mentary lines, since they never exceed very simple
and obvious rhythmic proportions and the most common chords of the key.

Recent investigations of the music of barbarous and half-civilized
tribes show that the attainment of symmetry in the folk-song is a
somewhat late experience. In many of the songs of the American
Indians, for example, the first phrase moves practically along the
track of the common chord; the second phrase frequently repeats the
first, and in some instances the repetition goes on indefinitely
without any answer or conclusion. In other cases a second phrase
follows along the track of a closely related chord, but I have never
noticed a case in which a third phrase appeared, corresponding to the
first, after a digression of the second phrase into another chord.
Generally the rhythm runs out with a series of what might be called
inarticulate drum-beats, as if an impulse existed still unsatisfied,
blindly making itself felt in these insignificant pulsations; an
impulse which a finer melodic sense would have satisfied by the proper
antithesis in relation to the first phrase, thus leaving the melody and
the rhythm to complete themselves together, as always takes place in
civilized music.

The art of music seems to be an evolution from the sense of number and
the feeling for the common chord, combined with a certain fondness for
reverie, which in the earlier stages of the art was perhaps
semi-religious in character, and in the later stages is more nearly
related to the dance, until finally, in the highest stage, it is a
reverie of the beautiful or the pathetic, pure and simple. The
existence of the harmonic sense in rude natures, where music has not
been heard, seems very difficult to account for, since, while it is
true that any resonant tone contains the partial tones constituting the
common chord, a resonant tone is very seldom heard among rude
surroundings; and the discovery of the instinct of barbarous melodies
to work themselves along the track of the chord is one of those
unexpected finds of modern investigation which, while at first seeming
to explain many things, are themselves excessively difficult to account
for.

In a sense, there is no difference in kind between the folk-song and
the most complete and highly organized art-music; that is to say, both
alike are primarily due to the operation of simple musical instincts
working off along the track of rhythmic proportion and harmonic
relati