The music of savage tribes is, however, the last stronghold of Spencer;
and if his theory fails to find proper support in that quarter, it can
hardly resist all the weight of evidence that may be brought against
it from others. Here, he says, he has Sir Hubert Parry on his side,
"who adopts the view I have here re-explained and defended," and who
"has in his chapter on Folk-Music exemplified the early stages of
musical evolution, up from the howling chants of savages--Australians,
Caribs, Polynesian cannibals, etc.--to the rude melodies of our own
ancestors. I do not see how any unbiassed reader, after examining the
evidence placed by him in its natural order, can refuse assent to the
conclusion drawn." Well, the final refutation of Spencer can be had out
of the mouth of Sir Hubert Parry himself. What Sir Hubert's own theory
of the origin of music may be I do not know; but certainly neither
the facts nor the arguments he has adduced in his _Art of Music_ give
any colour to the theory that music first arose as a modification of
the attributes of emotional speech. Let us examine Sir Hubert Parry's
evidence.
We begin at the beginning with the descending chromatic howl of the
Carib which he quotes on page 49 of his book--the "howling chant" to
which Spencer refers; and if, as the philosopher will have it, this
represents "the early stages of musical evolution," his case has gone
by the board at once. There could be no more conclusive testimony to
the fact that music has its origin not in speech, but in the venting
of mere vague emotion in mere vague sound; for where Spencer sees
the previous influence of speech in this howl of the Carib I cannot
imagine. He might as well suppose that speech antedates the howl of a
dog or the roar of a lion. On what grounds does he find support for
his theory here? Simply that a howl of this kind, like the song of the
Omaha Indians, is distinguished by indefiniteness of intervals! "Now
this," he says, "is just one of the traits to be expected if vocal
music is developed out of emotional speech; since the intervals of
speech, also, are indefinite." Was there ever a more palpable _non
sequitur_? Because A has one of the characteristics of B, therefore
A must have grown out of B! Here is a complete justification of my
previous remark that Spencer has converted a mere likeness into a
cause. The real reason for music exhibiting some of the traits of
speech is that, music and speech being the expression of allied orders
of feeling, and both finding voice through the same muscular apparatus,
they simply cannot help having a great many features in common. But
we really require something more than a demonstration that the
intonations of music, being affected by the same physical organs, point
to very much the same mental and physical phenomena as the intonations
of speech, in order to convince us that music _had its origin_ in
speech.
Take now the further examples given by Sir Hubert Parry, and discover
in them, if you can, any evidence that does not go to show that they
are born directly of a primitive _pensée musicale_, without any sign
of the previous intervention of speech. Written over them all, indeed,
is conclusive proof that when primitive man sings, or even croons, to
himself, he is unconsciously guided by a rudimentary musical sense.
Savages contrive, says Sir Hubert, "little fragmentary figures of two
or three notes, which they reiterate incessantly over and over again.
Sometimes a single figure suffices. When they are clever enough to
devise two they alternate them, but [naturally] without much sense or
orderliness"; and he shows, later on, how even among savages there is a
continuous growth in this primitive sense of design. Now all this is in
accordance with the theory of the origin of music already advanced in
this essay; and these phenomena of savage music will easily account for
all the most complex modern developments of the art, which Spencer half
admits his theory will _not_ account for. Savage man, merely because
he is a physical organism, expresses himself in sound. Again, merely
because he is a physical and psychical organism, he takes pleasure in
sounds, in successions of sounds, and in the co-relations of sounds;
and, to complete the list of the elements necessary to constitute all
the music that has ever been written in the world, Sir Hubert Parry
shows that, even in the savage whose rude attempt at song is little
more than a howl, there is a rudimentary sense of form, of balance, of
design. "When little fragments of melody[55] become stereotyped," says
Sir Hubert, "as they do in every savage community sufficiently advanced
to perceive and remember, attempts are made to alternate and contrast
them in some way; and the excitement of sympathy with an expressive cry
is merged in a crudely artistic pleasure derived from the contemplation
of something of the nature of a pattern." Is there any support for the
speech-theory here? Is it not, indeed, an interloper pure and simple,
obscuring a trail that is perfectly clear and open if left alone?
The one fact upon which Spencer always seems to rely is that the
intervals of speech and the intervals of the most primitive chant
are both indefinite. Even here, however, Sir Hubert Parry's book is
unpropitious to him, for Sir Hubert insists on the obvious fact that
indefiniteness of intervals in early music is entirely a matter of
lack of instruments by which to fix the various notes of a scale. "It
is extremely difficult to make sure what intervals savages intend to
utter, as they are very uncertain about hitting anything like exact
notes till they have advanced enough to have instruments with regular
relations of notes more or less indicated upon them." To pass from
an indefinite howl to a definite series of notes, when an instrument
has been invented that guides the voice and fixes its tones, may be
the work of a day. Wherein then comes the function of speech and
recitative, which are supposed to occupy the intermediate stages of
evolution between the howl and the song--for I suppose Spencer would
hardly contend that man learned to speak _before_ he learned to howl?
And at what stage appears this elementary feeling for musical design
which the savage exhibits? Can this be conceived to grow out of the
habit of speech? If not, if it is independent of speech, if it is
something that concerns itself with pure sound alone, what was it
doing in all the ages when man was making sounds, but had not yet
made himself a language? "The crudest efforts of savages," says Sir
Hubert Parry, "throw light upon the true nature of musical design,
and upon the manner in which human beings endeavoured to grapple with
it." Again, "the savage state indicates a taste for design, but an
incapacity for making the designs consistent and logical; in the lowest
intelligent stage, the capacity for disposing short contrasting figures
in an orderly and intelligent way is shown." Once more, can speech
be logically conceived as playing the leading part in this long but
continuous drama of evolution?
Finally, in Sir Hubert Parry's own pages Spencer could have found
evidence of yet another element of pure musical enjoyment in the
savage mind--none other than an incipient desire for harmony. Speaking
of the rise of harmony in the Middle Ages, and of the curious device
of making two wholly different tunes go together by the process of
"easing off the corners and adapting the points where the cacophony
was too intolerable to be endured," Sir Hubert shows the existence of
this same practice among savages. "This," he says, "may seem a very
surprising and even laughable way of obtaining an artistic effect, but
in reality the actual practice of combining several tunes together is
by no means uncommon. Several savage and semi-civilised races adopt
the practice, as, for instance, the Bushmen at the lower end of the
human scale, and the Javese, Siamese, Burmese, and Moors about the
middle. In these cases the process usually consists of simultaneously
singing or playing short and simple musical figures, such as savages
habitually reiterate, with the addition in some cases of a long sort of
indefinite wailing tune which goes on independently of all the rest of
the performance. The Javese carry such devices to extremes, producing
a kind of reckless, incoherent, instrumental counterpoint, very much
like a number of people playing various tunes at once, with just
sufficient feeling for some definite central principle to accommodate
the jarring elements. The practice of combining tunes seems to have
become universal quite suddenly, and it led very quickly to fresh
developments. And it is worth noting that one of these developments was
precisely the same in principle as that adopted by the Bushmen and the
Javese, and other semi-savage experimenters in such things; which was
to accompany the main combination of two melodies by a short musical
figure which could be incessantly reiterated as an accompaniment."
Phenomena like these undermine the crude and hasty inference that
Orientals and savages have no notion of harmony; they prove that, as
low down in the human scale as our investigations will carry us, man
tries to make harmony because it pleases his musical sense. How far he
succeeds depends upon other things than his mere desire.
So that, to sum up, we can dismiss speech altogether from our
hypothesis of the origin of music, seeing that, while no man can
represent to us either the psychological or historical processes
by which music has grown or could grow out of speech, we find
innate in the human organism every element out of which music _can_
grow, independently of speech--the delight in tone, the delight in
successions of tones, the delight in combinations of tones, the delight
in rhythm, the delight in design. Even Spencer himself, in the chapter
on "Developed Music" in his _Facts and Comments_, sees that these
elements are sufficient to account for certain kinds of music, though
his total analysis, particularly in the distinction between merely
symmetrical music and poetical music, is æsthetically incomplete and _à
priori_. To Spencer's oft-reiterated question, "If my theory does not
explain the origin of music, how else can its genesis be explained?"
we may reply that his theory really explains nothing; it only asserts.
It points to certain resemblances between speech and song, and then
dogmatically lays it down, without an atom of proof, that the one has
arisen from the other. _Per contra_, an analysis of primitive music
shows us that in the rudest savage we have, in embryo, every element
that goes to make the most complicated music of modern times--some of
these elements, indeed, appearing even in animals. If we are to believe
that these in themselves could not develop into music, we must have a
reason why; and if we are to believe that an imitation of the accents
of speech was necessary before primitive man could express what he felt
in mere indefinite sound, we must have not only some proof that it
ever occurred, but some demonstration of how the process is possible;
for to me, at least, it is psychologically inconceivable. When Spencer
says that "song emerged from speech," he is, I contend, merely using a
verbal formula that conveys nothing representable to us; it is of the
family of those "pseudo-ideas" upon which he himself has emptied the
vials of his scorn in _First Principles_.