18 WHAT IS AN OVATION? tents, and have cattle), and also of Tubal Cain, that instructor of every artificer in brass and iron "The harsh resounding trumpet's dreadful bray, With boisterous untuned drums." 66 Mr. Helps has this passage in his story of the Lake City of the age of flint: At the end of the day there was a sort of ovation in honour of Realmah, and he was accompanied home by a great crowd, and with loud noise of instruments of music which would not much have delighted our ears, but which were very pleasing to the Sheviri." One finds it hard to quote without a mild protest, in the case of so pleasing and accomplished a writer, a passage containing the words "a sort of ovation," remembering how that word ovation is used up and abused by penny-a-liners. The penny papers are, some of them, above misusing the poor word now. One of them, in a special correspondent's letter on the occasion of the reception of Prince Bismarck at Berlin after the great war of 1870-71, told us that the clerks of the Foreign Office gave the Count "a kind of 'ovation'" in the interior of their bureau, but immediately went on to remark that the word "ovation" has been sadly misused of late years by careless writers; whereas he claimed to have not misapplied it in connection with the welcome of Bismarck at the Foreign Office. "He is not the first German who has been 'ovated.' What said Kaiser Ludwig as he sat at supper after the great victory at Mühldorf-on-the-Inn, more than five hundred years ago . . . with the valiant Ritter Schweppermann, etc. The country had been eaten to the bone, and the conqueror and his captains had no better fare than bread and eggs for supper; whereat cried the Kaiser, 'Jedem Mann ein Ey; dem frommen Schweppermann zwei.' And surely the 'fromme' Schweppermann deserved his two eggs—and the 'fromme' Bismarck his to boot." The application may be a little strained, but at any rate the writer is aware that an egg PROGRESS OF MUSIC. 19 -when this Jubal, better known perhaps by name. to devout lovers of Handel than to cursory readers is a main ingredient in that once rare and dainty dish, an ovation. To revert, however, to ancient music. The Egyptians, we find, had a lyre with three strings; the early lyre of the Greeks had four, constituting their tetrachord, and in course of some centuries lyres of seven and eight strings were employed, until, by the expiration of a thousand years, they had advanced to their "great system" of the double octave, through all which changes there of course arose a greater heterogeneity of melody, though little in the time, as yet. Harmony was then unknown: the advance from melody to harmony was by a sudden leap, music in parts not being evolved until Christian church music had reached some development, when, the fugue having been suggested by the employment of two choirs singing alternately the same air, with whom it became the practice (very possibly originating in a mistake) for the second choir to begin before the first had ceased, "from the fugue to concerted music of two, three, four, and more parts, the transition was easy." Between the old monotonous dance-chant and an oratorio of our own day, with its endless orchestral complexities and vocal combinations, an essayist on the law and cause of Progress may well pronounce the contrast in heterogeneity to be so extreme that it seems scarcely credible that the one should have been the ancestor of the other. The clerical interlocutor in Gryll Grange, admitting that little is known of the music of the Greeks, but inferring the unknown from the known, has no doubt it was as excellent in its kind as their sculpture. Another demurs to that view, arguing that they seem to have had only the minor key, and to have known no more of counter-point than they did of perspective. A third demurs to their having only the minor 20 MUSIC OF THE GREEKS. of the Book of Genesis, attained the distinction of fatherhood of all such as handle the harp and key. The natural ascent of the voice, he remarks, is in the major key, and the Greeks, with their exquisite sensibility to sound, could not have missed the obvious expression of cheerfulness. "With their three scales, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, they must have exhausted every possible expression of feeling." With all that, objects Mr. Minim, they never got beyond melody; they had no harmony, in our sense; they sang only in unisons and octaves. His opponent, however, denies it to be clear that they did not sing in fifths. Mr. Grote claims a powerful ethical effect for the old Grecian music. It wrought much more movingly, he contends, on the impulses and resolutions of the hearers, though it tickled the ear less gratefully, than the scientific compositions of after-days. He shows each particular style of music to have had its own appropriate mental effect-the Phrygian mode imparting a wild and maddening stimulus; the Dorian mode creating a settled and deliberate resolution, exempt alike from the desponding and from the impetuous sentiments. "In the belief of all the ancient writers, every musical mode had its own peculiar emotional influences, powerfully modified the temper of hearers, and was intimately connected with the national worship."-Grote, History of Greece, vol. iii., pp. 288 seq.; cf. p. 297; vol. ii., 583 seq.; vol. viii., 477 seq. Lady Eastlake calls it difficult to imagine how a Greek child could ever evince its natural predilection for music— those two chief elements of the art which test the highest and the lowest grade of musical inclination, time and harmony, being alike unknown to them. They are believed to have never advanced even so far as the knowledge of those harmonious thirds which little Mozart, when but three years CHRISTIAN WEST AND PAGAN EAST. 21 organ. Father Smith, the organist, was forestalled even by name. 66 old, would strike on the clavicle, "and incline his little head, smiling to the harmony of the vibrations." They seem to have either used music outwardly, on this dissertator's showing, as a mere sing-song enhancement of that luxurious pleasure which all Orientals take in story-telling, or versereciting, or to have sought for it inwardly as an abstract thing on which to try their powers of thought, and not their springs of emotion; for they are credited with having ascertained the existence of a deep science in music before they suspected a deeper instinct; they studied her grammar before they knew her speech. Instead of combining her tones in fulness of harmony, they split them into divisions incognizable to our modern ears." M. Kiesewetter scouts the preconceived and deeply-rooted opinion that our present music has been perfected upon that of the Greeks, and that it is only a further continuation of the same. He refers to authors who, even in his own day, talk of “the revival of ancient music in the middle ages;" and, in refuting their view, while admitting that there was a period when the music of the Christian West sought counsel with that of the Heathen East, and when the decisions of Greek writers were looked upon as the source of all true musical inspiration, he maintains that, in point of fact, the later music only prospered in proportion as she disengaged herself from the earlier, and then first attained a certain degree of perfection when she had succeeded in throwing off the last fetters, real or conventional, of old Hellenic doctrine. Even had ancient Greece, he argues, continued to exist for two thousand years more, no music, in any way analogous to ours, could possibly have proceeded from her. "The systems in which the art was bound, the purposes for which she was used, the very laws of the State regarding her, offered unconquerable impediments to her 22 DORIAN AND GREGORIAN. "What passion cannot Music raise and quell? development. The old Greek music perished in its infancy, an interesting child, but one predestined never to arrive at maturity." And for the human race he pronounces her fall to have been no loss. It is certain, affirms the Quarterly essayist, that in the Isles of Greece, "where burning Sappho loved and sung," that which we now call music was so unknown, that were old Timotheus to rise from the dead, no change or development in modern civilization would astonish him so much as that in the art of music. "He would be delighted with our postoffice, interested in our railroads, ashamed of our oratory, horrified at our public buildings, but dumbfounded at our musical festivals." Haply, however, even old Timotheus redivivus would stand up for the melody of his native land. Thomson is strenuous to hail in Hellenic melody a melody indeed :— "The sweet enforcer of the poet's strain, Thine was the meaning music of the heart. The allusion here is, as commentators remind us, to the tones known as the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, etc., upon which St. Ambrose founded what are called the "authentic" ecclesiastical tones, the Gregorian, as finally settled in their present form, and set to the Psalms of David, by St. Gregory the Great. M. Jannsen, in his Vrais Principes du Chant Grégorien, says of St. Ambrose, "C'est en modifiant le système des tetrachordes grecs qu'il conserva leur quatre modes |