connection, we have the evidence furnished by the existence of similarly monotonous chants among boatmen and others in the East, and the history of the Greeks gives us still further evidence; the early poems of that race-sacred legends embodied in the rhythmic and metaphorical language of strong feeling-appear to have been chanted, not recited; and the cadences and tones became musical under the same influences that made the words poetic; but this chanting is believed by historic investigators to have been rather recitative than singing properly so-called, and a recitative much simpler than ours, judging from the fact that the early Greek lyre, played in unison with the voice, had but four strings, and thus confined the voice to four notes.* We have thus historic evidence of an early form of music, advanced as compared with the dance-chants, but far less removed from ordinary speech than the recitative that is the simplest part of our own music this is a valuable addition to the rationale of the matter as connected with industrial development; and in addition to this historic evidence there is other, of a class still observable, that recitative, the simplest form of civilised music, has been the natural outcome of strong feelings, similar to those that developed the dance-chants out of primitive poetic utterance. When a Quaker preacher addresses a meeting, which he only does under the influence of strong religious feeling, he usually speaks in tones quite different from ordinary speech, indeed, in a kind of subdued monotonous chant; and the intoning to be heard in many churches doubtless represents the same mental state, and came into use on account of its fitness to represent contrition, supplication, or reverence, although, in the present day, its connection with those feelings may be thought rather historical than actual.

Had we proposed to ourselves the great labour of discussing exhaustively the origin and respective functions of all the fine arts, we should have taken upon us a composite task to which there is good need that some competent hand should be set, and of which each division might well occupy a considerable essay. It would, in that event, have been needful to analyse the co-existence of sculpture in its noblest and most prolific epoch with the highly imaginative polytheism which the Greeks had developed, or had had developed for them by the

The music of the Greeks seems to have been mainly accessory to their poetry, and the superb perfection of their poetry fully accords with their inferiority to some other ancient nations in the matter of music.

The Two Earliest Arts.

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primitive Aryan stock, out of mere fetishism. It would have been also necessary to discuss the equally notable co-existence of the most exquisite epoch of architecture with Medieval Catholicism, and to trace how the decadence of the same Mediæval Catholicism became involved with that Renaissance wherein painting rose to its highest known eminence, to an eminence, indeed, which no other age of painting approached, with the isolated exception of the present age as represented by the single name of Turner (and that order of landscape art, which Turner emphatically is, cannot fairly be placed behind any order of art, be it what it may, in respect either of exaltation or of triumph over materials). The correlativity of the various great poetic or literary epochs with various states and phases of social existence would, in such a wide subject, be the widest division, and, at the same time, the most straightforward, because the same spontaneous connection with the emotional nature that brings this supreme art first into existence, maintains poetry of all arts in the first position as regards expression of national character, and, at an early stage of civilisation, is aided by the adaptability of poetry to the purposes of a high language of ideas, so that every great epoch must produce a great literature, whether posterity be or be not fortunate enough to inherit such product. But this correlativity, also, is of less importance to us just now than the formation of modern music in an age of restless energy and social embroilment, and among a people who are the speculative and solidly thoughtful nation par excellence, a phenomenon which we shall presently inspect more closely.

Concerning the absolute or remotest origin of poetry and music, no one can, of course, predicate much with certainty: only it is perfectly clear that as poetry is merely speech perfected, and comes to a recognisable state through the necessity of saying or uttering as perfectly as possible certain definite emotions that manifest themselves in the primitive brain, so, some of the vaguer emotional manifestations, for which mere speech seems inadequate, strive to utter themselves in the vaguer sounds that are the essence of music. And, inasmuch as the more definite emotions, and such states of mind as are the subject of ready intercommunication, demand emphatic expression sooner and more urgently than those vaguer emotions whereof a man is but half-conscious, we need not be surprised at barbarous poetry coming into existence earlier than barbarous music. But the extreme lateness of the highest and most complex form of music might well astonish

anyone who had only thought a little on the subject; while to us it seems, after considering the subject from time to time during several years, that the explanation is plain enough.

It would be impossible to conceive the great instrumental music of Germany taking its birth, for instance, among such institutions as existed without dispute in France under Louis XIV. The national life in France then, though compact and articulate, was not one of universal aspiration and brotherhood, but one in which the king and the nobility ruled absolutely as a matter of course, while the peasants and burgesses, equally as a matter of course, accepted the supremacy of the Court, and aspired to nothing beyond their birthrights (as birthrights were then conceived). To such a society the sense of fusion produced by powerful music on large bodies of people, and the soaring, unbounded aspirations that are expressed in the combinations and sequences of vague exquisite sounds, could have but little meaning or raison d'être; and this kind of society, the natural outcome and finale of the Feudal-Catholic régime, existed, not in France alone, but throughout Europe, taking its tone always more or less from France. But France, who had set, and still sets, so many fashions for the rest of the civilised world to follow, had in store a tremendous example in an opposite kind to that of the Louis XIV. order of things; and as we find a strict correspondence between that pre-revolutionary era and the courtly dramatic and other literatures that were its most articulate artistic outcome, so we trace a correspondence equally certain, if more vague, between the ideas and sentiments disseminated throughout Europe since the Revolution and the great development of music.

M. Taine has shown, with admirable vividness and vigour, in his Philosophie de l'Art, how the aristocratic order of things, so entirely unfit for the social medium of a great musical development, became transformed into the most fitting medium for such a development-how these absolute governments, perfect in their own way, became their own executioners, and broke up through simple definite achievement. We English, always less prone to complete bouleversements than our Latin neighbours, had readjusted the monarchic system to our requirements, when no longer disposed to tolerate the absolute monarchy that ended virtually at the execution of Charles I.; and before the French Revolution we had had time to settle into a tolerably definite social system more or less feudal and classified; but in France the final struggle of Absolutism came when there was so much more intellectual

Social Medium of Modern Music.

7

advance among the burghers-a so much more "long-accrued retribution" to be executed by oppressed and suddenly liberated savage natures, that France simultaneously rose and sank to a far more frightful and universal instruction, as to the power of the people, and their possibilities, than it had been the lot of England to give to the nations of Europe. The Government before the Revolution, being absolute, lapsed into negligence and tyranny; and the brilliant society of the Court, which it had long been the part of the people to admire simply, became the sole recipients of the good things dispensed by the Government. "This," as M. Taine observes with naïveté, "appeared unjust to the burgesses and the people," who, having largely developed in enlightenment, numbers, and wealth, found their power increasing in proportion with their discontent, until they "made the French Revolution," and, after ten years of unparalleled anarchy and sufferings, established a democratic and levelling régime, under which all employments are open to all persons, subject only to the qualifications of the individual and to fixed rules of ad

vancement.

The wars of the First Empire, aided by the force of example, gradually carried this order of things past the frontiers of France; and it is clear enough that, notwithstanding local differences and temporary delays, the whole of Europe in the present day steadily inclines to the new arrangement of society, which, together with the rapid invention of industrial machines and a considerable amelioration of manners and customs, has changed the average condition of men, and, consequently, their general character. Freed from arbitrary rule, and protected by efficient police, their material anxieties are lessened; and an enormously increased production of matters conducive to comfort and convenience puts within the reach of the poor many things that were formerly luxuries to the rich. However low a man's birth, almost any career is open to him; while the rigour of State control has relaxed, a parallel relaxation has taken place in family control; and, as the citizen has tended towards equality with the nobleman, the father has become the comrade of his children instead of the distant ruler of old times. The weight of oppression and unhappiness in the visible relations of life has, in short, been very perceptibly lightened. On the other hand, ambition and covetousness have increased frightfully in area: people experiencing more and more comfort, and seeing happiness more and more nearly within their reach, get to look upon comfort and happinessnay, wealth and position-as rights: the more they have the

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more they want; their pretensions outrun their acquisitions. At the same time, the immense development of positive science, and the spread of education, have not taken place without opening the door for bold inroads of free thought; and men are getting more and more apt to throw off the traditions that heretofore ruled their beliefs, and to strive, by the force of individual intellect alone, to attain to absolute truth. They have called in question to a startling extent the recognised formulas of religion, morality, and politics, and for nearly sixty years there has been an ever-growing tendency to try the various roads, proclaimed by various minds, as leading to complete happiness-the various social and "religious" systems offered for man's approval.

Such a state of things is not without the very gravest effects on the general mind, in modifying the currency of ideas: the ruling personage of such a drama, the person to whom the spectators accord most interest and sympathy, is the dreamy, melancholy man of inordinate ambition, whom we see embodied in Réné, in Faust, in Werther, in Manfred-the man of vague longing and incurable sadness. His incurable sadness arises partly from an inordinate sensibility, causing him to fret over small ills, to crave too eagerly sweet and delicious sensations. He is too much accustomed to comfort; he has not had the rough education of our ancestors, half-feudal, half-rustic; he has not been cuffed by his father, flogged at school, kept in respectful silence among great people, checked in his mental development by domestic discipline; he has not been used, as his ancestors were, to depend on his hands and his sword, to make journeys on horseback, or to lie uncomfortably; and in the sultry atmosphere of modern luxury and sedentary habits he has become delicate, nervous, excitable, and but little able to accommodate himself to any life exacting effort and imposing pain. Intellectually he is disposed more or less to scepticism: in the inrush of new doctrines and new views, shaking society from top to bottom, a precocious independence of judgment often sends him adrift in his youth, far away from the beaten track that his fathers habitually followed under the guidance of tradition and authority. His curiosity and his ambition, abnormally exacting, goad him forth on the search for absolute truth and infinite happiness: love, glory, science, power, as they exist in the world, will not satisfy him; and the intemperance of his desires, irritated by the insufficiency of his conquests and the emptiness of his enjoyments, leaves him dejected over the ruins of himself, while his imagination, overwrought, oppressed and powerless, can