up like having a good Logic put into my
hands at the age of fourteen. For since that time I have been often
teaching it and have watched its effects on hundreds of intelligent
youths. Among all the subjects that we teach, not for the purpose of
supplying mere facts, but for the purpose of training youth to judge
facts and co-ordinate their knowledge, I know nothing that benefits the
average student like the study of Aristotelian Logic. May I add that, so
far as I know American education, the most serious defect I have
observed in it is the small attention paid to this subject, and hence
the vast number of your men and women who are unable to distinguish a
sound from an unsound argument, still less to point out where the
fallacy lies.
There are here present, I have no doubt, a large number of people,
otherwise highly educated, who, were I to propose a stock example for
their criticism, would feel at a loss how to deal with it. Let me give
an illustration. “Every hen comes from an egg; every egg comes from a
hen; therefore every egg comes from an egg.” Is this a correct argument?
If not, where is it at fault? If you had all been trained in Whately’s
Logic, or any other Logic of the kind, as we were in our youth, such a
question would present no difficulty whatever.
But if you have failed to derive this lesson from the old Greeks, your
English ancestors were better advised. All the subtlety of the mediæval
schools, all the disputations of their universities, were based on Greek
Logic; and, if they often wasted their time on idle problems, it must
always be remembered that by this means Europe was trained to accuracy
and subtlety in argument, and hence to weigh vague and random theorising
and to make men competent critics of any new dogma. We often remark from
our side of the Atlantic how many wild theories in religion, how many
sham theories in science, blossom and flourish in this country,
inhabited though it may be by a most shrewd and intelligent population.
The simplest answer is to point to their ignorance of common Logic, and
hence their liability to be deceived by the most vulgar fallacies. It
would be easy to mention a book popular in this country, the pages of
which any logically trained people would only use to wrap sardines or to
heat a stove.
The Greeks do not parade their logic in their writings, though we know
they were fond of subtleties; there are indeed examples of it in the
_Sophist_ of Plato, where this sort of thing is ridiculed in his
travesty of two professional educators. But there are two great and
solid proofs of the power which strict Logic had upon their minds. The
first comes out in their literature. Wherever they undertake to argue an
issue, whether political, social, or religious, their reasoning is clear
and easily followed. They of course often start from traditional
beliefs, which may not now command assent, but they always reason from
these with clear and sober thinking. There was no more important cause
for the permanence of that great literature. Its sound thinking has kept
it from all extravagance and made it acceptable to educated men of all
ages and nations. The second proof is my chief subject to-day: it is the
peculiarly logical character of Greek mathematics which has made this
too the model of the scientific thinking of the world.