Such, in brief, was the physical and mental nature of the third human
species. In spite of innumerable distractions, the spirit of the Third
Men kept on returning to follow up the thread of biological interest
through a thousand variegated cultures. Again and again folk after folk
would clamber out of savagery and barbarism into relative enlightenment;
and mostly, though not always, the main theme of this enlightenment was
some special mood either of biological creativeness or of sadism, or of
both. To a man born into such a society, no dominant characteristic
would be apparent. He would be impressed rather by the many-sidedness of
human activities in his time. He would note a wealth of personal
intercourse, of social organization and industrial invention, of art and
speculation, all set in that universal matrix, the private struggle to
preserve or express the self. Yet the historian may often see in a
society, over and above this multifarious proliferation, some one
controlling theme.
Again and again, then, at intervals of a few thousand or a few hundred
thousand years, man’s whim was imposed upon the fauna and flora of the
earth, and at length directed to the task of remaking man himself. Again
and again, through a diversity of causes, the effort collapsed, and the
species sank once more into chaos. Sometimes indeed there was an
interlude of culture in some quite different key. Once, early in the
history of the species, and before its nature had become fixed, there
occurred a non-industrial civilization of a genuinely intellectual kind,
almost like that of Greece. Sometimes, but not often, the third human
species fooled itself into an extravagantly industrial world
civilization, in the manner of the Americanized First Men. In general
its interest was too much concerned with other matters to become
entangled with mechanical devices. But on three occasions at least it
succumbed. Of these civilizations one derived its main power from wind
and falling water, one from the tides, one from the earth’s internal
heat. The first, saved from the worst evils of industrialism by the
limitations of its power, lasted some hundred thousand years in barren
equilibrium, until it was destroyed by an obscure bacterium. The second
was fortunately brief; but its fifty thousand years of unbridled waste
of tidal energy was enough to interfere appreciably with the orbit of
the moon. This world-order collapsed at length in a series of industrial
wars. The third endured a quarter of a million years as a brilliantly
sane and efficient world organization. Throughout most of its existence
there was almost complete social harmony with scarcely as much internal
strife as occurs in a bee-hive. But once more civilization came at
length to grief, this time through the misguided effort to breed special
human types for specialized industrial pursuits.
Industrialism, however, was never more than a digression, a lengthy and
disastrous irrelevance in the life of this species. There were other
digressions. There were for instance cultures, enduring sometimes for
several thousand years, which were predominantly musical. This could
never have occurred among the First Men; but, as was said, the third
species was peculiarly developed in hearing, and in emotional
sensitivity to sound and rhythm. Consequently, just as the First Men at
their height were led into the wilderness by an irrational obsession
with mechanical contrivances, just as the Third Men themselves were many
times undone by their own interest in biological control, so, now and
again, it was their musical gift that hypnotized them.
Of these predominantly musical cultures the most remarkable was one in
which music and religion combined to form a tyranny no less rigid than
that of religion and science in the remote past. It is worth while to
dwell on one of these episodes for a few moments.
The Third Men were very subject to a craving for personal immortality.
Their lives were brief, their love of life intense. It seemed to them a
tragic flaw in the nature of existence that the melody of the individual
life must either fade into a dreary senility or be cut short, never to
be repeated. Now, music had a special significance for this race. So
intense was their experience of it, that they were ready to regard it as
in some manner the underlying reality of all things. In leisure hours,
snatched from a toilful and often tragic life, groups of peasants would
seek to conjure about them by song or pipe or viol a universe more
beautiful, more real, than that of daily labour. Concentrating their
sensitive hearing upon the inexhaustible diversity of tone and rhythm,
they would seem to themselves to be possessed by the living presence of
music, and to be transported thereby into a lovelier world. No wonder
they believed that every melody was a spirit, leading a life of its own
within the universe of music. No wonder they imagined that a symphony or
chorus was itself a single spirit inhering in all its members. No wonder
it seemed to them that when men and women listened to great music, the
barriers of their individuality were broken down, so that they became
one soul through communion with the music.
The prophet was born in a highland village where the native faith in
music was intense, though quite unformulated. In time he learnt to raise
his peasant audiences to the most extravagant joy and the most delicious
sorrow. Then at last he began to think, and to expound his thoughts with
the authority of a great bard. Easily he persuaded men that music was
the reality, and all else illusion, that the living spirit of the
universe was pure music, and that each individual animal and man, though
he had a body that must die and vanish for ever, had also a soul that
was music and eternal. A melody, he said, is the most fleeting of
things. It happens and ceases. The great silence devours it, and
seemingly annihilates it. Passage is essential to its being. Yet though
for a melody, to halt is to die a violent death, all music, the prophet
affirmed, has also eternal life. After silence it may occur again, with
all its freshness and aliveness. Time cannot age it; for its home is in
a country outside time. And that country, thus the young musician
earnestly preached, is also the homeland of every man and woman, nay of
every living thing that has any gift of music. Those who seek
immortality, must strive to waken their tranced souls into melody and
harmony. And according to their degree of musical originality and
proficiency will be their standing in the eternal life.
The doctrine, and the impassioned melodies of the prophet, spread like
fire. Instrumental and vocal music sounded from every pasture and corn
plot. The government tried to suppress it, partly because it was thought
to interfere with agricultural productivity, largely because its
passionate significance reverberated even in the hearts of courtly
ladies, and threatened to undo the refinement of centuries. Nay, the
social order itself began to crumble. For many began openly to declare
that what mattered was not aristocratic birth, nor even proficiency in
the time-honoured musical forms (so much prized by the leisured), but
the gift of spontaneous emotional expression in rhythm and harmony.
Persecution strengthened the new faith with a glorious company of
martyrs who, it was affirmed, sang triumphantly even in the flames.
One day the sacred monarch himself, hitherto a prisoner within the
conventions, declared half sincerely, half by policy, that he was
converted to his people’s faith. Bureaucracy gave place to an
enlightened dictatorship, the monarch assumed the title of Supreme
Melody, and the whole social order was refashioned, more to the taste of
the peasants. The subtle prince, backed by the crusading zeal of his
people, and favoured by the rapid spontaneous spread of the faith in all
lands, conquered the whole world, and founded the universal Church of
Harmony. The prophet himself, meanwhile, dismayed by his own too facile
success, had retired into the mountains to perfect his art under the
influence of their great quiet, or the music of wind, thunder, and
waterfall. Presently, however, the silence of the fells was shattered by
the blare of military bands and ecclesiastical choirs, which the emperor
had sent to salute him and conduct him to the metropolis. He was
secured, though not without a scrimmage, and lodged in the High Temple
of Music. There he was kept a prisoner, dubbed God’s Big Noise, and used
by the world-government as an oracle needing interpretation. In a few
years the official music of the temple, and of deputations from all over
the world, drove him into raving madness; in which state he was the more
useful to the authorities.
Thus was founded the Holy Empire of Music, which gave order and purpose
to the species for a thousand years. The sayings of the prophet,
interpreted by a series of able rulers, became the foundation of a great
system of law which gradually supplanted all local codes by virtue of
its divine authority. Its root was madness; but its final expression was
intricate commonsense, decorated with harmless and precious flowers of
folly. Throughout, the individual was wisely, but tacitly, regarded as a
biological organism having definite needs or rights and definite social
obligations; but the language in which this principle was expressed and
elaborated was a jargon based on the fiction that every human being was
a melody, demanding completion within a greater musical theme of
society.
Toward the close of this millennium of order a schism occurred among the
devout. A new and fervent sect declared that the true spirit of the
musical religion had been stifled by ecclesiasticism. The founder of the
religion had preached salvation by individual musical experience, by an
intensely emotional communion with the Divine Music. But little by
little, so it was said, the church had lost sight of this central truth,
and had substituted a barren interest in the objective forms and
principles of melody and counterpoint. Salvation, in the official view,
was not to be had by subjective experience, but by keeping the rules of
an obscure musical technique. And what was this technique? Instead of
making the social order a practical expression of the divine law of
music, churchmen and statesmen had misinterpreted these divine laws to
suit mere social convenience, until the true spirit of music had been
lost. Meanwhile on the other side a counter-revival took place. The
self-centred and soul-saving mood of the rebels was ridiculed. Men were
urged to care rather for the divine and exquisitely ordered forms of
music itself than for their own emotion.
It was amongst the rebel peoples that the biological interest of the
race, hitherto subordinate, came into its own. Mating, at least among
the more devout sort of women, began to be influenced by the desire to
have children who should be of outstanding musical brilliance and
sensitivity. Biological sciences were rudimentary, but the general
principle of selective breeding was known. Within a century this policy
of breeding for music, or breeding ‘soul’, developed from a private
idiosyncrasy into a racial obsession. It was so far successful that
after a while a new type became common, and thrived upon the approbation
and devotion of ordinary persons. These new beings were indeed
extravagantly sensitive to music, so much so that the song of a skylark
caused them serious torture by its banality, and in response to any
human music of the kind which they approved, they invariably fell into a
trance. Under the stimulus of music which was not to their taste they
were apt to run amok and murder the performers.
We need not pause to trace the stages by which an infatuated race
gradually submitted itself to the whims of these creatures of human
folly, until for a brief period they became the tyrannical ruling caste
of a musical theocracy. Nor need we observe how they reduced society to
chaos; and how at length an age of confusion and murder brought mankind
once more to its senses, but also into so bitter a disillusionment that
the effort to re-orientate the whole direction of its endeavour lacked
determination. Civilization fell to pieces and was not rebuilt till
after the race had lain fallow for some thousands of years.
So ended perhaps the most pathetic of racial delusions. Born of a
genuine and potent aesthetic experience, it retained a certain crazy
nobility even to the end.
Many scores of other cultures occurred, separated often by long ages of
barbarism, but they must be ignored in this brief chronicle. The great
majority of them were mainly biological in spirit. Thus one was
dominated by an obsessive interest in flight, and therefore in birds,
another by the concept of metabolism, several by sexual creativity, and
very many by some general but mostly unenlightened policy of eugenics.
All these we must pass over, so that we may descend to watch the
greatest of all the races of the third species torture itself into a new
form.