380 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the classic models of antiquity in all the other arts. To this day, 

 music has, in a technical sense, remained free from all admixture with 

 relics of the dead past ; and, although some of these may be hereafter 

 discovered, it is doubtful if they would prove more than merely inter- 

 esting to those thinkers who are ever desirous of enlarging their con- 

 ceptions of the art by studying that of other peoples. 



Such specimens could hardly have any vital power, however high- 

 ly they might be prized, being too foreign to the experiences and 

 requirements of our age to find willing ears. And this not because 

 sympathy with the emotions expressed would not be accorded, or that 

 the few sounds of the lyre would not prove sensuously agreeable, but 

 because the structure of the music, in the third sense mentioned above, 

 would prove so strange.* 



We can not here define the Greek scales, nor contrast Occidental 

 music with Oriental, Gothic cathedrals with Grecian temples, dramas 

 of Shakespeare or Kalidisa with those of Sojxhocles, as regards relative 

 complexity and simplicity, but must proceed to point out that as civili- 

 zation arose in the West, music at least kept pace with it, if it was 

 not greatly in advance of the intellect of the time, as it is now, when 

 even Beethoven's latest quartets remain as sealed books. It has been 

 noted that it was an important factor in the general Western illumi- 

 nation, and was most truly of it, while the other arts were represented 

 by specimens that were in it but not entirely of it. These arts of 

 visible representation of known things requiring less mental power 

 than the invention of new forms that have no counterparts in nature or 

 geometry, it does not appear strange that, while painting, sculpture, and 

 architecture attained highest perfection long ago, music continues to 

 make rapid advances in several directions, to open new schools, to pass 

 through various phases now being developed in one direction, now in 

 another that this art is expected to reveal hitherto unknown possi- 

 bilities in the future. We have already grown beyond the deification 

 of the bodily man, and seek the mystic inner soul. This makes the 

 art of music so greatly in requisition. Our successors may go deeper 

 still, and altogether cease to make reproductions of tangible things. 



The relation of musical art to literature and general progress may 

 be seen illustrated in the recent history of Germany. After the Thirty 

 Tears' War, which reduced her to material, mental, and moral poverty, 

 she began to establish the Protestant religion, and to try to form into 

 one coherent state a number of small principalities. Her literature 

 was the expression of the national spirit, and yet helped to form this 

 spirit. Luther invented the Choral, which remains to this day, not 

 only the song of the Church, but the national song of the whole united 

 people, their political song, their war-song, and one of the mightiest 

 engines for developing in the minds and hearts of the people the sen- 



* See article on " Oriental Music," vol. xviii, p. 241, in " The Popular Science 

 Monthly." 



