42 THOUGHTS UPON THE MUSICAL SENSE [X. 



Let us however consider the converse question \—Is it the 

 case that highly developed music must appear when high musical 

 talent exists? Let us suppose for instance that a child 

 endowed with the talent of a Mozart were born among some 

 savage nation such as the Samoans before they were influenced 

 b}^ European civilization. Would such a child, after reaching 

 maturity, compose stringed quartettes and symphonies ? 

 Certainly not. If the Samoans possessed the songs which 

 they have to-day, our aboriginal Mozart must soon have known 

 them all by heart and would have composed new ones. 

 Perhaps, being such a unique genius, he might have produced 

 a great musical reform, introducing changes of a revolutionary 

 character and raising Samoan music to a higher stage. But he 

 would not have raised it to the modern symphony. In order 

 to attain such a height he would have been obhged first to 

 invent the musical notation, and then, rising higher, to pass 

 through polyphonic music, until at last he reached the com- 

 mencements of that harmonized music to which symphony 

 belongs. The greatest change that he could have introduced 

 would have been an extension of the scale from three or four 

 whole tones to seven, and in association with this, the composi- 

 tion of more elaborately constructed melodies, or at the utmost 

 the invention of music in two parts, which is known to have 

 taken place comparatively recently, viz. in the times of the 

 Troubadours. 



It would have been as impossible for the Samoan Mozart to 

 compose symphonies as for one of the great men of science of 

 ancient Greece, such as Archimedes, to invent the modern 

 dynamo as used for the transmission of energy or for electric 

 lighting. To be enabled to construct such a machine, he 

 would have had to work his way through more inventions and 

 discoveries than could have been made during the life-time of 

 the greatest genius who has ever lived. For in ancient times 

 nothing was known of electricity except that amber (electron) 

 when rubbed attracted little pieces of paper. Before a man 

 could arrive at the knowledge by which he could construct a 

 fixed electro-magnet in such a manner as to produce currents 

 in a rotating coil, many other discoveries in physics had first 

 to be made, the investigations of Gray, Dufay, Kleist, Franklin, 

 and others were necessary, Galvani and Volta had to discover 



