224
XIX. ON THE LIVES AND ART PRINCIPLES OF SOME SEVENTEENTH
AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY COMPOSERS 236
XX. DECLAMATION IN MUSIC 254
XXI. SUGGESTION IN MUSIC 261

CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS

I

THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC

Darwin's theory that music had its origin "in the sounds
made by the half-human progenitors of man during the season
of courtship" seems for many reasons to be inadequate and
untenable. A much more plausible explanation, it seems to me, is
to be found in the theory of Theophrastus, in which the origin
of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.

When an animal utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses its
emotions in more or less definite tones; and at some remote
period of the earth's history all primeval mankind must have
expressed its emotions in much the same manner. When this
inarticulate speech developed into the use of certain sounds as
symbols for emotions--emotions that otherwise would have been
expressed by the natural sounds occasioned by them--then we have
the beginnings of speech as distinguished from music, which
is still the universal language. In other words, intellectual
development begins with articulate speech, leaving music for
the expression of the emotions.

To symbolize the sounds used to express emotion, if I may so
put it, is to weaken that expression, and it would naturally
be the strongest emotion that would first feel the inadequacy
of the new-found speech. Now what is mankind's strongest
emotion? Even in the nineteenth century Goethe could say, "'Tis
fear that constitutes the god-like in man." Certainly before
the Christian era the soul of mankind had its roots in fear.
In our superstition we were like children beneath a great tree
of which the upper part was as a vague and fascinating mystery,
but the roots holding it firmly to the ground were tangible,
palpable facts. We feared--we knew not what. Love was human,
all the other emotions were human; fear alone was indefinable.

The primeval savage, looking at the world subjectively, was
merely part of it. He might love, hate, threaten, kill, if he
willed; every other creature could do the same. But the wind
was a great spirit to him; lightning and thunder threatened him
as they did the rest of the world; the flood would destroy him
as ruthlessly as it tore the trees asunder. The elements wer