If Spencer's theory is æsthetically and psychologically inconceivable,
he is hardly happier in the pseudo-historical evidence by which he
seeks to support it. His notion seems to be that all ancient music, and
the Oriental and savage music of the present day, represent the art
at the second or recitative stage of development--a kind of half-way
house between excited speech and full-blown song. Thus the Chinese
and Hindoos "seem never to have advanced" beyond recitative. "The
dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous, and in virtue of
their monotony are more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the
_songs_[53] of civilised races"--which is surely a quite illegitimate
comparison. Again, "hence it follows that the primitive (Greek)
recitative was simpler than our modern recitative, and, as such, much
less remote from common speech than our own singing is." These typical
quotations will serve to show how blandly Spencer assumes the very
thing he has to prove. The dance-chants of savages are not as highly
organised as our European songs; but does this indicate that there
is not the same psychological difference between the song and the
speech of the savage as there is between the song and the speech of
the European? The ancient Greek music was not so complex as ours; but
will Spencer be bold enough to say that a man of Athens, listening to
contemporary music, did not feel under it precisely the same kind of
æsthetic pleasure as we feel when we listen to a song by Brahms or a
symphony by Beethoven--a kind of pleasure different in essence and
in temperature from any that can be given by speech? Did the Greek,
that is, listening to Greek music, feel as I do when I listen to an
eloquent preacher or an intoning Quaker, or as I do when I listen to
_music_ in the real sense of the term? Surely there can be no doubt
in the matter. Setting aside the difference due to the enormous
development of our art on the formal and technical side, there can be
no question that the Greek took pleasure in his music _quâ_ music, not
_quâ_ "recitative."[54] And as with the Greeks, so with Orientals and
savages. How Spencer can imagine that Oriental music as a whole, and
particularly that of China and India, has for the most part remained
stationary at recitative, is a mystery to me, in face of the mass of
evidence that may be had from any history of music or any collection
of travels. There is, indeed, in much Oriental music, that dubiety of
scale (according to our notions) which has misled unwary travellers
into the belief that the native singing cannot be real music, because
it is so different from ours. But nothing can be better established
than the fact that melodies pure and simple, tunes written and sung
merely to express that _pensée musicale_ to which I have already
referred, are common in the music of all Oriental nations. Spencer's
statement "that the music of Eastern races is not only without harmony,
but has more the character of recitative than of melody," and that "the
chant of the early Greek poet was a recitative with accompaniment in
unison on his four-stringed lyre," is a fair sample of the uncritical
way in which he has assumed anything that would be likely to bear out
his theory. His confusion of two or three distinct things by dubbing
them all "recitative" is one of the main sources of his errors on this
question.
As for his attempt to limit harmonic music to modern Europe, I will
only say, with Naumann, that wherever we have, as in the old Egyptian
paintings, a representation of a concert with many instruments of
various shapes and sizes, it is incredible that the performers should
all have been playing the same notes. The result, of course, could
not have been harmony in our acceptation of the word, for this is to
a large extent dependent upon theory for its development; but it was
conceivably one of the roots from which harmony could grow. And as
Spencer admitted that his theory contained no explanation of harmony,
that theory is obviously weakened by any fact indicating that the
desire for harmony is innate in the human breast, like the love of
tones, sequences of tones, and relations between tones. We must dismiss
from our minds all the misleading connotations of the term "harmony,"
as we must with the term "recitative"; and when we do this there is
ample evidence to show that the harmonic sense--the joy in hearing
two tones sounded together--is as innate, and as independent of the
stimulus of speech, as the melodic sense. The mere sweeping of the
harp-strings during singing is not what _we_ would call harmony; but if
it does not point to a rudimentary feeling that tones in combination
are more pleasurable than single tones, it is difficult to say what
it does indicate. Everywhere, in truth, we come down to the really
fundamental fact, that there is even in primitive man a real _musical
sense_, independent of speech in origin, and, as far as we can see,
much earlier than speech in the order of time, for man certainly
expressed his feelings in pure indefinite sound long before he had
learned to agree with his fellows to attach certain meanings to certain
stereotyped sounds.