3 o8 THE HUMAN EXPRESSION 



met short of two hundred or more miles from where 

 we were spending the night in the settled country. 

 For this tinamu with a beautiful voice vanishes when 

 cattle and their masters come to eat down the tall 

 grasses and kill the birds for the pot. It is essentially 

 a bird of the desert pampas, on which account the 

 gaucho setting out for the frontier tells you he is 

 going to the plains "where the partridge sings." 



No more need be said on this subject of the value 

 that natural sounds and particularly bird voices have 

 for us as human beings. It is precisely this element, 

 the human expression, which gives its chief attraction 

 to instrumental music. Herbert Spencer was not 

 quite right in saying that all music is an idealisation 

 of human emotions. We have seen that music for 

 him was almost exclusively vocal music, or at all 

 events that he hardly touches on instrumental music 

 when dealing with this subject. There is instrumental 

 music devoid of expression that we cherish or tolerate 

 solely because it is an intrinsically pleasing sound and 

 tickles our hearing. And going back in time we find 

 that it is precisely the instruments of this character 

 which have successively lost their attraction and been 

 discarded. Nevertheless, the element of caprice and 

 fashion cannot be excluded. I cannot, for instance, 

 see any other reason for the retention of such an 

 instrument as the piccolo, which in solo-playing may 

 tickle even a modern's ear with its million fantastic 

 flourishes, as of a superior singing mouse or a squeal- 

 ing piglet of genius, but in orchestral music is dis- 

 tinctly offensive. Caprice, then, has served to retard 



