CHAPTER XII.

ARTS OF PLEASURE.

Poetry, 287—Verse and Metre, 288—Alliteration and Rhyme, 289—Poetic Metaphor, 289—Speech, Melody, Harmony, 290—Musical Instruments, 293—Dancing, 296—Drama, 298—Sculpture and Painting, 300—Ancient and Modern Art, 301—Games, 305.

To those who have not thought particularly about straightforward prose talk, and poetry which is set in metre and rhyme, and song which is chanted to a tune, it may seem that these are three clearly distinct things. But on careful examination it is found that they shade into one another, and it can be made out how human speech passed into all three states. Savage tribes have some set form in their chants, which shows they feel them different from common talk. Thus Australians, to work themselves into fury before a fight, will chant, “Spear his forehead!—Spear his breast!—Spear his liver!—Spear his heart!” and so on with the other parts of the enemy’s body. Another Australian chant is sung at native funerals, the young women taking the first line, the old women the second, and all together the third and fourth.

“Kardang garro “Young-brother again Mammul garro Son again Mela nadjo Hereafter I-shall Nunga broo.” See never.”

Here the words of the savage chant are no longer mere prose, but have passed into a rude kind of verse. All barbaric tribes hand down such songs by memory, and make new ones. The North American hunter has chants which will bring him on the bear’s track next morning, or give him victory over an enemy. The following is the translation of a New Zealand song:—

“Thy body is at Waitemata, But thy spirit came hither And aroused me from my sleep. _Chorus_—Ha-ah, ha-ah, ha-ah, ha!”

This last shows a feature extremely common in barbaric songs, the refrain of generally meaningless syllables. We moderns are often struck with the absurdity of the nonsense-chorus in many of our own songs, but the habit is one which seems to have been kept up from the stages of culture in which the Australian savage sings “Abang! abang!” over and over at the end of his verse, or a Red Indian hunting-party enjoy singing in chorus “Nyah eh wa! nyah eh wa!” to an accompaniment of rattles like those which children use with us.

It is among nations at a higher stage of culture that there appears regular metre, where the verses are measured accurately in syllables. The ancient hymns of the Veda are in regular metre, and this is proof how far the old Aryans had advanced beyond the savage state. Indeed the resemblances between the metre of the most ancient Indian and Persian and Greek poetry show that in the remote ages of their national connection their measured verse had already begun. Metre is best known to us from Greek and Latin verses, but there are more metres in the world than Horace knew of. For instance, when Longfellow versified a collection of American native tales in his “Song of Hiawatha,” he found no metre among the Indians themselves, who were not cultured enough to have such a device; so he imitated the peculiar metre of the Kalewala, the epic poem chanted by the native bards of Finland. Our own poetry, where the verses are scanned by accent, differs in its nature from the classic metres whose syllables are measured by quantity or length. Later than the invention of metre, came other means by which the poet could please his hearers with new effects of matched and balanced sounds. Thus our early English forefathers rejoiced in alliteration, where the same consonant comes in again and again, with a frequency which would weary our modern taste, though our ear is pleased with occasional touches of it, as

“Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad.”—SPENSER.

“He rushed into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell.”—BYRON.

Rhyme, too, seems comparatively modern in the world’s history of poetry. Its clumsy beginnings may be judged from such lines as these of an old Latin poet (perhaps Ennius) quoted by Cicero:—

“Cœlum nitescere, arbores frondescere, Vites lætificæ pampinis pubescere, Rami bacarum ubertate incurvescere.”

Thus the Christian hymns of the middle ages, such as the famous “Dies Iræ,” did not bring in rhyme as quite a novelty, but they used it skilfully and made it common, and it was taken up also by the Troubadours, the masters and teachers of Europe in the poetic art.

The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once pictures for the imagination and music for the ear. But besides this, it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic art lies in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. The modern poet still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense. This may be seen in analyzing a poem of Shelley’s:—

“How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother, Sleep! One, pale as yonder waning moon, With lips of lurid blue; The other, rosy as the morn When throned on ocean’s wave It blushes o’er the world.”

Here the likeness of death and sleep is expressed by the metaphor of calling them brothers, the moon is brought in to illustrate the notion of paleness, and the dawn of redness; while to convey the idea of the dawn shining over the sea the simile of its sitting on a throne is introduced, and its reddening is compared on the one hand to a rose, and on the other to blushing. Now this is the very way in which early barbaric man, not for poetic affectation, but simply to find the plainest words to convey his thoughts, would talk in metaphors taken from nature. Even our daily prose is full of words, now come down to ordinary use, which show vestiges of this old nature-poetry, and the etymologist may, if he will, set up again the pictures of the old poetic thoughts which made the words.

To read or recite poetry as we moderns do is to alter its proper nature, for the purpose of poetry was to be chanted. But this very chanting or singing grew out of talking. On listening carefully to the talk going on around us, we may observe that it does not run in an unchanged monotone, but that all sentences are intoned to an imperfect tune, a rise and fall of pitch marking the phrases, distinguishing question and answer, and touching emphatic words with a musical accent. This half-melody of common speech may be roughly written down in notes; it is not the same in English and German; and indeed one way in which a Scotchman’s talking is known from an Englishman’s is the different intoning of his phrases. When speech becomes solemn or impassioned, it passes more and more into natural chanting, which at devotional meetings may be heard nearly passing into distinct tune. The intoning in churches arose from the same natural utterance of religious feeling, but in course of time it became fixed by custom, and was forced into the regular intervals of the musical scale. So the artificial recitative of the opera is a modern musical working up of what has come down by tradition of the ancient tragic declamation, which once swayed the listening throng of the Greek theatre.

We are apt to take it as a matter of course that all music must be made up of notes in scale, and that scale the one we have been used to from childhood. But the chants of rude tribes, which perhaps best represent singing in its early stages, run in less fixed tones, so that it is difficult to write down their airs. The human voice is not bound to a scale of notes, for its pitch can glide up and down. Nor among nations who sing and play by musical scales are the tones of these scales always the same. The question how men were led to exact scales of tones is not easy to answer fully. But one of the simplest scales was forced upon their attention by that early musical instrument the trumpet, rude forms of which are seen in the long tubes of wood or bark blown by forest tribes in South America and Africa. A trumpet (a six feet length of iron gas-pipe will do) will sound the successive notes of the “common chord,” which may be written _c e g c_, on which the trumpeter performs the simple tunes known so well as trumpet-calls. This natural scale, perfect so far as it goes, contains the most important of musical intervals, the octave, fifth, fourth, and third. Another scale, of more notes than this, though of fewer than our full scale, is not less familiar to English ears. This is the old five-tone scale, without semitones, which can be played on the five black keys of the pianoforte, and the best-known form of which may be written _c, d, e, g, a, c_. Old Scotch airs are on the five-tone scale, which indeed may still be met with across the world, as where some traveller in China watching a funeral procession has been surprised to hear a melancholy dirge like what he last heard played by a piper on the shore of a Highland loch. Engel, in his _Music of Ancient Nations_, shows that music of this pentatonic or five-toned kind has belonged since early times to other Eastern nations, so that any genuine Scotch melody like “Auld Lang-syne” may give some idea of the music of antiquity. The more advanced seven-tone scale which prevails in the modern world is nearly taken from that of the musicians of classic Greece, who accompanied the singer’s voice on the eight-stringed lyre. Pythagoras, who first brought musical tones under arithmetical rule, had the curious fancy that the distances of the seven planets are related as the seven tones of the octave, an idea which still dimly survives among us in the phrase “music of the spheres.”

Modern music is thus plainly derived from ancient. But there has arisen in it a great new development. The music of the ancients scarcely went beyond melody. The voice might be accompanied by an instrument in unison or at an octave interval, but harmony as understood by modern musicians was as yet unknown. Its feeble beginnings may be traced in the middle ages, when musicians were struck by the effects got by singing two different tunes at once, when one formed a harmony to the other. It is still a joke among musicians to sing together in this old-fashioned way two absurdly incongruous tunes, for instance, “The Campbells are coming” and “The Vesper hymn,” so arranged that one makes a sort of accompaniment to the other. The old rounds and catches, still popular, thus make one part of the tune serve as a harmony for the other. The Roman church part-music, and the Protestant singing by the congregation, with the organ to accompany them, had great effect in making the change by which the mere melody of the ancients grew into the harmonized melody of the moderns. This great step once understood, the student can follow in the history of music its successive stages in part-singing and orchestral composition, in the church and the concert-room, till in the hands of the great composers of the last three centuries the full resources of modern musical art were developed.

The musical instruments of the present day may all be traced back to rude and early forms. The rattle and the drum are serious instruments among savages; the rattle has come down to a child’s toy with us, but the drum holds its own in peace and war. Above these monotonous instruments comes the trumpet, which, as has just been seen, brings barbaric music a long step further on. The pipe or flageolet appears in its simplest form in the common whistle, and is improved by holes, by which the player alters the length of the pipe so as to give several notes. From very remote times, and far and wide over the earth, the familiar pipe is found, played single or double, and sometimes blown with the nostril instead of the mouth. Already in the ancient world it was often provided with a skin wind-bag which made it into the bagpipe, or, held sideways and blown across the mouth-hole, it became the flute. Another way of bringing out a range of notes is seen in the Pan’s pipes, the row of reeds of different lengths, in old classic days associated with the grace of rural poetry, but now come down to sound the vulgar pipings of the street showman. In the modern orchestra, the cornet is a trumpet provided with stops. The clarionet is a development of the grass-stem with a vibrating slit or tongue such as children cut in the fields in spring. The whole class of musical instruments to which the harmonium belongs, work with these vibrating tongues, which by their name of “reeds” still keep up the memory of their origin. The organ carries out in the widest range and grandest proportions the principle of the simple pipe or whistle, so that there is scientific correctness in the disrespectful name of “kist o’ whistles” given it by the Scotch, who disliked its use in church. Not less primitive are the rudest forms in which stringed instruments appear. It is told in the _Odyssey_ (xxi. 410) how the avenging hero, when he has strung his mighty bow compact of wood and horn, gives the stretched string a twang that makes it sing like a swallow in a soft tone beautifully. One might well guess that the strung bow of the warrior would naturally become a musical instrument, but what is more, it really is so used. The Damara in South Africa finds pleasure in the faint tones heard by striking the tight bowstring with a little stick. The Zulu despises the bow as a cowardly weapon, but he still uses it for music; his music-bow, shown in Fig. 75 _a_, has a ring slid along the string to alter the note, and is also provided with a hollow gourd acting as a resonator or sounding-box to strengthen the feeble twang. Next, looking at _b_ in the figure, it is seen how the ancient Egyptian harp may have been developed from such a rude music-bow, the wooden back being now made hollow so as to be bow and resonator in one, while across it are strung several strings of different lengths. All ancient harps, Assyrian, Persian, even old Irish, were made on this plan, yet we can see at a glance that it was defective, the bending of the wooden back putting the strings out of tune. It was not till modern ages that the improvement was made of completing the harp with the front-pillar, as seen in _c_, which makes the whole frame rigid and firm. Looking at the three figures, it is seen how the course of invention was by gradual growth; the harp with the pillar could not have been first invented, for no men could have been so stupid as to go on making harps and leave out the front-pillar when once the idea of it had come into their minds. The harp, though now made more perfect than of old, is losing its ancient place in music; but the reason of this is easy to see, it has been supplanted by modern instruments which have come from it. The very form of a grand piano shows that it is a harp laid on one side in a case, and its strings not plucked with the fingers but struck with hammers worked from a keyboard. It is the latest development from the bowstring of the præhistoric warrior.

[Illustration: FIG. 75.—Development of the Harp, _a_, music-bow with gourd resonator (South Africa); _b_, ancient harp (Egypt); _c_, mediæval harp with front-pillar (England).]

Dancing may seem to us moderns a frivolous amusement; but in the infancy of civilization it was full of passionate and solemn meaning. Savages and barbarians dance their joy and sorrow, their love and rage, even their magic and religion. The forest Indians of Brazil, whose sluggish temper few other excitements can stir, rouse themselves at their moonlight gatherings, when, rattle in hand, they stamp in one-two-three time round the great earthen pot of intoxicating kawi-liquor; or men and women dance a rude courting dance, advancing in lines with a kind of primitive polka step; or the ferocious war-dance is performed by armed warriors in paint, marching in ranks hither and thither with a growling chant terrific to hear. We have enough of the savage left in us to feel how Australians leaping and yelling at a corrobboree by firelight in the forest can work themselves up into frenzy for next day’s fight. But with our civilized notions it is not so easy to understand that barbarians’ dancing may mean still more than this; it seems to them so real that they expect it to act on the world outside. Thus among the Mandan Indians, when the hunters failed to find the buffalos on which the tribe depended for food, every man brought out of his lodge the mask made of a buffalo’s head and horns, with the tail hanging down behind, which he kept for such an emergency, and they all set to dance buffalo. Ten or fifteen masked dancers at a time formed the ring, drumming and rattling, chanting and yelling; when one was tired out he went through the pantomime of being shot with bow and arrow, skinned, and cut up; while another, who stood ready with his buffalo-head on, took his place in the dance. So it would go on, without stopping day or night, sometimes for two or three weeks, till at last these persevering efforts to bring the buffalo succeeded, and a herd came in sight on the prairie. The description and sketch of the scene will be found in Catlin’s _North American Indians_. Such an example shows how, in the lower levels of culture, men dance to express their feelings and wishes. All this explains how in ancient religion dancing came to be one of the chief acts of worship. Religious processions went with song and dance to the Egyptian temples, and Plato said that all dancing ought to be thus an act of religion. In fact, it was so to a great extent in Greece, as where the Cretan chorus, moving in measured pace, sang hymns to Apollo, and in Rome, where the Salian priests sang and danced, beating their shields, along the streets at the yearly festival of Mars. Modern civilization, in which sacred music flourishes more than ever, has mostly cast off the sacred dance. To see this near its old state the traveller may visit the temples of India, or among the lamas of Tibet watch the mummers in animal masks dancing the demons out, or the new year in, to wild music of drums and shell-trumpets. Remnants of such ceremonies, come down from the religion of England before Christian times, are still sometimes to be seen in the dances of boys and girls round the Midsummer bonfire, or of the mummers at Yuletide; but even these are dying out. The dances of choristers in plumed hats and the dress of pages of Philip III.’s time, still performed before the high altar of Seville Cathedral, are now among the quaintest relics of a rite all but vanished from Christendom. Even sportive dancing, as a graceful exercise, is falling off in the modern world. The pictures from ancient Egypt show that the professional dancers were already skilful in their art, which perhaps reached its highest artistic pitch in classic Greece and Rome. Something of the old-fashioned picturesque village-dancing may still be seen at festivals in most countries of Europe except England, but the ball-room dances of modern society have lost much of the old art and grace.

At low levels in civilization it is clear that dancing and play-acting are one. The North American dog-dance and bear-dance are mimic performances with ludicrously faithful imitations of the creatures’ pawing and rolling and biting. So the scenes of hunting and war furnish barbarians with subjects for dances, as when the Gold Coast negroes have gone out to war, and their wives at home dance a fetish-dance in imitation of battle, to give their absent husbands strength and courage. Historians trace from the sacred dances of ancient Greece the dramatic art of the civilized world. Thus, in the festivals of the Dionysia, the wondrous life of the Wine-god was danced and sung, and from its solemn hymns and laughable jests arose tragedy and comedy. In the classic ages the player’s art divided into several branches. The pantomimes kept up the earliest form, where the dancer acted in dumb show such pieces as the labours of Herakles, or Kadmos sowing the dragon’s teeth, while the chorus below accompanied the play by singing the story; the modern pantomime ballets, which keep up remains of these ancient performances, show how grotesque the old stage gods and heroes must have looked in their painted masks. In Greek tragedy and comedy the business of the dancers and chorus was separated from that of the actors, who recited or chanted each his proper part in the dialogue, so that the player could now move his audience by words of passio