constitution, it is enough to say, that it is to it we are indirectly
indebted for the use of verbal language,--that power so peculiarly
_distinctive of man_, that, in the poetical phraseology of one
celebrated country, it gave him his name as a _divider of the voice_,
or, in other words, an utterer of articulate sounds. If we consider
speech simply as a medium of the reciprocal expression of present
feelings to the little society of citizens and friends of which we
are a part, even in this limited view, of what inestimable value does
it appear! To communicate to every one around us, in a single moment,
the happiness which we feel ourselves,--to express the want, which we
have full confidence, will be relieved as soon as it is known,--or to
have the still greater privilege of being ourselves the ministers of
comfort to wants, which otherwise could not have been relieved by us,
because they could not have been discovered,--when the heart which we
love is weighed down with imaginary grief, to have it in our power, by
a few simple sounds, to convert anguish itself into rapture,--these
are surely no slight advantages; and yet compared with the benefit
which it affords to man as an _intellectual_ being, even these are in
considerable. To be without language, spoken or written, is almost to
be without thought; and if, not an individual only, living among his
fellows whose light may be reflected upon him, but our whole race had
been so constituted, it is scarcely possible to conceive that beings,
whose instincts are so much less various and powerful than those of
the other animals, could have held over them that dominion, which they
now so easily exercise. Wherever two human beings, therefore, are
to be found, there language is. We must not think, in a speculative
comparison of this sort, of mere savage life; for the rudest savages
would be as much superior to a race of beings without speech, as
the most civilized nations at this moment are, compared with the
half-brutal wanderers of forests and deserts, whose ferocious ignorance
seems to know little more than how to destroy and be destroyed. Even
these are still associated in tribes, that concert together verbally
their schemes of havoc and defence; and employ, in deliberating on the
massacre of beings as little human as themselves, or the plunder of a
few huts, that seem to contain nothing but misery and the miserable,
the same glorious instrument with which Socrates brought wisdom down
from heaven to earth, and Newton made the heavens themselves, and all
the wonders which they contain, descend, as it were to be grasped and
measured by the feeble arm of man.
Such are the benefits of language, even in its fugitive state; but the
noblest of all the benefits which it confers, is in that permanent
transmission of thought, which gives to each individual the powers
and the wisdom of his species; or, rather,--for the united powers and
wisdom of his species, as they exist in myriads, at the same moment
with himself, upon the globe, would be comparatively a trifling
endowment,--it gives him the rich inheritance of the accumulated
acquisitions of all the multitudes, who, like himself, in every
preceding age, have inquired, and meditated, and patiently discovered,
or by the happy inspiration of genius, have found truths which they
scarcely sought, and penetrated, with the rapidity of a single glance,
those depths of nature, which the weak steps and dim torch-light of
generations after generations had vainly laboured to explore. By that
happy invention, which we owe indirectly to the ear, the boundaries of
time seem to be at once removed. Nothing is _past_; for every thing
lives, as it were, before us. The thoughts of beings who had trod the
most distant soil, in the most distant period, arise again in our mind,
with the same warmth and freshness as when they first awoke to life in
the bosom of their author. That system of perpetual transmigration,
which was but a fable, as believed by Pythagoras,--becomes reality when
it is applied, not to the _soul_ itself, but to its feelings. There
is then a _true metempsychosis_, by which the poet and the sage, in
spreading their conceptions and emotions from breast to breast, may be
said to extend their existence through an ever-changing immortality.
Who does not feel the justness of what Lucan says, when he speaks
of the events of Pharsalia, and predicts the lively feelings with
which they are afterwards to be regarded, not as past, and therefore
indifferent, but as present, and almost future:
“Hæc et apud seras gentes, populosque nepotum,
Sive sua tantum venient in secula fama,--
Sive aliquid magnis nostri quoque cura laboris
Nominibus prodesse potest,--cum bella legentur,
Spesque metusque simul, perituraque vota movebunt;
Attonitique omnes, veluti _venientia_ fata
Non _transmissa_ legent, et _adhuc_ tibi magni favebunt.”[77]
“There is without all doubt,” as has been justly observed, “a chain of
the thoughts of human kind, from the origin of the world down to the
moment at which we exist,--a chain not less universal than that of the
generation of every being that lives. Ages have exerted their influence
on ages; nations on nations; truths on errors; errors on truths.” In
conformity with this idea of the generation of thought, I may remark,
that we are in possession of opinions,--which, perhaps, regulate our
life in its most important moral concerns, or in all its intellectual
pursuits,--with respect to which, we are as ignorant of the original
authors, by whom they have been silently and imperceptibly transmitted
to us from mind to mind, as we are ignorant of those ancestors, on
whose existence in the thousands of years which preceded our entrance
into the world, our life itself has depended, and without whom,
therefore, _we_ should not have been.
The unlimited transmission of thought, which the invention of language
allows, brings the universe of _mind_ into that point of view, in
which an eloquent living French author has considered the _physical_
universe,--as exhibiting, at once, all its splendid varieties of
events, and uniting, as it were, in a single moment the wonders of
eternity. “Combine,” says he, “by your imagination, all the fairest
appearances of things. Suppose that you see, at once, all the hours
of the day, and all the seasons of the year,--a morning of spring
and of autumn,--a night brilliant with stars, and a night obscure
with clouds,--meadows, enamelled with flowers,--fields, waving with
harvest,--woods, heavy with the frosts of winter,--you will then have a
just notion of the spectacle of the universe. Is it not wondrous, that
while _you_ are admiring the sun, who is plunging beneath the vault of
the west, _another_ observer is beholding him as he quits the regions
of the east,--in the same instant reposing, weary, from the dust of the
evening, and awaking, fresh and youthful, in the dews of morn! there is
not a moment of the day, in which the same sun is not rising, shining
in his zenith, and setting on the world! or, rather, our senses abuse
us, and there is no rising, nor setting, nor zenith, nor east, nor
west; but all is one fixed point, at which every species of light is
beaming at once from the unalterable orb of day.”
In like manner,--If I may venture to consider the phenomena of the
mind in the same fanciful point of view,--every moment may be said
to be exhibiting the birth, and progress, and decay of thought.
Infancy, maturity, old age, death, are mingled, as it were, in one
universal scene. The opinions which are perishing in one mind, are
rising in another; and often, perhaps, at the last fading ray of the
flame of genius, that may have almost dazzled the world with excess
of brilliancy, some star may be kindling, which is to shine upon the
intellectual universe with equal light and glory:--[78]
“Flowers of the sky! ye, too, to age must yield,
Frail, as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush;
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush;
Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,
And Death, and Night, and Chaos, mingle all!
----Till, o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form;
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars, and shines,--another, and the same.”
Such are the benefits resulting from that happiest of all inventions,
which we may be said to owe to our sense of Hearing,--if, indeed, it be
an _invention_ of man, and not rather, as many have thought, a _coeval
power_, bestowed on him by his provident Creator at the very moment
which gave him life. But still, whether original or invented, the ear
must equally have been its primary recipient. We have seen, in the
view which we have taken of it, that of our more social intercourse
it constitutes the chief delight,--giving happiness to hours, the
wearying heaviness of which must otherwise have rendered existence
an insupportable burthen; and that, in its more important character,
as fixed, in the imperishable records which are transmitted, in
uninterrupted progression, from the generation which passes away to
the generation that succeeds, it gives to the individual _man_, the
product of all the creative energies of _mankind_; extending, even to
the humblest intellect, which can still mix itself with the illustrious
dead, that privilege, which has been poetically allotted to the
immortality of genius, of being “the citizen of every country, and the
contemporary of every age.”
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Gray de Principiis Cogitandi, Lib. I. v. 130-134.
[75] Gray on the Pleasure arising from Vicissitude, Stanza I.--In v. i.
the original has, instead of “in vain,” “now.”
[76] Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, c. iv. sect. 1.
[77] Pharsalia, lib. vii. v. 207--213.
[78] Darwin's Botanic Garden, Canto IV. v. 371--380.
LECTURE XXI.
ON HEARING--CONTINUED.
Gentlemen, after considering, in a former Lecture, some states of mind,
which arise immediately from affections of our nerves, and which,
therefore, I can see no reason for classing apart from our other
sensations, I proceeded, in my last Lecture, to consider the feelings,
which are more commonly termed sensations, beginning with the most
simple of these, in the order of _smell_, _taste_, and _hearing_.
In the elucidation of these, my great object was to show, that there is
nothing, in the mere states of mind, that constitutes the sensations of
fragrance, sweetness, sound, which could have led us to ascribe them to
corporeal objects as their causes,--more than in any of our internal
joys or sorrows,--if we had had no other means of acquiring knowledge
of those causes, than are afforded by the sensations themselves,--that,
in short, we consider them as sensations, or external affections of the
mind, because we have previously believed in an external world,--not
that we believe in an external world, merely because we have had those
particular sensations.
The various advantages, which these three senses afford, I endeavoured
to point out to you; and, in particular occupied a great part of my
Lecture, in illustrating the advantages for which we are indebted to
our organ of _hearing_, as the medium of _language_, and by it, more or
less directly, not of the high acquisitions of science and civilization
only, but of the rudest forms of social communication, and almost of
social existence.
After the remarks on this advantage received from _language_, which
is unquestionably, and beyond all comparison, the most inestimable
benefit which the sense of hearing affords,--it would be improper to
omit wholly the mention of the pleasure, which we receive from it, as
a source of _musical_ delight,--of that expression of feeling, which
itself, almost like verbal discourse, may be said to be a language,
since it is the utterance of thought and emotion from heart to
heart,--but which has a voice, as independent of the mere arbitrary
_forms of speech_, as the tears of gratitude, or the smiles of love,
that may indeed, give eloquence to _words_, but require no _words_ to
render _them_ eloquent. Though, when very strictly considered, even the
pure, and almost spiritual delight of music, may perhaps be counted
only a pleasure of sense, it yet approaches, by so many striking
analogies, to the nature of our intellectual enjoyments, that it may
almost be said to belong to that class; and though,--relatively to
minds that are capable of enjoyments more truly intellectual,--it is to
be considered as a mere pastime or relaxation, it assumes a far higher
character, in its relation to the general pleasures of common minds,
and may be said, at least, to be the _intellectual luxury_ of those,
who are incapable of any other luxury, that deserves so honourable a
name. And it is well, that there should be some intermediate pleasure
of this sort, to withdraw for a while the dull and the sensual, from
the grosser existence in which they may be sunk, and to give them some
glimpses, at least, of a state of purer enjoyment, than that which is
to be derived from the sordid gains, and sordid luxuries, of common
life.
Of the influence,--whether salutary or injurious,--which music has
upon the general character,--when cultivated, to great refinement,
and so universally as almost to become a part of the habit of daily
social life,--it is not, at present, the place to speak. But of its
_temporary_ influence, as a source of tranquillizing delight, there
can be no doubt,--nor, perhaps too, of its occasional efficacy, in
exciting emotions of a stronger kind, when peculiar circumstances may
have predisposed to them in a very high degree. But there can be as
little doubt, that by far the greater number of anecdotes of this kind,
which have been handed down in ancient history, are as fabulous, as the
existence of that _god of music_, to whose miraculous influence alone,
they could, with any decent appearance of epic or dramatic truth, have
been ascribed.
“Hear, how Timotheus' varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise;
While at each change, the son of Lybian Jove
Now burns with glory, and then melts with love,--
Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow,
Now, sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow;
Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found,
And the world's victor stood subdued--by sound!”[79]
On these lines, which allude to the celebrated ode of Dryden,--who
adapted, with most happy application, to the burning of the Persian
palace, an anecdote recorded of the power of Timotheus over the
same great warrior, on another occasion,--I may remark, by the way,
what influence the accidental composition of this ode has had, in
giving almost a sort of dignity to the very madness of the act which
it records. It is impossible for us,--even though we knew well how
fictitious is the circumstance attached to it,--not to look upon the
action, in a different light, from that in which we should have viewed
it, if we had read only the historical account of it, as originating in
a drunken debauch, at the instigation of a drunken prostitute.
Such is the influence of genius. Its power extends not over the present
and the future merely, but, in some measure, also over the past, which
might have seemed fixed forever. In spite of our conviction, we look
upon an action of Alexander differently, because an individual existed,
many centuries after him, and in a country which would then have been
justly counted barbarous, by the very barbarians whom he overcame.
“Ebrio scorto de tanta re ferente sententiam, unus et alter, et ipsi
mero onerati, assentiunt: Rex quoque fuit avidior quam patientior.
‘Quin igitur ulcisimur Græciam, et urbi faces subdimus?’ Omnes
incaluerant mero; itaque surgunt temulenti ad incendendam urbem, cui
armati, pepercerant.”[80]
Of the wonders, which were said, in ancient times, to have been
performed, on the mind and body, by a judicious adaptation of musical
sounds, to the nature of the particular case, intellectual, moral,
or corporeal, I might read many histories to you, from the original
authors, which would perhaps not be less truly ludicrous in the serious
gravity of their narration, than in the affected solemnity of the
fictitious personage whose speech I am about to quote. The experiment
with which the quotation closes is, it must be allowed, a very powerful
one, and certainly could not have been more successful, in the hands of
Timotheus himself.
“The bare mention of _music_ threw Cornelius into a passion. ‘How can
you dignify,’ quoth he, ‘this modern fiddling with the name of music?
Will any of your best hautboys encounter a wolf now-a-days with no
other arms but their instruments, as did that ancient piper Pythocaris?
Have ever wild boars, elephants, deer, dolphins, whales, or turbots,
shewed the least emotion at the most elaborate strains of your modern
scrapers, all which have been, as it were tamed and humanized by
ancient musicians? Whence proceeds the degenerancy of our morals? Is
it not from the loss of ancient music, by which (says Aristotle) they
taught all the virtues? Else might we turn Newgate into a college of
Dorian musicians, who should teach moral virtues to those people.
Whence comes it that our present diseases are so stubborn? whence is
it that I daily deplore my sciatical pains? Alas! because we have lost
their true cure, by the melody of the pipe. All this was well known
to the ancients, as Theophrastus assures us, (whence Cælius calls it
_loca dolentia decantare_) only indeed some small remains of this skill
are preserved in the cure of the Tarantula. Did not Pythagoras stop a
company of drunken bullies from storming a civil house, by changing
the strain of the pipe to the sober spondaeus? and yet your modern
musicians want art to defend their windows from common nickers. It is
well known that when the Lacedaemonian mob were up, they commonly sent
for a Lesbian musician to appease them, and they immediately grew calm
as soon as they heard Terpander sing: Yet I don't believe that the
Pope's whole band of music, though the best of this age, could keep his
holiness's image from being burnt on a fifth of November.’ ‘Nor would
Terpander himself,’ replied Albertus, ‘at Billingsgate, nor Timotheus
at Hockley in the Hole, have any manner of effect, nor both of them
together bring Horneck to common civility.’ ‘That's a gross mistake,’
said Cornelius, very warmly, ‘and to prove it so, I have here a small
lyra of my own, framed, strung, and tuned after the ancient manner.
I can play some fragments of Lesbian tunes, and I wish I were to try
them upon the most passionate creatures alive.’--‘You never had a
better opportunity,’ says Albertus, ‘for yonder are two apple-women
scolding, and just ready to uncoif one another.’ With that Cornelius,
undressed as he was, jumps out into his balcony, his lyra in hand,
in his slippers,--with a stocking upon his head, and waist-coat of
murrey-coloured satin upon his body: He touched his lyra with a very
unusual sort of an harpegiatura, nor were his hopes frustrated. The odd
equipage, the uncouth instrument, the strangeness of the man and of the
music, drew the ears and eyes of the whole mob that were got about the
two female champions, and at last of the combatants themselves. They
all approached the balcony, in as close attention as Orpheus's first
audience of cattle, or that of an Italian opera, when some favourite
air is just awakened. This sudden effect of his music encouraged him
mightily, and it was observed he never touched his lyre in such a truly
chromatic and enharmonic manner as upon that occasion. The mob laughed,
sung, jumped, danced, and used many odd gestures, all which he judged
to be caused by the various strains and modulations. ‘Mark,’ quoth he,
‘in this, the power of the Ionian, in that, you see the effect of the
Æolian.’ But in a little time they began to grow riotous, and threw
stones; Cornelius then withdrew. ‘Brother,’ said he, ‘do you observe I
have mixed unawares too much of the Phrygian? I might change it to the
Lydian, and soften their riotous tempers: But it is enough: learn from
this sample to speak with veneration of ancient music. If this lyre in
my unskilful hands can perform such wonders, what must it not have done
in those of a Timotheus or a Terpander?’ Having said this he retired
with the utmost exultation in himself, and contempt of his brother;
and, it is said, behaved that night with such unusual haughtiness to
his family, that they all had reason to wish for some ancient Tibicen
to calm his temper.”[81]
That, in enlightened countries, so many wonders should have been
related and credited,--if no phenomena that could justify them
were truly observed,--may perhaps on first reflection, appear so
unaccountable, as almost to induce belief of the wonders themselves,
as less inexplicable than the very credit which was given to them.
But it must be remembered, that, in all ages, and even in countries
of philosophers, there is a very large fund of credulity in
man,--which yields, very readily, to every thing that is not absolutely
impossible, and which is even not very nice, in estimating what is
impossible,--leaning always, whenever there is the slightest doubt
on this point, with a very favourable inclination to the side of the
_possibility_;--and, in the second place, that the phenomena of music
are precisely of a kind, which gives this credulity the widest scope.
They are pleasing in themselves, and of a kind therefore, on which it
is gratifying to the imagination to dwell--their influence on the mind
is felt in a very high and wonderful degree, even without any fabulous
addition;--they are produced by instruments, which seem, in their
sensible appearance, so little adequate to the production of them, that
the result is almost like the effect of supernatural agency, to which
we know not how to give any limits;--and, when a little mystery is once
admitted, the imagination, which has fairly got over the difficulty of
this first admission, is not very scrupulous afterwards as to degrees,
but is sufficiently ready of itself to admit a great deal more, without
pausing to consider its exact amount.