DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONAL 8PEECH. 225 



nearly allied to our recitative-; (far simpler indeed, if we 

 may judge from the fact that the early Greek lyre, which 

 had but foicr strings, was played in u?u'so?i with the voice, 

 which was therefore confined to four notes ; ) and as such, 

 much less remote from common speech than our own sing- 

 ing is. For recitative, or musical recitation, is in all res- 

 pects intermediate between speech and song. Its average 

 effects are not so loud as those of song. Its tones are less 

 sonorous in timbre than those of song. Commonly it di- 

 verges to a smaller extent from the middle notes — uses 

 notes neither so high nor so low in pitch. The intervals 

 habitual to it are neither so wide nor so varied. Its rate 

 of variation is not so rapid. And at the same time that its 

 primary rhythm is less decided, it has none of that second- 

 ary rhythm produced by recurrence of the same or parallel 

 musical phrases, which is one of the marked character- 

 istics of song. Thus, then, we may not only infer, from 

 the evidence furnished by existing barbarous tribes, that 

 the vocal music of pre-historic times was emotional speech 

 very slightly exalted ; but we see that the earliest vocal 

 music of which we have any account, differed much less 

 from emotional speech than does the vocal music of our 

 days. 



That recitative — ^beyond which, by the way, the Chinese 

 and Hindoos seem never to have advanced — grew naturally 

 out of the modulations and cadences of strong feehng, we 

 have indeed still current evidence. There are even now 

 to be met with occasions on which strong feeling vents 

 itself in this form. Whoever has been joresent when a 

 meeting of Quakers was addressed by one of their preach- 

 ers (whose practice it is to speak only under the influence 

 of religious emotion), must have been struck by the quite 

 unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in which the 

 address was made. It is clear, too, that the intoning used 

 m some churches, is representative of this same mental 

 10* 



