The depth of pitch may seem cause for surprise when we remember that our flutes of the present day that are nearest in length of tube to this Greek instrument do not reach by an octave this extreme low compass. The difference arises through the means of excitation for producing sound from a cylindrical pipe; this therefore is a reed blown, not a lip blown, flute, and properly belongs to the clarionet species. In pitch, it descends lower than our A clarionet, and we have to modify the conclusion generally held that the Greeks only used instruments of high range of tones.

Now, taking up the remaining three of these four flutes which were found together in one mansion, on which was written the name, “Caio Vibio” (as was seen on the day of their discovery, December 10th, 1867), we notice that they also had their lowest note B in the 8-foot octave. The reeds were placed at the top of the instruments, not branching out aslant as indicated in the specimens illustrated, earlier, (page 96), of this particular construction; and the instrument was held in position like our clarionet, only lifted more to the horizontal probably, for on this point we have not, that I am aware of, any ancient representation. No. 2 has twelve notes, there being one note interposed which is not found in No. 1. It is F[n]; but the extent of compass is the same, whilst the closed holes are 4 and 7:—

In No. 3 we find other differences, and this peculiarity, that the second and fifth sections are not pierced with holes, so that practically the corresponding notes were permanently closed—there is no note between B and C♯, no note between D and E. Observe that the first note in each is marked (0), for this is the note from the open end of the pipe when all finger holes are closed:—

In No. 4 we find other distinctions and an extended range:—

I have had further correspondence with M. Mahillon, and he out of his abundant courtesy has added to my obligations to him, by sending to me his two large photographs of the Pompeian flutes, taken as they are in the Naples Museum; and I have had these photographed in reduced size, and engraved. They show the closure rings in the position in which they were found (refer to final chapter for clearer outline drawings). The large expanded portion at the top of the pipe is made of ivory, and is cup shaped, and into this the reed was fitted for playing. Whatever the original reeds were, they perished in the heat of the lava and ashes that overwhelmed the city. The cup would have suitably held either Arghool reeds, or bulbed reeds, enclosing these or other kinds of reeds. When M. Mahillon first investigated these flutes, he supposed that the Arghool reed had been used by the players in their day; but he now tells me that, having in more recent years made the acquaintance of most of the pipes of the middle ages—the cromornes, the courtauds, the dolziana, racket and others—he has come to the conclusion that the Pompeian flutes were blown by some sort of double reed, but differing from the oboe and bassoon type, which are adapted on a short metallic tube of small bore; and he considers that probably they were of the sort now existing in the Japanese pipe called the Hichirichi, but I do not see how this could be, since such have a broad base, quite half an inch in diameter, to fit into a tube corresponding. Moreover this explanation or supposition leaves the chief part of the problem unanswered—what then was the utility and purpose of the three bulbs? The mystery is there still. Perchance the meaning of it is this—the era of the concealed reed has closed, and this Pompeian instrument announces a new departure in flutes, played by a broad double reed sensitive to a ligature pressed by the lips, the precursor therefore of all modern reeds that can be accommodated to pitch.

I have myself one of these interesting little Japanese instruments, and will in another chapter describe and illustrate it; and the curious thing about it is that, in the splendid work on Egypt got up by order of the great Napoleon, such an instrument is figured there complete in every detail of pipe and reed, full size, and is claimed as an instrument belonging to Egypt. Did Japan get it from that motherland? The plot seems to thicken.

You will notice a curious application of the closure in this last specimen, No. 4, there being no fewer than seven holes shut off from speaking, sections 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10; and we cannot well understand or suppose it likely that during the progress of the piece of music the setting of the rings was changed. The player on this was able to supply three notes beyond the compass of the other flutes.

In reference to specimen No. 3, there is one particular which we should not omit to refer to. The ring closing the a (section 8), has a second hole bored at a little distance lower, and so gives a note flatter than that which the chief opening emits. In fact, we have a second g♯, which is a little higher, and establishes two quarters of a tone between g and a, and the g itself it is remarked is too low by a quarter of a tone. The various skips fixed by the closed holes cannot be without meaning. In one instance, we find a skip of a fourth; and the minor or neuter third, which I remarked upon as common to the earlier flutes as a fixed interval, and for some reason or other preserved, is also exemplified; in No. 4, we have D♯ to F♯, and again all sounds closed for the fourth between F♯ and A♯; and in No. 1, all sounds closed between D and G.

One wonders whether we have not some reminiscence of an earlier pentatonic scale in these, some traits by inheritance and tradition. Travellers in Persia have remarked that the singers seem to have a custom of making a drop of a fourth in the two concluding notes of their song; and the people in that land of the rose and the bulbul are passionately fond of song, and gather together, sitting out half the night in the open air, listening to song following song. All national traits are worth studying, and very often simple things render true clear light to the investigator.

All the details respecting the construction, the scales, and the conditions of these Pompeian flutes, we owe to M. Charles Victor Mahillon, who, travelling with M. Gevaert, the Director of the Conservatoire of Music at Brussels, found these unheeded relics of the musical art in a corner at the Naples Museum; and, fired with enthusiasm, was able, by his recognized position, to obtain the necessary permission to fulfil his desire, which was to make copies of them for a full investigation of their musical nature. He made most exact copies, down to the minutest details, and so enriched the museum which has long been under his fostering care, and increased the world’s knowledge because enthusiasm was allied to practical skill.

As Nature goes on in the same old way, never changing her laws or her behaviour, we can hear from these models the same tones as were heard by the Greeks, centuries ago; the flutes are faithful even to the pitch, for a pipe preserves its interior diameter, and is a true record which age does not imperil. In this respect, the wind instruments have the advantage over the stringed kind. The shapes of the Greek lyres we know from the vases, and from the paintings and sculpture; but of the nature of the strings and their tension, and the amount of sound elicited from the sounding-board, we remain in ignorance, and our best surmises fail to explain or account for the effects attributed to the skill of the players on these instruments.

Whether by some peculiar skill the flute players were able to produce a series of harmonics, is a puzzling problem. There is no reason to suppose that they could control the reed, unless they used a reed with reversed cut of tongue, like that of the old Chalumeau, or some other kind of reed, or a double reed as just now suggested; not the Arghool reed. To obtain harmonics merely by hard blowing would be a hazardous affair, especially in public performance before an audience professedly merciless to failure. The only harmonics to instruments of this class are twelfths and possibly fifths. Yet on the other hand, in the contests between ancient flute players, the especial aim of the rivals was to outdo each other in producing the highest notes.

Our players on oboi and clarionets only obtain harmonics with certainty by pressing the reed with the lip, so as to shorten the reed’s active portion. On the Egyptian flutes, as stated in a previous chapter, fifths were obtained in series, and after that octaves. A fine straw reed tongue was used in this case, and may account for results so different from modern custom.

One of these four Pompeian flutes produces three notes beyond the compass of the others, and there was doubtless some intent in the distinction; possibly the player who handled it had the dignity of first flautist.

There is yet one other example in existence of this type of flute. It was discovered at Salamis, in the the island of Cyprus, by Cesnola, and is, I believe, included in that portion of his wonderful collection which was sent to New York. It is described in his book, “Salaminia,” and is illustrated. Although in decayed condition, its structure is apparent. It is of bronze, with sliding cylinders; is about twenty inches long, and is perforated with fourteen finger holes, three of which it would seem were closed off. Careful measurements were taken, and an exact copy made by Messrs. Carte, and they were thus able to ascertain the original notes of the time worn instrument. The notes are nearly those of the modern chromatic scale, the lowest note being C in the bass clef, and the highest G (an octave and a fifth above). These notes,

C, C♯, D, D♯, E, F, G, A, B♭, C, E, G,

were obtained by using an Arghool reed, and—as they vary from the scale obtained by M. Mahillon, on the Pompeian flutes—there is some reason to infer that a stiffer reed was used, as anyone who has had experience with these reeds knows how greatly pitch may differ on the same pipe when two different reeds are tried; in fact, resultant pitch is the effect of the combination of pitch of reed with pitch of tube. Both F♯ and G♯ are missing from this Cyprus specimen. The age of this flute is not indicated; but the Pompeian flutes are fixed to a year, almost to a day, in the memorable year 79 of our era, when the gay city was overwhelmed in the lava of Vesuvius. Thus we may say that these flutes have been held in safe keeping through that stretch of years between our own time and the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, an association of thoughts which will come home to many readers more clearly.

Pompeii was originally founded by the Oscan people, who had nothing in common with the Romans, and did not lose their independence until about 90 B.C. The city was the last in the Campania, which was reduced to submission by the army of Rome.

These long Pompeian flutes could not have been played with all the holes uncovered; indeed, I come to the conclusion that one instrument in its purpose had the same utility as our three clarionets, enabling the player to take the scale in a lower range. Thus, at one time he would limit himself to the upper portion, and not use the lower; and at another time close off the upper notes and extend the range to the lowest extreme. And such changes might have been made at the end of any part of the song, or measure of the music; and the rearrangement in the closing of the holes would easily and quickly be effected. We should not, I think, imagine that an extensive compass was desired, as we desire it; for art was limited by precise rules and elaborate systems, and to ignore them was to offend. Evidently, in this instrument the capabilities of the Greek and Roman Auloi attained perfection,—nothing further was achieved; and with this we may consider that the era of ancient flautists closed.

At the present time there are several bands of excavators at work on classical sites. There is rivalry between the savants of four nations (German and French, English and American), each anxious to unearth the past, so that any day we may see new treasures that for centuries have been waiting,

CHAPTER IX.

Back to the Land of the Nile.

EGYPT REVEALS THE SECRET.

What! didn’t you know? I thought that everybody knew that. Why not have asked before? Could have told you at any time. That is the way that secrets have of coming out,—“promiskuss like,” as they say in the village. Now it seems that the bulbed mystery that we have been tantalized about, and which has so worried the lobes of our brain on sleepless nights, is after all a piece of nature, coaxed by artifice to be non-natural. A method of waist making was practised in early life to ensure the result desired; it was an instance not of design in nature, but of design upon nature, much as the modern young lady’s waist is. The simplicity of the explanation is charming. There is a passage in Pliny referred to by Mr. W. Chappell in his History of Music, and I will quote what he says. What it means I do not know, but that is by no means an objection, as one mystery is at least left, and what we shall do when every secret is open is a mystery past finding out!

There is another account of this furnished by the ever learned Mr. J. F. Rowbotham, in his so styled “History of Music,” which is no history, but a monologue (attractive, truly) on the historical progress of the art of music during some centuries. He says that the whole account is in Theophrastus (Hist. Plant, IV., 11), and names the lake differently. The passage runs thus:—

Doubtless, the original readers understood the author, and filled in implied details which we are in the dark about. The ancient writers avoid telling us what we want most to know. It is, for instance, at times, doubtful whether the name reed always refers to the body of the pipe, or at times to the vibrating reed, and a writer or translator would easily fall into error if without practical knowledge of wind instruments, just as they do in similar matters of musical detail at the present time. Some ancient writers, we know, wrote only from reports on the subject of music, being themselves ignorant upon it, although they are in several instances our chief authorities for the learning of the ancients thereon.

To the description given by Mr. W. Chappell, he adds his own comment: “these reeds throw out shoots around them, and perhaps each row of shoots may have been counted as a year’s growth.” I am not so sure that a reed “pervious throughout” would throw off shoots; some such are merely sheathed like bulrushes and flags. The contention of Mr. Rowbotham that Antigenedes “must needs change the time of cutting flute reeds, in order to get crisp reeds, and reeds with small bores, and that they might give out these (Hemiolian Chromatic) querulous intervals” is not convincing, and the use of the word “querulous” betrays that he is “begging the question”; indeed, his point is that “the age was an age of quibbling and cavilling and hair splitting, and these subtleties of thought had their parallel or consequence in other things as well,”—including querulous flutes. This imagined correspondence between things and thoughts shews the writer to be clever as a special pleader, but that he is a specialist in wind instruments does not follow. The question is still open, did Theophrastus speak of flute reeds or of flute pipes, or of the reeds to be used for bulbs, or of those for making reed tongues?

Antigenedes wrote about the year 450 B.C., it is said, that he increased the number of holes of the flute. It is a curious coincidence that Ling Lun the Chinese minister of Huang-Ti, was also sent to a chosen spot, called Tahsia (since identified as Bactria, the mother of cities from its unrivalled antiquity) west of the Kuenlun mountains, where there is a valley called Chichku where bamboos of regular thickness grew, that he might there choose the finest sort for music, and thus set out the true lus or laws and principles. How strangely the Greeks and Chinese tales agree, that the pipes must be very choice, and of a particular growth.

Some years back, when I first entertained the idea that these bulbs figuring on the vases represented real hollow bulbs, I sought high and low for evidence of any species of reed growing with such distinct shape that it could be so employed. I made enquires of curators at South Kensington botanical departments, and also at Kew, but without success, and no botanist could afford me the information that I was anxious for. There was no reed, neither roots of reeds, anywhere answering the description.

Yet such reeds grew! It is because the nature of the growth of the reed has assumed a most interesting importance at the present stage of our investigations, that I have introduced these quotations from the ancient writers.

A very valuable piece of information has recently been obtained from Egypt, and we owe our knowledge of it to Mr. T. L. Southgate who read a paper at a Musical Association meeting, upon the pair of Egyptian flutes found and shown by Mr. Petrie. He had obtained tidings and measurements of similar pipes in foreign museums, and gave particulars of experiments as to pitch, and showed a model made according to details communicated to him by M. Maspero of a so-called flageolet with eleven holes, found in ancient Panopolis anterior to the eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B.C. This extraordinary find he stated, was furnished with a moveable beak of the whistle kind, and it gave a scale of semitones and two enharmonic intervals; and the scale, he maintained, corresponded almost exactly with our present chromatic scale. Thus the musical acquirement of the Egyptians was raised to a most exalted level, much beyond anything ascribed to that people, and some head-shakings and symptoms of unbelief became manifest among the curious musicians assembled. I confess that I was among the doubters. Neither the flageolet nor the scale seemed to me to conform to the genius of the people, as shown in their tablets of stone, or papyrus rolls, or wall paintings. The date 1500 B.C.—four hundred years older than the Lady Maket flutes—was understood to be fixed by M. Maspero, and confirmed by other recognised Egyptologists, and the genuineness of the relic seemed vouched for.

And now comes the strange part of the discovery. It was found that the supposed flageolet beak was no flageolet affair at all, neither in form nor purpose, and that what had been interpreted in the drawing as a whistle mouth was the representation merely of a patch of pitch or bitumen that had in ancient days got attached to the original. About as dumbfounding an experience as that which befel the renowned Mr. Pickwick at the deciphering of the ever memorable Roman inscription. We may now sing old Hummel’s chorus:—

for the mistake brought out the secret, and the information long wanted was to be had for the asking, and came out in a very matter of fact way. M. Maspero says that the head piece found with the pipe was a hollow piece of reed, bulb shaped, and that it was a custom to grow such bulbs by subjecting the reed during its early growth to artificial constraint. Places in the reed would be chosen, round which, when it was about half an inch in diameter, a string or other fibre would be wound closely, and the reed so treated left otherwise to grow to its proper growth of about exteriorly three quarters of an inch. The artificial waist therefore remained with, say, a quarter inch interior diameter, whilst the other portion expanded in growth as usual, and thus these mysterious bulbs were formed. The explanation is delightfully simple, and the wonder is that no one thought of it before, for I expect that there are similar practices of reed torture going on in other parts of the world, which probably even our botanists could have made us acquainted with.

The difficulties of obtaining knowledge from those who know is, however, a common experience; not that knowledge is refused or withheld, but that the specialist and the neophyte seem unable to get into the same line of sight, and between the two there is often a great lack of perceptivity of the actual kind of help wanted, and the language of reply only perhaps may serve to show us what dumb creatures we are in our endeavours to understand one another.

The eleven holed pipe was found in 1888. As M. Maspero has no doubt about the age of this flute, and maintains that it dates back to the eighteenth dynasty, and as he is in the front rank of authority as an Egyptologist, we have to accept his decision, although it throws previous conclusions into confusion.

The Chinese are held to have possessed an octave scale of twelve semitones more than four thousand years ago, but heretofore we had no hint of an early existence of such amongst the Egyptians, nor of an intercourse with China which would account for identity. It is altogether mysterious, and raises new questions of affinities, and of the evolution of mind in the human race.

So far the details afforded give a new insight into the nature of the bulbed flute, they tend to support my idea of the use of the bulb for holding a concealed reed.

As it is, Egypt has revealed one secret concerning the subulone flutes, and shown that the double and triple bulbs depicted on the Etruscan vases are essentials of the structure of the flutes, and can no longer be regarded as conventional ornament.

M. Maspero sent Mr. Southgate a tracing of the bulb piece in his possession, who has obliged me with a copy of it. The dark irregular patches are due to accidental adherence of some bitumen. The numerals indicate merely proportions in the interior diameters.

In the times of the earlier civilizations, men had a wonderfully direct way of obtaining their ends; they chose the simplest means and the fittest, and the survival of their method down to our days is the best proof of a judgment almost as unerring as instinct. With all our mechanical appliances, we can do little better than modify and develop the designs we have inherited. In our wind instruments, everywhere the primitive remains, even as the type of race remains.

CHAPTER X.

The Isles of Greece.

MIDAS THE GLORIOUS.

“The Glorious!” So Pindar names the flute player Midas the Sicilian, who had twice obtained the laurel wreath by his performance on the flutes at the Pythic games. It is in his twelfth ode that Pindar celebrates the victory of Midas over all Greece upon that instrument which Athene herself had invented, and he inscribes the ode thus:—

To Midas of Agragas, winner of
the Prize for Flute Playing.

How strangely this sounds to us, and how little able are we to estimate at its true significance the esteem in which flute players were held by all the people of Greece.

Many records there are, telling unmistakably of the passion the Greeks had for this music; of the wealth lavished on the famous players; of the temples in which their names were cut in marble with every token of pride and exultation; and of statues raised to their honour. But greater tribute than any that was given, or than remains, is this,—that Pindar thought the flute player worthy of one of his odes, and immortalized him. His voice was the voice of national feeling, and, as I have said, it sounds strangely to us. We are so civilized, have gone so utterly beyond

that we should not recognize the voice of Saturn; and if

reached our brass belaboured ears, how many think you would listen with reverence?

Yet surely for a little while we should find some good in letting our imagination dwell upon the scenes and surroundings that were real in Greek life; some good also in cherishing the belief that the dead beliefs of old humanity were once living beliefs.

Pindar, second only because Homer was first, was revered by the whole Greek race, and considered their greatest lyric poet. From the pillars of Hercules to the verge of India, wherever there were Greeks, there Pindar was amongst them. How high an honour, therefore, it was that fell to Midas the flute player.

Strophe.

Then come antistrophe, and again strophe and antistrophe, but without the intervening epode, by which it is known that this was a processional ode. The poet weaves into his strain numerous allusions to myths which were in common acceptance, and fully understood by his hearers, and acclaimed forthwith. Needless, however, to be given here, although scholars still find interest in them. Pindar goes on to state how Maiden Athene fashioned the flute with its varied strain, and bestowed it on man, and concludes with this

Antistrophe.

So ends he, with the poet’s right to moralize, by which we may infer that our glorious Midas had to toil at the pipes, and practice some hours daily as the price of attaining his great renown.

Pindar’s lines have been variously translated; one reading is thus given:—

That reads pleasantly; but what of this more stately flow in prose?

How charmingly that lingers on the tongue, “the city with beautiful places for the dance.” When will it be so said of our great city? Is it a picture past praying for;—past hoping for?

Pindar, as we know, came of a family of flute players. He was born at Thebes, or at an adjacent village, about 522 B.C. His family, we are told, excelled in flute playing, the national art of Bœotia; and he himself, in one of his odes, boasts of a descent from Spartan ancestors, and on his mother’s side from an Arcadian nymph, Metope, mother of Thebe, the mythical foundress of the Theban nation. Through the country of Bœotia, the river Cephisus ran into the Copaic Lake, and both river and lake were celebrated for the reed beds, from which the Theban flute makers obtained their materials. So that our poet was an authority upon flutes, and a critic in the art of playing the instruments. A legend records that when a boy, a swarm of bees settled on his lips whilst he was asleep and filled his mouth with honey. He was also believed to be a familiar guest with the priests of Delphi, where an iron chair, on which he sat to conduct his hymns, was shown as one of the curiosities of the temple; whilst at Athens a statue was erected to him, and the Rhodians engraved one of his odes in golden letters on their temple to Minerva, and the site of his house beside the fountain of Dirce was respected for centuries afterwards.

Flute playing was believed to be of Phrygian origin, and that it was brought from Asia Minor into Greece may perhaps be indicated by the fact that Pindar had in his house at Thebes (Grecian Thebes) a small temple to the Mother of the Gods and Pan, the Phrygian deities to whom the first hymns to the flute were supposed to have been sung. Dion notices that at Thebes all but the Cadmea was in ruins, and that a small votive statue of Hermes, set up for some victory in flute playing, still stood up out of the weeds among the ruins in the ancient Agora. The Pythic contests were held in the plains of Crissa, hard by which stood the temple and oracle of Apollo, the especial god of the Dorian race, and the patron of music and the arts. It was in the years 494 and 490 B.C. that Midas won his laurel crowns, and he had also won once at the Panathenea. Curiously, we find that the first notable flute player at the Pythian games, Sacadas, was victor on the first (586 B.C.) and two subsequent occasions after the performance on that instrument had been introduced as a regular part of the solemnity.

Pindar’s ode to Midas was sung at Agrigentum when the victor entered the city in triumphal procession, and the whole town poured out to meet him. The victor and his friends visited in proud succession the altars of his religion, and the titular deities of the city were thanked for their favour, and again his exploits were chanted in notes of solemn joy.

We have one or two flute players who possibly have some idea of their surpassing merits; but they would be aghast if they found themselves recipients of such public honours as these in a modern city,—we are so civilized. Yet stay, did we not receive intelligence how that Sarasate received some such jubilee welcome on returning to his native place in Spain, not very long ago! What an old-fashioned corner of the earth that must be, where the old atmosphere remains unsmoked, and where the peasants remain and get richly browned in the sun, and dance with goatskins over their shoulders, and to them there are days of out-door life still going on, such as are by our race clean forgotten.

To parallel Pindar and Midas, we should have to imagine Tennyson writing an ode to Sarasate the passionate, the great artist, the dark browed fiddler on the platform of St. James’s Hall, London! Ah! no, it will not do; the parallel would be too shaky. We can run excursion trains, and cram Albert Halls, and our people can shout themselves hoarse in Fleet Street over the three o’clock winner, and the names of Patti and Sims Reeves, and Melba, and Jean de Reszke may exhaust our refined fervour, and the grandeur of heads fitted with unseen crowns may raise a flickering illusion of glory, and the dazzling crush of ladies plated with diamonds, may exalt the senses with the pride of wealth,—but all this, the utmost of the get-up of modern effects, will pale beside that uprising of citizens, that grand acclaim in open air over the plain of Crissa to “glorious Midas!”

One day I do remember,—one day fit to be named with the days of old. Stay a moment, and think what was in those days. Imagine the concourse of people from all ends of the world; a small world it was then, and yet how great in men, aye, and in coming men. There, under the shadow of the great towering crag of Delphi—the centre or “navel” of the earth, as the Greek poets termed it—with the world-renowned temple glowing in lily whiteness in the blue air, there the great games were held,—duty, religion, race, patriotism, drew all men of Greek birth or parentage to witness or to share in them. Week after week, from every state and colony, from isle and creek and dented bay, the flower of Hellas gathered in national pride to swell the host of spectators at these Panegyreis, called by them “universal gatherings.” Hither came statesmen and philosophers, merchants and traders, poets and priests, and people of every degree; streaming up through gorge and defile, up through groves of pine and laurel and cypress, up to the broad, bright plain,

In that great day when Midas stood forth to meet the gaze of the vast assembly, there were, as visitors, some of those who have written their names indelibly on the pages of Time, some of those who have made history. Who were they? Pindar, we know, was there,—what other? At that day, Pythagoras walked upon the earth, and Æschylus was then in the prime of manhood; Sophocles, a babe but one year old, nestled in a mother’s arms; and Phidias, a child of seven summers, not yet dreaming of his great fame, tripped over the grass, gathering garlands of hyacinth, saffron, and asphodel; and fancy may picture him there listening to the flutes of Midas, hearing the shout of victory, and seeing the bestowal of the laurel crown. Imagine him—one of the young immortals—lifted up in the exciting moment, his little heart throbbing in sympathy with the pulse of the grand enthusiasm that ran through that sunsmitten multitude!

Aye, those were glorious days! One such day I do remember, one worthy to rank with those days of Grecian festivals; the day when our vast city for a whole day welled out from every street and alley its thousands, tens of thousands, mile upon mile, from morn to sunset, to welcome Garibaldi. Then we knew what it was to feel the thrill of genuine fervour. Then, for one day at least, we rejoiced in being of human race, and believed in the wide kinship of patriotism. Men and women counted themselves happy if they could touch but the folds of his grey cloak. They who had looked into the depths of his calm grey eyes felt themselves dwellers under a loftier sky and went away, comforted; and to gaze upon his serene face was to receive into the heart a new sense of the service of life. He was one of those

Since glorious Midas won, 2397 years have come and gone, and Pindar’s verse each year has kept the laurels green. Perhaps in after years he personified the ideal or master flute player to the popular imagination, for the statue here represented dates from the time of Hadrian—that is six hundred years later—and is believed by the archæologists to be a copy or adaptation of an earlier work, when a pseudo-archaic style was in fashion. The original they say may, like other earlier representations of deities, have been clad in actual drapery. According to Pliny, Midas was the original inventor of the plagiaulos or side blown flute; but it was so customary to assign to their heroes the origin of things considered benefits to the people, that we may class this as a mythical reminiscence.

The figure is draped in a chiton, with sleeves which are fastened down with studs; a circlet rests upon the head, and the hair falls in long tresses over the shoulders; the beard is long, and of the peculiar shape commented upon by ancient writers. The marble is beautifully worked, the details very graceful, and the expression given to the face remarkable. The statue was found in the villa of Antoninus Pius, near Civita Lavinia. The right arm, left hand, the mouthpiece, and part of the middle of the pipe are restorations; but the artist, being in the dark as to the actual kind of flute originally represented, made up a shape of mouthpiece from the fragments, for which his inner consciousness alone is responsible.

The flutes represented are from a photograph of the instruments in the British Museum, and there can be little doubt that this kind of pipe was the one given to the player by the sculptor. The reed when placed in the little tube would stand at half a right angle to the pipe, as the bore indicates that degree of slant.

Fig. 25.

In taking leave of Greece and her flutes, I am pleased to be able to quote from recent intelligence one incident which shows the permanence of national character.

“Milo, the Island of the Cyclades, in which the famous ‘Venus of Milo’ was discovered, has again been the scene of the unearthing of a splendid example of ancient Hellenic art. The new ‘find’ is the marble statue of a boxer, somewhat above life size, which is almost as perfect after its burial under the dust of centuries as it was when it came fresh from the hands of its sculptor.

“The shipping of the statue to Athens was made the occasion for a characteristic Greek popular festival. The whole population, headed by the civil magistrates and a band of musicians, and followed by a regiment of soldiers, accompanied the newly found treasure in jubilant procession to the ship, which had been sent from Athens for its transport to the capital.”

The old ways remain! The Greeks are a young people yet; they show the same spontaneity of enthusiasm, the same joy in the face of nature, the same impulses under the influence of art. Theirs is still a small world girdled by the sea, and they are not so far as we from the days when

CHAPTER XI.

Near the City of Charites.

THE MYSTERY OF THE “SLENDER BRASS.”

This chapter is a pendant to that on “Midas the Glorious.” It is an afterthought which my long familiarity with free reeds has given birth to. One day I chanced to buy a child’s toy, a little trombone, perfect in slide action, and in succession of tones. Following my habit of experimenting with reeds, pursuing therein the course of a lifetime’s devotion to such attractions, I naturally desired, childlike, to see the inside of this trombone. It contained a slide within a tube, and upon this slide a series of free reeds set tandem fashion; upon lengthening the trombone, each reed in succession was brought to the one air hole which alone was provided for the issue of the sounds from the series of reeds. For so small an instrument, merely a toy be it remembered, there was great power, and correct pitch.

By a freak of memory, Midas and his flute came to mind, and words of Pindar flashed through my brain with a new significance. Was the free reed used in the flute of Midas? that was the question. Pindar, as was stated, was himself familiar with the flute; he came of a family of flute players, and therefore his description has a more than casual purport, for we may be sure that he had clearly in mind every detail he directed attention to by his words, and knew everything affecting the instrument. Pindar, having stated how Maiden Athene fashioned the flute with its varied strain, and bestowed it on man, then proceeds to describe it and its musical sound. Of the sound of the flute he writes:—