ne art was being
kept alive deep beneath the ashes of life in the hearts of the
oppressed common folk. They still sang as they felt; when the
mood was sad the song mirrored the sorrow; if it were gay the
song echoed it, despite the disputes of philosophers and the
commands of governments and religion. Montaigne, in speaking
of language, said with truth, "'Tis folly to attempt to fight
custom with theories." This folk song, to use a Germanism,
we can hardly take into account at the present moment, though
later we shall see that spark fanned into fire by Beethoven,
and carried by Richard Wagner as a flaming torch through the
very home of the gods, "Walhalla."

Let us go back to our dust heap. Words have been called
"decayed sentences," that is to say, every word was once a
small sentence complete in itself. This theory seems true
enough when we remember that mankind has three languages,
each complementing the other. For even now we say many words
in one, when that word is reinforced and completed by our
vocabulary of sounds and expression, which, in turn, has its
shadow, gesture. These shadow languages, which accompany
all our words, give to the latter vitality and raise them
from mere abstract symbols to living representatives of
the idea. Indeed, in certain languages, this auxiliary
expression even overshadows the spoken word. For instance,
in Chinese, the _theng_ or intonation of words is much more
important than the actual words themselves. Thus the third
intonation or _theng_, as it is called in the Pekin dialect,
is an upward inflection of the voice. A word with this upward
inflection would be unintelligible if given the fourth _theng_
or downward inflection. For instance, the word "kwai" with a
downward inflection means "honourable," but give it an upward
inflection "kwai" and it means "devil."

Just as a word was originally a sentence, so was a tone in
music something of a melody. One of the first things that
impresses us in studying examples of savage music is the
monotonic nature of the melodies; indeed some of the music
consists almost entirely of one oft-repeated sound. Those
who have heard this music say that the actual effect is not
one of a steady repetition of a single tone, but rather that
there seems to be an almost imperceptible rising and falling
of the voice. The primitive savage is unable to sing a tone
clearly and cleanly, the pitch invariably wavering. From
this almost imperceptible rising a