We are now to enter upon the second of our four lines of study by
concentrating our attention upon three historic _details_ in the
growth of this personality whose _general_ advance has been so
carefully illustrated in our first line. These details are found in
the sudden rise of Physical Science, of Modern Music, and of the
Modern Novel, at periods of time so little separated from each other,
that we may consider these great fields of human activity as fairly
opened simultaneously to the entrance of man about the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
Addressing ourselves first, then, to the idea of Science, let us place
ourselves at a point of view from which we can measure with precision
the actual height and nature of the step which man took in ascending
from the plane of, say, Aristotle's "science" to that of Sir Isaac
Newton's "science." And the only possible method of placing ourselves
at this point of view is to pass far back and fix ourselves in the
attitude which antiquity maintained towards physical nature, and in
which succeeding ages comfortably dozed, scarcely disturbed even by
Roger Bacon's feeble protest in the thirteenth century, until it was
shocked out of all future possibility by Copernicus, Galileo and Sir
Isaac Newton.
Accordingly, in pursuance of our custom of abandoning abstract
propositions at the earliest moment, when we can embody them in terms
of the concrete, let us spend a quiet hour in contemplating some of
the specific absurdities of our ancestors in scientific thought and
in generalizing them into the lack of personality. Let us go and sit
with Socrates on his prison-bed, in the _Phaedo_, and endeavor to see
this matter of man's scientific relation to physical nature, with his
sight. Hear Socrates talking to Simmias: he is discussing the method
of acquiring true knowledge: it is well we are invisible as we sit by
him, for we can not keep back a quiet smile,--we who come out of a
beautiful and vast scientific acquirement all based upon looking at
things with our eyes; we whose very intellectual atmosphere is
distilled from the proverb, "seeing is believing"--when we hear these
grave propositions of the wisest antique man. "But what of the
acquisition of wisdom," says Socrates: ... "do the sight and hearing
convey any certainty to mankind, or are they such as the poets
incessantly report them, who say that we neither hear nor see anything
as it is?... Do they not seem so to you?"
"They do, indeed," replied Simmias. "When, then," continued Socrates,
"does the soul attain to the truth? For when it attempts to
investigate anything along with the body, it is plain that the soul is
led astray by the body.... Is it not by reasoning, if by anything,
that reality is made manifest to the soul?"
"Certainly."
But now Socrates advances a step to show that not only are we misled
when we attempt to get knowledge by seeing things, but that nothing
worth attention is capable of being physically seen. I shall have
occasion to recur in another connection to the curious fallacy
involved in this part of Socrates' argument. He goes on to inquire of
Simmias: "Do we assert that Justice is anything, or not?"
"We say that it is."
"And beauty and goodness, also?"
"Surely."
"Did you ever see anything of the kind with your eyes?"
"Never," replied Simmias.
... "Then," continues Socrates, "whoever amongst us prepares, with the
greatest caution and accuracy, to reflect upon that particular thing
by itself upon which he is inquiring" and ... "using reflection alone,
endeavors to investigate every reality by itself, ... abstaining as
much as possible from the use of the eyes ... is not such an one, if
any, likely to arrive at what really exists?"
"You speak, Socrates," answered Simmias, "with amazing truth."
It is curious to note in how many particulars this process of
acquiring knowledge is opposed to that of the modern scientific man.
Observe specially that Socrates wishes to investigate every reality by
itself, while we, on the contrary, fly from nothing with so much
vehemence as from an isolated fact; it maddens us until we can put it
into relation with other facts, and delights us in proportion to the
number of facts with which we can relate it. In that book of
multitudinous suggestions which Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg)
calls _The Pupil at Sais_, one of the most modern sentences is that
where, after describing many studies of his wondrous pupil, Novalis
adds that "erelong he saw nothing alone."
Surely, one of the earliest and most delightful sensations one has in
spiritual growth, after one has acquired the true synthetic habit
which converts knowledge into wisdom, is that delicious, universal
impulse which accompanies every new acquisition as it runs along like
a warp across the woof of our existing acquisition, making a pleasant
tang of contact, as it were, with each related fibre.
But Plato speaks even more directly upon our present point, in
advocating a similar attitude towards physical science. In Book VII.
of the _Republic_, he puts these words into the mouth of Socrates:
"And whether a man gapes at the heavens, or blinks on the ground,
seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can
learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science."
Of course these, as the opinions of professed idealists, would not be
representative of the Greek attitude towards physical science.
Yet when we turn to those who are pre-eminently physical philosophers,
we find that the mental disposition, though the reverse of hostile, is
nearly always such as to render the work of these philosophers
unfruitful. When we find, for example, that Thales in the very
beginning of Greek philosophy holds the principle, or beginning,
[Greek: he arche] of all things to be moisture, or water; that
Anaximenes a little while after holds the beginning of things to be
air; that Heraclitus holds the _arche_ to be fire: this _sounds_
physical, and we look for a great extension of men's knowledge in
regard to water, air and fire, upon the idea that if these are really
the organic principles of things, thousands of keen inquiring eyes
would be at once leveled upon them, thousands of experiments would be
at once set on foot, all going to reveal properties of water, air and
fire.
But perhaps no more expressive summary of the real relation between
man and nature, not only during the Greek period but for many
centuries after it, could be given than the fact that these three
so-called elements which begin the Greek physical philosophy remained
themselves unknown for more than two thousand years after Thales and
Anaximenes and Heraclitus, until the very last century when, with the
discovery of oxygen, men are able to prove that they are not elements
at all; but that what we call fire is merely an effect of the rapid
union of oxygen with bodies, while water and air are compounds of it
with other gases. It is perfectly true that in the years between
Thales and the death of Aristotle, a considerable body of physical
facts had been accumulated; that Pythagoras had observed a number of
acoustic phenomena and mathematically formulated their relations; it
is true that--without detaining you to specify intermediate
inquirers--we have that wonderful summary of Aristotle--wonderful for
one man--which is contained in his _Physics_, from which the name
"meta-physics" originated, though the circumstance that he placed the
other books _after_ those on physics, calling them [Greek: Ta meta ta
physicha biblia], the meta-physical, or over and above physical,
books.
When we read the titles of these productions--here are "Eight Books of
Physical Lectures," "Four Books of the Heavens," "Two Books of
Production and Destruction," Treatises "On Animals," "On Plants," "On
Colors," "On Sound"--we feel that we must be in a veritable realm of
physical science. But if we examine these lectures and treatises,
which probably contain the entire body of Greek physical learning, we
find them hampered by a certain disability which seems to me
characteristic not only of Greek thought, but of all man's early
speculation, and which excludes the possibility of a fruitful and
progressive physical science. I do not know how to characterize this
disability otherwise than by calling it a lack of that sense of
personal relation to fact which makes the thinker passionately and
supremely solicitous about the truth, that is, the existence of his
facts and the soundness of his logic; solicitous of these, not so much
with reference to the value of his conclusions as because of an inward
tender inexorable yearning for the truth and nothing but the truth.
In short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether dealing with
physical facts or meta-physical problems, is lacking in what I may
call the intellectual conscience--the conscience, for example, which
makes Mr. Darwin spend long and patient years in investigating small
facts before daring to reason upon them; and which makes him state the
facts adverse to his theory with as much care as the facts which make
for it.
Part of the philosophy of this personal relation between a man and a
fact is very simple. For instance what do you know at present of the
inner life of the Patagonians? Probably no more than your Mitchell's
or Cornell's Geography told you at school. But if a government
expedition is soon to carry you to the interior of that country, a
personal relation arises which will probably set you to searching all
the libraries at your command for such travels or treatises as may
enlarge your knowledge of Patagonia.
It is easy to give a thousand illustrations of this lack of
intellectual conscience in Greek thought, which continued indeed up to
the time of the Renaissance. For example: it would seem that nothing
less than a sort of amateur mental attitude towards nature, an
attitude which does not bind the thinker to his facts with such iron
conscientiousness that if one fact were out of due order, it would
rack him, could account for Aristotle's grave exposition of the four
elements. "We seek," he says "the principles of sensible things, that
is of tangible bodies. We must take therefore not all the
contrarieties of quality but those only which have reference to the
touch.... Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch
are these: hot, cold; dry, wet; heavy, light; hard, soft; unctuous,
meagre; rough, smooth; dense, rare." Aristotle then rejects the last
three couplets on several grounds and proceeds: "Now in four things
there are six combinations of two; but the combinations of two
opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected; we have therefore four
elementary combinations which agree with the four apparently
elementary bodies. Fire is hot and dry; air is hot and wet; water is
cold and wet: earth is cold and dry." And thus we comfortably fare
forward with fire, air, earth and water for the four elements of all
things.
But Aristotle argues that there must be a fifth element: and our
modern word quintessence is, by the way, a relic of this argument,
this fifth element having been called by later writers _quinta
essentia_ or quintessence. The argument is as follows: "the simple
elements must have simple motions, and thus fire and air have their
natural motions upwards and water and earth have their natural motions
downwards; but besides these motions there is motion in a circle which
is unnatural to these elements, but which is a more perfect motion
than the other, because a circle is a perfect line and a straight line
is not; and there must be something to which this motion is natural.
From this it is evident that there is some essence or body different
from those of the four elements, ... and superior to them. If things
which move in a circle move contrary to nature it is marvelous, or
rather absurd that this, the unnatural motion should alone be
continuous and eternal; for unnatural motions decay speedily. And so
from all this we must collect that besides the four elements which we
have here and about us, there is another removed far off and the more
excellent in proportion as it is more distant from us."
Or take Aristotle's dealing with the heaviness and lightness of
bodies.
After censuring former writers for considering these as merely
relative, he declares that lightness is a positive or absolute
property of bodies just as weight is; that earth is absolutely heavy,
and therefore tends to take its place below the other three elements;
that fire has the positive property of lightness, and hence tends to
take its place above the other three elements; (the modern word
_empyrean_ is a relic of this idea from the _pyr_ or fire, thus
collected in the upper regions), and so on; and concludes that bodies
which have the heavy property tend to the centre, while those with the
light property tend to the exterior, of the earth, because "Exterior
is opposite to Centre, as heavy is to light."
This conception, or rather misconception, of opposites appears most
curiously in two of the proofs which Socrates offers for the
immortality of the soul, and I do not know how I can better illustrate
the infirmity of antique thought which I have just been describing
than by citing the arguments of Socrates in that connection according
to the _Phaedo_. Socrates introduced it with special solemnity. "I do
not imagine," he says, "that any one, not even if he were a comic
poet, would now say that I am trifling.... Let us examine it in this
point of view, whether the souls of the dead survive or not.
"Let us consider this, whether it is absolutely necessary in the
case of as many things as have a contrary, that this contrary
should arise from no other source than from a contrary to itself.
For instance, where anything becomes greater, must it not follow
that from being previously less it subsequently became greater?
"Yes."
"So, too, if anything becomes less, shall it become so
subsequently to its being previously greater?"
"Such is the case," said Cebes.
"And weaker from stronger, swifter from slower, ... worse from
better, juster from more unjust?"
"Surely."
"We are then sufficiently assured of this, that all things are so
produced, contraries from contraries?"
"Sufficiently so."
... "Do you now tell me likewise in regard to life and death. Do
you not say that death is the contrary of life?"
"I say so."
"And that they are produced from each other?"
"Yes."
"What then is that which is produced from life?"
"Death," said Cebes.
"And that which is produced from death?"
"I must allow," said Cebes, "to be life."
"Therefore, our souls exist after death."
This is one formal argument of Socrates.
He now goes on speaking to his friends during that fatal day at great
length, setting forth other arguments in favor of the immortality of
the soul. Finally he comes to the argument which he applies to the
soul, that magnitude cannot admit its contrary, but that one retires
when the other approaches. At this point he is interrupted by one who
remembers his former position. Plato relates:
Then some one of those present (but who he was I do not clearly
recollect) when he heard this, said, "In the name of the gods,
was not the very contrary of what is now asserted laid down in
the previous part of the discussion, that the greater is produced
from the less and the less from the greater, and this positively
was the mode of generating contraries from contraries?" Upon
which Socrates said ... "... 'Then it was argued that a contrary
thing was produced from a contrary; but now, that contrary itself
can never become its own contrary'.... But observe further if
you will agree with me in this. Is there anything you call heat
and cold?"
"Certainly."
"The same as snow and fire?"
"Assuredly not."
"Is heat, then, something different from fire, and cold something
different from snow?"
"Yes."
"But this I think is evident to you, that snow while it is snow
can never, having admitted heat, continue to be what it was, snow
and hot; but on the approach of heat will either give way to it
or be destroyed."
"Certainly so."
"And fire, on the other hand, on the approach of cold, must
either give way to it or be destroyed; nor can it ever endure,
having admitted cold, to continue to be what it was, fire and
cold.... Such I assert to be the case with the number 3 and many
other numbers. Shall we not insist that the number 3 shall perish
first ... before it would endure while it was yet 3 to become
even?... What then? what do we now call that which does not admit
the idea of the even?"
"Odd," replied he.
"And that which does not admit the just, nor the graceful?"
"The one, ungraceful, and the other, unjust."
"Be it so. But by what name do we call that which does not admit
death?"
"Immortal."
"Does the soul, then, not admit death?" (Socrates has already
suggested that whatever the soul occupies it brings life to.)
"No."
"Is the soul, therefore, immortal?"
"Immortal."
Socrates' argument drawn from the number 3 brings before us a great
host of these older absurdities of scientific thought, embracing many
grave conclusions drawn from fanciful considerations of number,
everywhere occurring. For briefest example: Aristotle in his book "On
the Heavens" proves that the world is perfect by the following
complete argument: "The bodies of which the world is composed ... have
three dimensions; now 3 is the most perfect number ... for of 1 we do
not speak as a number; of 2 we say _both_; but 3 is the first number
of which we say _all_; moreover, it has a beginning, a middle and an
end." You may instructively compare with this the marvelous matters
which the school of Pythagoras educed out of _their_ perfect number
which was 4, or the _tetractys_; and Plato's number of the _Republic_
which commentators to this day have not settled.
These illustrations seem sufficient to show a mental attitude towards
facts which is certainly like that one has towards a far-off country
which one does not expect to visit. The illustration I have used is
curiously borne out by a passage in Lactantius, writing so far down as
the fourth century, in which we have a picture of mediaeval relations
towards nature and of customary discussions.
"To search," says he, "for the causes of natural things; to inquire
whether the sun be as large as he seems, whether the moon is convex or
concave, whether the stars are fixed in the sky or float freely in the
air; of what size and what material are the heavens; whether they be
at rest or in motion; what is the magnitude of the earth; on what
foundations it is suspended and balanced;--to dispute and conjecture
on such matters is just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a
city in a remote country of which we never heard but the name."
Perhaps this defect of thought, this lack of personality towards
facts, is most strikingly perceived in the slowness with which most
primary ideas of the form and motion of the earth made their way among
men. Although astronomy is the oldest of sciences, and the only one
progressive science of antiquity; and although the idea that the
earth was a sphere, was one of the earliest in Greek philosophy; yet
this same Lactantius in the 4th century is vehemently arguing as
follows: "Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that
the crops and trees on the other side of the earth hang downwards, and
that men there have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask of
them how they defend these monstrosities--how things do not fall away
from the earth on that side? they reply that the nature of things is
such that heavy bodies tend towards the centre, like the spokes of a
wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the earth
towards the heavens on all sides. Now I am really at a loss what to
say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere
in their folly and defend one absurd opinion by another."
And coming on down to the eighth century, the anecdote is well known
of honest Bishop Virgil of Salisbury, who shocked some of his
contemporaries by his belief in the real existence of the antipodes,
to such an extent that many thought he should be censured by the Pope
for an opinion which involved the existence of a whole "world of human
beings out of reach of the conditions of salvation."
And finally we all know the tribulations of Columbus on this point far
down in the fifteenth century, at the very beginning of the
Renaissance.
Now this infirmity of mind is as I said, not distinctive of the Greek.
To me it seems simply a natural incident of the youth of reason, of
the childhood of personality. At any rate, for a dozen centuries and
more after Aristotle's death, to study science, means to study
Aristotle; in vain do we hear Roger Bacon in the thirteenth
century--that prophet philosopher who first announces the two
rallying cries of modern science, mathematics and experiment--in vain
do we hear Roger Bacon crying: "If I had power over the works of
Aristotle I would have them all burnt; for it is only a loss of time,
a course of error, and a multiplication of ignorance beyond
expression, to study them."
Various attempts have been made to account for the complete failure of
Greek physical science by assigning this and that specific tendency to
the Greek mind: but it seems a perfect confirmation of the view I have
here presented--to wit that the organic error was not Greek but simply
a part of the general human lack of personality--to reflect that 1,500
years after Aristotle, things are little better, and that when we do
come to a time when physical science begins to be pursued upon
progressive principles, we find it to be also a time when all other
departments of activity begin to be similarly pursued, so that we are
obliged to recognize not the correction of any specific error in Greek
ratiocination, but a general advance of the spirit of man along the
whole line.
And perhaps we have now sufficiently prepared ourselves, as was
proposed at the outset of this sketch of Greek science, to measure
precisely the height of the new plane which begins with Copernicus,
Kepler and Galileo in the 16th century, over the old plane which ended
with Aristotle and his commentators. Perhaps the true point up to
which we should lay our line in making this measurement is not to be
found until we pass nearly through the 17th century and arrive fairly
at Sir Isaac Newton. For while each one of the great men who preceded
him had made his contribution weighty enough, as such, yet each brings
with him some old darkness out of the antique period.
When we come to examine Copernicus, we find that though the root of
the matter is there, a palpable environment of the old cycle and
epicycle still hampers it; Galileo disappoints us at various
emergencies. Kepler puts forth his sublime laws amid a cluster of
startling absurdities; Francis Bacon is on the whole unfaithful;
Descartes will have his vortices or eddies as the true principles of
motion of the heavenly bodies; and so it is not until we reach Sir
Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century that we find a large,
quiet, wholesome thinker, de-Aristotleized, de-Ptolemized,
de-Cartesianized, pacing forth upon the domain of reason as if it were
his own orchard, and seating himself in the centre of the universe as
if it were his own easy chair, observing the fact and inferring the
law as if with a personal passion for truth and a personal religion
towards order. In short, and in terms of our present theory, with Sir
Isaac Newton the growth of man's personality has reached a point when
it has developed a true personal relation between man and nature.
I should have been glad if the scope of this part of my inquiry had
allowed me to give some sketch at least of the special workers in
science who immediately preceded Newton, and some of whose lives were
most pathetic and beautiful illustrations of this personal love for
nature which I have tried to show as now coming into being for the
first time in the history of man. Besides such spectacles as the
lonesome researches of Jeremiah Horrox, for example, I scarcely know
anything in history which yields such odd and instructive contrasts as
those glimpses of the scientific work which went on about the court of
Charles II, and of what seems to have been the genuine interest of the
monarch himself. In _Pepys' Diary_, for instance, under date of May
11th, 1663, I find the entry: "Went home after a little discourse
with Mr. Pierce the surgeon who tells me that ... the other day Dr.
Clarke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman, before the
king, with which the king was highly pleased." Again, February 1st, of
the next year: "Thence to Whitehall, where in the Duke's chamber the
King came and stayed an hour or two, laughing at Sir W. Petty ... and
at Gresham College in general: Gresham College he mightily laughed at
for spending time only in weighing of air and doing nothing else since
they sat." On the 4th, he was at St. Paul's school and "Dr. Wilkins"
is one of the "posers," Dr. Wilkins being John Wilkins, Bishop of
Chester, whose name was well-known in mathematics and in physics.
Under date of March 1st, same year, the entry is: "To Gresham College
where Mr. Hooke read a second very curious lecture about the late
comet; among other things proving very probably that this is the very
same comet that appeared before in the year 1618, and that in such a
time probably it will appear again, which is a very new opinion; but
all will be in print." And again on the 8th of August, 1666, I find an
entry which is of considerable interest: "Discoursed with Mr. Hooke
about the nature of sounds, and he did make me understand the nature
of musical sounds made by strings mighty prettily; and told me that
having come to a certain number of vibrations proper to make any tone,
he is able to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings (those
flies that hum in their flying) by the note that it answers to in
music during their flying. That I suppose is a little too much
refined; but his discourse in general of sound was mighty fine."
On the other hand, I scarcely know how I could show the newness of
this science thus entering the world, more vividly than by recording
two other entries which I find in the midst of these scientific
notes. One of these records a charm for a burn, which Pepys thought so
useful as to preserve. This is, in case one should be burned, to say
immediately the following verse:
"There came three angels out of the East;
One brought fire, the other brought frost--
Out fire, in frost,
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost."
And the other is, under Sept. 29th, 1662, "To the King's Theatre,
where we saw 'Midsummer's Night's Dream,' which I had never seen
before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous
play that ever I saw in my life."
Indeed, if you should wish to see how recently we are out of the range
of Aristotle, you have only to read the chapter on Human Anatomy,
which occurs in the early part of dear old Robert Burton's _Anatomy of
Melancholy_. Here is an account of the body which makes curious
reading for the modern biologist. I give a line here and there. The
body is divided into parts containing or contained, and the parts
contained are either humors or spirits. Of these humors there are
four: to wit, first, blood; next, phlegm; third, choler; and fourth,
melancholy; and this is part of the description of each.
"Blood is a hot, sweet, temperate, red humor, ... made of the most
temperate parts of the chylus in the liver.... And from it spirits are
first begotten in the heart. Phlegm is a cold and moist humor,
begotten of the colder part of the chylus in the liver. Choler is hot
and dry, begotten of the hotter parts of the chylus. Melancholy, cold
and dry, ... is a bridle to the other two hot humors, blood and
choler. These four humors have some analogy with the four elements and
to the four ages in man." Having disposed thus of humors, we have
this account of spirit or the other contained part of the body.
"Spirit is a most subtle vapor, which is expressed from the blood, and
the instrument of the soul to perform all his actions; a common tie or
medium between the body and the soul, as some will have it; or as
Paracelsus--a fourth soul of itself." Proceeding to other parts of the
body, here are the lungs. "The lungs is a thin spongy part like an
ox-hoof.... The instrument of voice; ... and next to the heart to
express their thoughts by voice. That it is the instrument of voice is
manifest in that no creature can speak ... which wanteth these lights.
It is besides the instrument of breathing; and its office is to cool
the heart by sending air into it by the venosal artery," &c., &c.
This anatomy of Burton's includes the soul, and here are some
particulars of it. "According to Aristotle, the soul is defined to be
emtelecheia, ... the perfection or first act of an organical body
having power of life.... But many doubts arise about the essence,
subject, seat, distinction and subordinate faculties of it.... Some
make one soul; ... others, three.... The common division of the soul
is into three principal faculties--vegetal, sensible and rational."
The soul of man includes all three; for the "sensible includes vegetal
and rational both; which are contained in it (saith Aristotle) _ut
trigonus in tetragono_, as a triangle in a quadrangle.... Paracelsus
will have four souls, adding to the three grand faculties a spiritual
soul: which opinion of his Campanella in his book _De Sensu Rerum_
much labors to demonstrate and prove, because carcases bleed at the
sight of the murderer; with many such arguments." These are not the
wanderings of ignorance; they represent the whole of human knowledge,
and are an epitome made up from Aristotle, Galen, Vesalius,
Fallopius, Wecker, Melancthon, Feruclius, Cicero, Pico Mirandola,
Paracelsus, Campanella, Taurellus, Philip, Flavius, Macrobius, Alhazen
the Arabian, Vittellio, Roger Bacon, Baptista Porta, Cardan, Sambucus,
Pliny, Avicenna, Lucretius, and such another list as makes one weary
with the very names of authorities.
These details of antique science brought face to face with the
weighing of air at Gresham College, and with Sir Isaac Newton,
represent with sufficient sharpness the change from the old reign of
enmity between Nature and man, from the stern ideal of justice to the
later reign of love which embraces in one direction, God, in another,
fellow-man, in another, physical nature.
Now, in these same sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in
which we have seen science recovering itself after having been so long
tongue-tied by authority, a remarkably similar process goes on in the
art of music. If, as we did in considering the progress of science, we
now place ourselves at a standpoint from which we can precisely
estimate that extension of man's personal relation towards the unknown
during these centuries, which resulted in modern music, we are met
with a chain of strikingly similar facts and causes. The Greek music
quite parallels Greek physical science. We have seen how, in the
latter, a Greek philosopher would start off with a well-sounding
proposition that all things originated in moisture, or in fire, or in
air, and we have seen how, instead of attacking moisture, fire and
air, and of observing and classifying all the physical facts connected
with them, the philosopher after awhile presents us with an amazing
superstructure of pure speculation wholly disconnected from facts of
any kind, physical or otherwise. Greek music offers us precisely the
same net outcome. It was enthusiastically studied, there were
multitudes of performers upon the lyre, the flute, and so on, it was a
part of common education, and the loftiest souls exerted their
loftiest powers in theorizing upon it. For example, in Plato's
_Republic_, Socrates earnestly condemns every innovation upon music.
His words are: "For any musical innovation is full of danger to the
State.... Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him ... that when
modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change
with them;" ... (therefore) "our guardians must lay the foundations of
their fortress in music." Again, in Book III., during a discussion as
to the kind of music to be permitted in our Republic, we have this
kind of talk. Socrates asks: "Which are the harmonies expressive of
sorrow?" It is replied, they are "the mixed Lydian and the full-toned
or bass Lydian."
"These must be banished.... Which are the soft or drinking harmonies?"
"The Ionian and the Lydian."
These, it appears, must also be banished.
"Then the Dorian and the Phrygian appear to be the only ones which
remain."
Socrates "answered; of the harmonies I know nothing; but I want to
have one warlike which will sound the word or note which a brave man
utters in the hour of danger or stern resolve, or when his cause is
failing ... (and he) meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and
another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action....
These two harmonies I ask you to leave: the strain of necessity and
the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of
the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of temperance;
these, I say, leave."
Simmias draws a charming analogy in the _Phaedo_ between the relation
of a beautiful and divine harmony to the lyre and that of the soul to
the body; Pythagoras dreams upon the music of the spheres; everywhere
the Greek is occupied with music, practical and theoretical. I find a
lively picture of the times where in Book VII. of the _Republic_,
Socrates describes the activity of the musical searchers: "By heaven,"
he says, "'tis as good as a play to hear them talking about their
condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears alongside of
their neighbors.... one set of them declaring that they catch an
intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be
the unit of measurement; the others maintaining the opposite theory,
that the two sounds have passed into the same, each party setting
their ears before their understanding."
And in this last clause we have a perfectly explicit statement of that
lack of personal relation to facts which makes Greek music as meagre
as Greek science. We found it the common fault of Greek scientific
thought that it took more satisfaction in an ingenious argument upon a
pseudo-fact than in a solid conclusion based upon plain observation
and reasoning. So here, Socrates is satirizing even the poor attempt
at observation made by these people, and sardonically accuses them of
what is the very pride of modern science--namely, of setting their
ears before their understanding,--that is, of rigorously observing the
facts before reasoning upon them.
At any rate, in spite of all this beautiful and comprehensive talk of
harmony and the like, the fact is clear, that the Greek had no harmony
worth the name; he knew nothing but the crude concords of the octave,
the fourth and the fifth; moreover, his melody was equally meagre;
and altogether his ultimate flight in music was where voices of men
and women sang, accompanied in unison or octave by the lyre, the flute
and the like.
And if we consider the state of music after the passing away of the
Greek cultus up to the fifteenth century, we have much the same story
to tell as was just now told of mediaeval science. For a time the
world's stock of tunes is practically comprised in the melodies
collected by Gregory, known as the Gregorian Chant. Presently the
system of polyphonic music arises, in which several voices sing
different melodies so arranged as not to jar with each other. But when
we now come down to the sixteenth century, we find a wonderful new
activity in music accompanying that in science. Luther in Germany,
Gondimel in France, push forward the song: in Spain, Salinas of
Salamanca, studies ancient music for thirty years, and finally arrives
at the conclusion that the Greek had no instrumental music, and that
all their melody was originally derived from the order of syllables in
verse. In Italy, Montaverde announces what were called his "new
discords," and the beautiful maestro, Palestrina, writes compositions
in several parts, which are at once noble, simple and devout. England
at this time is filled with music; and by the end of the sixteenth
century the whole land is a-warble with the madrigals and
part-compositions of Weelkes, Wilbye, John Milton, Sr., and the famous
Dr. John Bull, together with those of Tye, Tallis, Morley, Orlando
Gibbons, and hundreds more. But as yet modern music is not. There is
no orchestra; Queen Elizabeth's dinner-music is mainly drums and
trumpets. It is not until the middle of the seventeenth century that
Jenkins and Purcell begin to write sonatas for a small number of
violins with organ accompaniment.
A curious note of the tendency towards instrumental music at this
time, however, is found in the fact that people begin to care so
little for the words of songs as to prefer them in a foreign language.
Henry Lawes, one of the most famous musicians of the middle of the
seventeenth century, he who suggested Milton's _Comus_ and set it to
music, endeavored to rebuke this affectation, as he supposed it, by a
cruel joke: he wrote a song, of which the words were nothing more than
the index of an old volume of musical compositions, and had it sung
amidst great applause. It must have been in the same course of feeling
that Waller--several of whose poems had been set to music by
Lawes--addressed to him the following stanza:
"Let those who only warble long,
And gargle in their throat a song,
Content themselves with do, re, mi;
Let words of sense be set by thee."
And so through Allegri, Stradella, the Scarlattis and a thousand
singers, players and composers we come to the year 1685 in which both
Bach and Handel were born. Here we are fairly in the face of modern
music. What then is modern music? Music at this time bounds forward in
the joy of an infinitely developable principle. What is this
principle? In its last analysis it is what has now come to be called
Harmony, or more specially Tonality. According to the modern musical
feeling when any tone is heard it is heard in its relation to some
other tone which from one circumstance or another may have been taken
as a basis of such relations. By a long course of putting our ears
before our understanding,--a course carried on by all those early
musicians whose names I have mentioned, each contributing some new
relation between tones which his ear had discovered, we have finally
been able to generalize these relations in such a way as to make a
complete system of tonality in which every possible tone brings to our
ear an impression dependent on the tone or tones in connection with
which it is heard. As the Pupil at Sais ere long began to see nothing
alone, so we hear nothing alone. You have only to remember that the
singer now-a-days must always have the piano accompaniment in order to
satisfy our demand for harmony, that we never hear any unmixed melody
in set music, in order to see how completely harmony reigns in our
music, instead of bare melody. We may then broadly differentiate the
modern music which begins at the same time with modern science, from
all precedent music, as Harmony contrasted with Melody. To this we
must add the idea of instrumental harmony, of that vast extension of
harmonies rendered possible by the great development of orchestral
instruments whose compass greatly exceeds that of the human voice,
which formerly limited all musical energy.
It is tempting, here, to push the theory of personality into fanciful
extremes. You have seen how the long development of melody--melody
being here the individual--receives a great extension in the
polyphonic music, when individual melodies move along side by side
without jostling: and how at length the whole suddenly bursts into the
highest type of social development, where the melody is at once united
with the harmony in the most intimate way, yet never loses its
individuality; where the melody would seem to maintain towards the
harmony almost the ideal relation of our finite personality, to the
Infinite personality; at once autonomous as finite, and yet contained
in, and rapturously united with the infinite.
But without pressing the matter, it now seems clear from our sketch
that just as in the 17th century the spirit of man has opened up for
the first time a perfectly clear and personal relation with physical
nature and has thus achieved modern science with Sir Isaac Newton, so
in this 17th century, the spirit of man opens up a new relation to the
infinite, to the unknown, and achieves modern music in John Sebastian
Bach.
Nor need I waste time in defending this category in which I placed
music, as a relation to the Unknown. If you collect all the
expressions of poets and philosophers upon music, you will find them
converging upon this idea. No one will think Thomas Carlyle
sentimental; yet it is he who says "music which leads us to the verge
of the infinite, and lets us gaze on that."
And so finally, with the first English novel of Richardson in 1739-40,
we have completed our glance at the simultaneous birth of modern
science, modern music, and the modern novel.
And we are now prepared to carry forward our third and fourth lines of
thought together: which were to show the development of the novel from
the Greek Drama, and to illustrate the whole of the principles now
advanced, with some special studies of the modern novel. These two
lines will mutually support each other, and will emerge concurrently,
as we now go on to study the life and works of that George Eliot, who
has so recently solved the scientific problem which made her life one
of the most pathetic and instructive in human history.