In the Land of Myth.
THE PURSUIT OF THE GODS.
In the land of Myth there occur many landmarks that project their
shadows into dim distances, telling with no uncertain indications that
the land of Fact is a much more extensive region, that it environs both
the land of myth and the land of tradition that borders it, and yields
to the explorer many evidences much earlier in racial history, when as
yet the mind of man had not imagined
“the fair humanities of old religion.”
In the pursuit of the gods we have to look back far beyond the age
whence the gods emerged. Like the rivers that come to our feet at full
flood so are these very human gods, they represent men in the fulness
of power, and disclose not the long course, the broad expanse of time,
the toilsome difficulties, through which that power has been attained.
The Greeks attributed to Apollo the invention of the lyre, the
eight-stringed lyre a completed and perfect instrument of music. In
the British Museum there is a magnificent marble statue of Apollo,
and in his hand the sculptor has fashioned a lyre of noblest pattern,
such as his fellow worshippers believed the god had designed and
given to them. We, of later days, well know that so accurate a leap
to perfection does not accord with human experience, and moreover are
able to trace the stages by which in the course of centuries the lyre
had arrived at that complete condition. So by the help of the Greeks
themselves, by their literary records, by their representations in
sculpture and in paintings, I hope that we shall be able to recognise
the process by which men worked in their own day of life from
generation to generation for the accomplishment of their aims in the
art and pleasure of music.
The great god Pan, beloved of the Greeks, and more widely worshipped
to-day under another name, gave men the little river reed to make their
music with, and marvellously has the gift flourished; the simple tiny
pipe, growing with the growth of centuries, has become a pipe speaking
with the voice of Jove, has reared itself upward until its heighth
would make it fit to stand beside the hand of the great Phidian statue
of the Olympian god. Simple as a Pan’s pipe is the great diapason that
reaches upward to the vaulted roofs of our temples. Not more impossible
to the mind of the ancient Greek the conception of the thing of music
we call an organ, than is to us the realization of the faith in those
divinities of mountains, woods, and streams, of those early dwellers
in a green world. Yet how we linger over the legends of the past, and
almost wish we could believe they once were true. Alas, in our well
worn world, fancy is a poor exchange for faith. The legend of Pan
reads how a nymph, Syrinx by name, whom Pan was pursuing, prayed the
Naiades (the nymphs of the water) to change her into a bundle of reeds,
just as Pan was laying hold of her, who therefore caught the reeds in
his hands instead of the desired nymph. The winds moving these reeds to
and fro caused mournful but musical sounds, which Pan perceiving he cut
them down, and made of them the pipes first known as the Syrinx, and
afterwards called by his name,—
“The pipe of Pan to shepherds
Couched in the shadow of Menalian pines
Was passing sweet.”
[Illustration: _Fig. 2. Ancient Greek players on Flute and Pan’s
pipes._]
The Pan’s pipes as a musical instrument made its mark in history; in
almost every land in some form or other it has existed as a popular
instrument, and therefore a source of pleasure. Varied in form, and
with pipes few or many, it is found on ancient sculptures and in
paintings. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America show specimens of the
instrument ancient, and often modern; for the use survives among some
people not yet spoilt by premature civilization. The British Museum
possesses a very peculiar specimen made of stone, which was found
in Central America. Another, of which there is a cast in the Berlin
Museum, was discovered placed over a corpse in a Peruvian tomb; it was
made of a greenish stone, a kind of talc, and had eight pipes which
gave their notes as in ancient days.
[Illustration: _Fig. 3._
_Ancient Peruvian Stone Syrinx._]
The British Museum possesses an interesting relic from a tomb at Arica;
this Peruvian _huaraya puhura_ consists of fourteen reed pipes of a
brownish colour tied together in two rows, so as to form a double set
of seven reeds; both sets are of the same dimensions and are placed
side by side, one set being open at the bottom, and the other set
being closed, consequently capable of producing octaves to the open
set; a remarkable feature therefore is the presence of the open set,
indicating a clear perception of the musical relations of the two
distinct forms used.
The Chinese also have their example in the instrument they call “The
Outspread Phœnix” or the sacred bird, to them the outward symbol of
some myth that had credence from immemorial times.
[Illustration: _Fig. 4._
_Peruvian Pan’s Pipes, Double Set._
_From a Tomb in Arica._]
Whether there has been a migration of races and heritage of
primitive invention, or whether with each people the Pan’s pipes had
spontaneously originated, is a problem upon which curiosity cannot
fail to be awakened when it is noticed how these instruments, almost
identical in make and shape, are found all over the world (_see
forward_ “_In the Land of China_.”)
The Chinese instrument is an assemblage of pipes of various lengths
from which musical tones of different pitches are produced,—it is a
mouth organ. Our modern organ is likewise an assemblage of pipes, and
differs only from it in respect of number and degree. Perhaps the
blowing across the open end of a pipes was the earliest mechanical
way of producing a flute sound. The little river reed pipe of Pan is
therefore selected as the type of all flutes; the principle is the same
whatever the variation in method of sounding.
Yet the appearance of Pan marks only one stage in the land of myth, and
that only just within the confines near where the border lines of myth
and history meet. For many thousand years beyond this the imagination
must travel to reach the earliest sources of music. The complete set
of seven pipes claimed by Pan was not the work of a summer’s day, the
scale as seven sounds was not the witchery of a nymph’s voice happily
remembered by a forest God; no, we may be sure the course of life was
more prosaic than that, and the seven-toned instrument had, as a seven
branched river, its beginning from one,—one pipe, ages, it may be,
earlier than the seven.
What do I make of it? Clearly this,—man IS a measuring animal. Like
other animals he calculates, forecasts and provides, but he alone
possesses the measuring faculty. Rambling again and again through the
region of the past, the thought presses forward for recognition that
man is a measuring animal, and hence his ability to produce instruments
of music. In the beginning they were all founded upon measure, the rude
measure of what suited the fingers; and the habit of so marking off
spaces, as time went on, recorded itself in a system, at first simple
as a child’s wit could compass, and afterwards so growing in complexity
as to tax the ingenuity of the most active brains of full-grown
civilized men to master and utilize, and yet at the last nothing more
than a system of finger activity for the covering of holes and the
touching of strings. Thus your musical scales arose. Had Polyphemus had
the ordering of a musical scale, most surely the intervals would have
been considerably larger; he would have suited his own fingers whether
with lengths of strings or with holes in pipes.
Imagine yourself a prehistoric man. How would you set about whistling?
The lips are in the control of the imitative faculty; the effect called
whistling would naturally be first elicited by accident of emotion, or
sensibility of one kind or other. The intent to whistle would arise in
desire to imitate; a chance whistle heard from a shell or hollow nut
or reed would attract attention as for imitation. To imitate, is, as
we know, a propensity of monkeydom. How the human animal shares this
propensity as a characteristic of his race, and how society is based
most differentially upon it,—is not that also taught and recognized in
philosophy?
Beyond the faculty of imitation man possesses that of measuring; he
measures and apportions in his buildings and his bakings: inches and
acres bear relation to each other; he marks off spans and cubits and
inches, and apportions minutely by millet-seeds and barley-corns.
For in earliest times simplest means and methods were as arbitrary
as are now our elaborated mechanisms. It is a truism that music is
ruled by measure, but what I want you to perceive is quite a different
interpretation, and that is that it was the _measuring that ordered the
music_.
Those who, seeing the holes that are cut upon a common flute, or
oboe, consider that in the origin of the instrument they were so done
in order fitly to comport with a musical scale, are wrong in their
supposition.
In the primitive making of a flute the holes were cut to suit the
spread of the fingers, and the scales which followed as the result of
the placing the holes, were accepted by primitive man; the ear got to
like the sequence of sounds, and it so worked into the brain of the
race, that ages after, it became an intellectually accepted musical
scale, or relation of notes and was varied by evolution; the structure
of the organ of hearing is the same in every race, so far as we can
ascertain, and the same natural laws are obeyed in its exercise.
Different races, however, have developed the hearing ear differently
as to its choice, because primitively, in the setting out of their
instruments there were differences of relation. The lengths of the
strings, and the distances of the holes spaced for the _convenience
of the fingers_, ordained the musical scales. Contrast the music of
the European and the Asiatic races. Our so-called divine music is to
the Chinese miserable, unscientific stuff; and the sounds which please
Asiatics as entrancing music, are to us distracting din, positively
painful to listen to. The liking of the ear in music is a liking by
inheritance, transmitted as a facial type is.
The fingers are the fates of the musical art. Curiously enough, six
fingers have been the chief arbiters of the nature of man’s music; and
yet how long it was before that number was brought into use. Earliest
pipe instruments seem to have employed only two fingers; then the thumb
was made available, after that the third finger, and at last the little
finger was brought into service; it was, however, the period of the
ruling of the six fingers, three of each hand, in which the scales were
laid, and the art of music developed. In the stringed instruments there
is evidence of similar advance from one string to many. Men learnt
slowly the marvellous capacities of the lissome fingers they possess.
We should see a meaning and a purpose in each change and variation in
the shape and adaptation of instruments. It may strike you somewhat
strangely that you should be set thinking of bits of wood, and pipes
and strings, as being aforetime the actual music makers, moulding in
fixed forms our musical tendencies. You fancy they are our servants,
unaware that they have ruled us earlier than we have ruled them.
My conclusion, curious as it may seem, is put forth seriously, after
much study and after long inquisitive looking into things, possibly
worth thinking about. Very lately I found a pertinent yet undesigned
confirmation of my views in a work by Dr. A. J. Ellis on the “Musical
Scales of Various Nations.” As a result of his extensive investigation,
he says “The final conclusion is, that the musical scale is not
one, not ‘natural,’ nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the
constitution of musical sound, but very diverse, very artificial, very
captious.” He has actually, as it were, caught the scale in the act of
changing by a caprice at the bidding of the finger. On the lute, in the
very early Persian and Arabic scales, the middle finger had nothing to
do, and to find employment for the lazy finger, a ligature was, on the
neck of the lute, tied half way between two existing notes. One Zalzal,
a celebrated lutist, who died eleven centuries ago, tied this ligature
half way, and so added two notes to the scale. “These notes,” Dr.
Ellis says, “became of great importance in Arab music, and effectually
distinguished the older Arabic form from the later Greek.”
For the coherence of the views I express upon this question, it is
to be implied that pipes and reeds have had an earlier development at
the hands of man than strings had, although the latter furnished the
first tangible means by which musical ratios were demonstrated by Greek
philosophers. In China the first standards of sounds were pipes, and by
them the degrees of the scale were fixed historically, yet too complete
to have had their real origin elsewhere than in the land of Myth. There
also must be placed the origin of the beautiful little “Sheng” to which
the Chinese attribute an unknown antiquity.
The term flutes, it is necessary to remember, is in ancient usage of
literature applied to include all pipes blown across and likewise those
sounded by means of reeds that the breath sets vibrating.
All the world over men have found delight in fluting, and the flute
as an instrument appears to be the common property of the human race.
Either of bones of animals or birds, of reeds or alders, of stones or
of clay, the art of man has fashioned flutes from the beginning of
time’s records.
Seeking to trace man’s earliest musical instruments it will become
plain to us that life moves very slowly. How little is really new;
variation follows variation. See what a long process thought is. It
takes a whole race many centuries to think a new thought, and embody it.
The Greeks as themselves acknowledged were indebted to the Egyptians
for their chief instruments. The invention of the flute is attributed
to the god Osiris, who lived when the world was young—ages ago; Osiris,
the dead god of the blue river, the ancestor of history, the river
known to all our race as oldest of rivers. When our thoughts dwell
upon “old Nile,” how memory-haunting are the lines in which Leigh Hunt
describes it;—read softly,
It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands
Like some grave thought threading a mighty dream.
[Illustration]