again as to Astronomy:—

Dr. Edkins was struck by the many ancient customs pointing to a connection between Western Asia and China, he calls attention to:—

Both the Revs. C. J. Ball and M. de Lacouperie agree:—

Mr. Simcox states that the Akkad religion:—

and as to ancestor worship Mr. Simcox says:—

On these points we shall notice that much that differentiates the two peoples will tend to show that the Chinese broke away from the Euphrates earlier than the Egyptian kindred, before indeed the anthropomorphic religious ideas became superimposed upon the naturalistic. This is an important index to the distance in time when the migration eastward began. Imagine that vast valley peopled as Berosus the old Babylonian historian states,—“There was originally in the land of Babylon a multitude of men of foreign race who had settled in Chaldea.” These people consisted of numerous tribes, previously dwellers in the forests in the highland range eastwardly bounding the valley, and through long centuries they had multiplied exceedingly; to be called in after time by several distinguishing names. In this early period they were all Akkads from the northern mountains, and Sumerians from the southern range as these names originally imply. Presumably, these people would sort themselves into kindreds, so that when the pressure from increase of population caused them to swarm, they went off in bodies all of the same type. The Red type we may call Egyptians, the Yellow type, or black-haired we call Chinese, the great remaining bulk of dwellers on the soil became the people called Chaldeans, Babylonians, Assyrians and other names. How long ago was it when “the black-haired people” swarmed off? The Chinese chronologers go back 43,000 years B.C. for the earliest tidings of their race, and no doubt their records are but dim traditions, not of China, but of this their primitive home by the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their astronomical calculations are shewn not correct for the land of China but must be referred to the land of Medea and of Southern Asia. The black-haired people took with them a knowledge which was common with all the tribes around them in that valley; their religion, the Sumerian, “the Spirit of Heaven,” “the Spirit of Earth,” nothing more, no gods or goddesses, agriculture and canalization they learnt there, and the building of dwellings of the reed-thatched type from which they have not departed, and the worship of ancestors common to that early world remains with the Chinese in its most primitive stage, as a traditionary usage almost instinctively connected with the family claims, as a posthumous honouring, not as a feeling of religion. The polytheistic ideas developed later with the other tribes had not then arisen, consequently we find the Chinese settled in their new home with only simple, vague notions of “Spirits” good and harmful, and being a people singularly wanting in imagination, they present still, notwithstanding their long history, an aspect, as a nation, of archaic survival.

These considerations help us to understand how it is that in their music they have shewn so little growth. They drew from the same musical roots as other nations yet remain stunted; socially and intellectually the Chinaman of to-day is the same as the man who was obedient to the rule of Yao, and Hwang-ti, and when the latter formulated the rules that were held to govern the music, the Chinese were content that for ever after music was fixed; they appear to delight in keeping things in a dwarfed state as they take a pride in dwarfed trees, and we of the Western world find it so difficult to understand them, but we still go on trying.

In these hints I think you will find fair justification for my belief in the very remote antiquity of a musical scale, a set sequence of sounds by choice adopted, it may be of four or five sounds, common in its rudimentary stage amongst all the tribes aggregated in Southern Asia, where we have for many scientific reasons a conviction that civilization originated.

The great migrations of peoples were caused by famines, plagues, inundations, overcrowding of population, but apart from these the instinctive desire of man to better himself in place and position and possessions was an ever inciting force.

An old Akkadian hymn, perhaps the oldest piece of writing in the world, commences,

a simple sentence—a premonition of all history. Imagine, if you can, the ages of civilized life necessary to bring the human brain to a conception so philosophic and true as this. Earth is old now. Earth was very old then.

The Chinese affirm that the Emperor Hwang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, invented the scale of twelve semitones, called the twelve lüs, and according to the record of date this was 4590 years ago. The pitch of the notes of all ancient systems was described by lineal measurements; hence every interval accepted was either the excess or defect resulting from the division of a greater measure, the octave, or the fourth. In some way or other the derived proportions have been grateful to human ears, perhaps because they denote absence of conflict, or presence of symmetry.

The discovery by the Yellow Emperor as narrated reads somewhat fabulous. It is stated that he sent his minister Ling Lun to the valley west of the Kuênlun mountains, where bamboos of regular thickness grow; that Ling Lun cut the piece of bamboo which is between the knots, and the sound emitted by this tube when blown across he considered the bass or tonic; that is our way of naming, not his. The length was equal to one Chinese foot. He then cut a second pipe two thirds of the length of the first, which gave a sound a fifth higher, and continued similar relations from pipe to pipe, and so on, he completed the series of twelve sounds according to the idea of his master, and for evermore fixed the musical scale handed down from generation to generation through thousands of years.

I have shown that Amiot misled us in assigning it to the Sheng, and I expect he has given currency to other errors. What I do note, and have assigned the cause for in the argument of the previous chapter, is the peculiar crowding of the scale with intervals less than a semitone between f and a; and perhaps this crowding has helped towards inducing the belief, without question, that the semitonal scale was intended, but that the making of the instrument was not done with due exactness, or that the instrument was out of order if it did not bear out the theory of an equal tempered semitonal succession through an octave. The theoretical existence of such a scale is not here called in question: my contention is that the ancient instruments give no confirmation of having been planned in view of such a principle. Stranger still, the very scheme to which the learned writers refer as the basis of the principle, and carefully guarded by them as an authentic ancient treasure, gives a complete denial to the whole assumption. I take their own statements, the evidence of their own authorities, and wonder, when I examine the twelve lüs, why they never examined them, why from curiosity alone they sought no corroboration of their statements from the lüs themselves.

In Van Aalst’s book the scheme is fully set out in diagram, the twelve lüs figured, and all the curious details inserted of the moons and the hours to which each pipe belongs by some mystical relation which the Chinese mind perceives; the pipes are arranged in the order in which they bear to the longest one, which is the prime genitor. Also there is another diagram, elaborately designed to display the affinities in a circle, having twelve compartments springing from a common centre; the kung or fundamental sound being placed as the hub of a wheel with the other sounds rayed round, each sound being named. The diagram of pipes shows how the lüs generate one another, whereas the circle or wheel diagram gives the notes as they follow in a series. I think that I remember seeing these diagrams in Amiot’s sixth volume. Very likely Van Aalst has taken them from the same source. Again, he says, “The lüs are a series of bamboo tubes, the longest of which measures nine inches, and which are supposed to render the twelve chromatic semitones of the octave.” It appears to me that the great source of misunderstanding has been in the European persistence in regarding “the twelve lüs” as meaning “twelve semitones”: whereas the Chinese name lüs means laws or principles.

I have examined these pipes by measures and do not find them in any way corroborating the semitonal relation; and simply taking the names accorded to the lüs and set forth in these diagrams, if we arrange the notes in successive order, neither do they bear out the scale claimed for them. Let us see: this is how they stand. Twelve semitones forsooth!

Thus the development of the scale shows only a central crowding of semitones, and not even an octave relation, plainly indicating an ancient growth through the tetrachord. The diagram showing how the lüs generate one another states that the longest pipe is nine inches; yet in the letterpress Van Aalst says that

And further, that

And so on, which shows how almost European the Chinese are in their humanity.

I have quoted largely from J. A. Van Aalst’s “Chinese Music” to which I am much indebted. The author is learned in the ways and in the literature of the Chinese, being himself in the Chinese Imperial Customs Service, and his work is published by order of the Inspector General of Customs, Shanghai.

The first tube in the diagram bears this inscription:—

Description follows, in the same style of quaint symbolism, upon each of the twelve. At the third pipe, however, which it says ought to be two-thirds of the preceding length, a change comes, which it is important to notice,—viz., “that the sound would be too high compared with kung, and so the tube is to be doubled, and four thirds taken instead of two thirds.” This virtually introduces the three fourths relation, the fourth instead of the fifth; and in the remainder of the pipes some are calculated some way, and some the other. There is no twelve fifth scheme carried out as supposed.

Pursuing the investigation, I cut slips on the system laid down, and found that the lengths and the pitches did not agree; and I also tried working out the Sheng on a basis of fifths instead of fourths, of the relation 2/3 instead of 3/4, and found that the result did not correspond with the speaking lengths of the Sheng pipes.

The tale told of the twelve lüs bears every evidence of being an invention; and I fancy that the fable originated in a scholastic endeavour to account for the existence of the perfected instrument the Sheng, so old that none knew how it came into being. The twelve lüs comprised a scale of an octave and a fourth, and the scale of the Sheng is also an octave and a fourth in compass; but neither constituted a semitonal scale, which was an idea of much later date. So also the making of a scale out of a succession of twelve fifths was a notion of the pedants, the men learned in book knowledge, and they fixed upon Ling Lun the credit of cutting each pipe by a succession of two-third lengths, on the principle of the fifth.

The question has been raised whether the pipes were open or stopped, and the authorities say they were stopped, and they make their drawings of the pipes corroborate their view, but if so, what becomes of the affirmation that Ling Lun cut the bamboos between the knots unless to secure an open tube?

Although I may seem to have been wandering from the track, I have not lost sight of the central point to which my cogitations tend. I wished to impress the evidence of evolution in the appropriation of bamboo pipes for musical purposes, in the use of such bamboos in the earliest periods, all of similar diameters, and to show that variation in the diameters was an after development, even as was the use of metal pipes instead of the natural growth of bamboo or reed.

If you have read the first part of this volume you will have understood that I take the view that the earliest musical notions of man in his primitive state were derived from the industry of his fingers, and the relations of a musical scale had the same basis, becoming afterwards hereditary. The Chinese foot is equal to a hand-span of a ruler or emperor, and has ten divisions equal each to a thumb’s breadth. The standard pipe is 9-7/8in. of our measure. Taking a pipe that length and halving it, or taking one half that length, the notes obtained are what we call tonic and its octave; but being of the same diameter the octave will be flat. This we find to be a peculiarity in Chinese music. Taking a pipe three quarters the length of the whole, a note is obtained from it which is a fourth; and this, the same diameter being kept, will be inevitably a flat fourth; hence the existence of a flat fourth in the ancient musical instruments of the Chinese and Japanese. And so everywhere, unless the diameters have varied as the lengths have varied, the intervals cannot then have been the exact intervals that we set down for our musical relations. Yet, strange it is: showing the persistence of heredity and tradition. The Chinese in later times perfectly well knew, as I shall show, the relations of the diameters of pipes according to geometrical laws.

Music with the Chinese, itself as an art so unprogressive, has from the first taken a unique position in the national life. Dr. Wagener tells us that the weights and measures that have been in use these 4600 years in the Chinese empire are based upon Lyng-lun’s work in determining the musical standards of the lüs. The first pipe which he cut as the foundation of his scale was the longest, and it was found to contain 1200 grains of millet seed. He chose a sort of millet, the sorghum rubrum, which is of a dark brown colour, as being harder and more uniform than the gray and other kinds. One hundred of these was made by him the unit of weight, and this was divided and subdivided on a decimal system until a single grain became the lowest weight of all. The length of this pipe was equal to 81 of these seeds placed lengthwise; but breadth-wise, it took 100 grains to make the same length: hence the double division 9 + 9 and 10 + 10 was naturally arrived at. This musical foot thus became the standard measure with decimal subdivisions. The breadth of a grain of seed was 1 fen (line), 10 fen = 1 tsun (inch), 10 tsun = 1 che (foot), 10 che = 1 chang, 10 chang = 1 ny. Lyng-lun also fixed the dimensions of the interior of the pipe at 9 grains breadth. The contents of the tube proved to be 1200 grains, and the weight of 100 grains was made by him the unit of weight. The pipe was thus made the basis of the musical system, and equally so the basis of the system for lineal measure, dry measure, and weight; ultimately for coinage.

Another interesting fact is that the Chinese had ascertained the geometrical relation of musical pipes. The problem had been thoroughly examined by a certain Prince Tsai-Yu (1596). In practical and scientific hydrodynamics, the relation of the diameters of pipes to the volume contained was well known; but it appears that, as applied to sounding pipes, the Prince Tsai-Yu was the first clearly to record its demonstration. Of two musical pipes of the same diameter, one two feet long and the other one foot long, the latter does not, as assumed, give a note the higher octave of the former, for the note will be flat. Neither if we halve the diameter, even as we halve the length, will the note prove true. The common practice with us in organ building is to give the half diameter to the seventeenth pipe; but this is merely an empirical decision. The prince, without explaining theoretically why, showed that the proper dimensions relatively of length and diameter were as follows. Assuming a pipe of 2ft. length to have an interior diameter of 5 lines, then correctly the pipe of 1ft. length should have a diameter of 3 lines 53 cent., and a pipe of 6in. length a diameter of 2 lines 50 cent.

Our organ pipe custom is solely a determination of ear, or feeling, as regards the aggregate of sounds; for we gain in brightness and fluency by not delaying the acceptance of the half diameter until the second octave, which geometrically would be its true position,—viz., at the twenty-fifth note. Thus, and by holding control in regard to the amount of wind, and regulating by voicing, we are able to blend the total accord of sounds in harmony, in the way pleasurable to the trained ear or cultivated taste, according to the perceptivities of the Western peoples.

CHAPTER XV.

In the Flowery Kingdom.

THE BIRD’S NEST.

Music by inspiration. Yes, that is it,—the very thing we want, what we are all longing for; so little of the truly inspired music comes newly to refresh us as the birth of the days we live in. Only the old seems the ever new. How inspiring it is to listen to the themes of the old masters, and feel the old melodies pass through us like a current of life, awakening thrills of delight, the memory of the first hearing of them blending with and enhancing the emotions of the present. To inspire, “to drink in.” How we drink in the life renewing melodies of Beethoven and Schubert: their potency never fails, and in our exultation we call them divine. How strangely inevitable are the ideas we associate with the words “divine” and “inspiration.” Apply them as we will to frail human effluences, there is no escape from the higher exalted sense, from the ideal signification. Inspiration,—it is a grand word. Somehow the ideal clings around words, in however “matter o’ fact” way they come to be used; like the eastern vase that has been filled with roses, in after time

One thought leads to another thought. I have a little instrument before me, dignified by the name “organ,”—a very little organ, but the name comes to it because it is one of the earliest of the race from which our present day organ has sprung. Was its inventor a genius? A poor human nomad wandering the wilds of Tartary, inspired to begin the foundations of that which was to be an empire of sound,—one of those

Was he inspired, I wonder? True it is that the invention has been claimed for some emperor, but that is so natural an appropriation that we give no heed to it. Certainly it is the unknown man who is the true great man, though history has obliterated his name and graven a royal cartouche in its place. The mythical is always later than the real.

This curious instrument: what a juggle of words it has led me to. The inspiration I have to talk of is done by inspiring,—its music is made as the lark’s music is, by inspirating. Note you how the bird sings by drawing in breath, by inspiring; and higher and higher he mounts, filling the air with melody for a half mile around him; soaring, singing and singing as he soars, never tiring for the hour together, because every effort invigorates the little body instead of exhausting its strength; he drinks in oxygen at every note, and so is refreshed by singing. Would that human singing were equally refreshing to the singer and the hearer!

The Sheng was formerly called the “bird’s nest,” and the peculiar arrangement of its pipes—the longest of which pipes exceed considerably the real sounding length—is held by the Chinese to represent the tail of the phœnix as she sits upon her nest; indeed, unless we accept the symbolism, the method shown in the construction is unaccountable.

According to the Chinese there are eight sound giving bodies corresponding to the eight symbols of Fu Hsi, which they believe are the expression of all the changes and permutations which take place in the universe. These eight are stone, metal, silk, bamboo, wood, skin, gourd, clay, with symbolic relations to the eight points of the compass and the eight seasons of the year. The Sheng is the representative of the gourd principle. Originally the bowl was formed of a portion of a gourd or calabash, although in later times made of wood and lacquered. This gourd is in shape like a teacup, the top of which is covered by the insertion of a circle of wood, having a series of holes around the margin, into which the pipes are fixed; then there is a neck or mouthpiece shielded by an ivory plate, through which the performer draws the wind. My instrument is an old one, has been in this country eighty years or more; and as it has been here photographed to a scale of one fourth, all the proportions are preserved in the engraving. The instrument is placed to the mouth with the pipes slanting to the right shoulder, the right hand forefinger being placed within the opening seen in the circle of pipes, and the thumb so placed as to be ready to cover the hole seen on the second pipe, counting to the left from this opening. The bowl is held in the hollow of the left hand, with the fingers reaching upwards to the pipes.

A noticeable feature is that it is the left hand that fingers the instrument, indicating a very early custom, in that respect. The pipe engraved here is of full size, and shows the little metal free reed affixed, which also is drawn at the side full size in its frame. The slot determining the speaking length of the pipe is at the back, and is here indicated at the proper position by the side diagram, the length of pipe above the slot having no particular relation except an average one of about the same length as the bottom portion reckoned from the lowest end of the cut. The pipes numbers 3 and 4 have their holes at the inside or back of the pipes in a position to be covered by the forefinger of the right hand.

Diagram of the
Length of Slot at the Back.

Fig. 29.

A Pipe of the Sheng (Full Size.)

The little free reed is of copper, is of very delicate workmanship, the tongue is about half an inch long having its tip slightly loaded with beeswax, and the corners rounded off, thus leaving passage way for the air, otherwise the tongue would not be set in vibration, since the reed tongue is quite level with its frame, a condition in which modern reeds would not speak. It is a peculiarity worth noticing. Another strange contrivance is that the hole which we see on each pipe a short distance above the cup, is designed to prevent the pipe from speaking; is not the opening for the sound of the note as in other pipes is the usual purpose; although the air drawn in comes simultaneously through all the pipes, not a single pipe will sound that has not the side hole covered by a finger. The position of the hole has no relation to nodal distance, it effects its purpose by breaking up the air column when it is open, and so prevents the pipe from furnishing a reciprocating relation to the pitch of the reed. Over these holes the four fingers play in the order the music requires.

The Sheng is considered to be one of the most important of the Chinese musical instruments; no other is so perfect either for sweetness or delicacy of construction. It is indispensable in the ritual music of their temples.

At the Confucian ceremonies there are six Sheng, three on the east and three on the west side of the hall. They play exactly the same music as the ti-tza or flute, yet they are not used in the popular orchestras. At nuptial and funeral processions the Sheng is played, but it is then merely for form’s sake, in accordance with the requirements of the rites, and the hired coolie who carries it simply simulates playing.

One rarely hears the Sheng now-a-days, on account, some say, of a curious superstition that a skilful performer becomes so wedded to its music, that he is ever playing, and that, as the instrument is played by suction or drawing in of the breath, a long continuance in practice brings on inflammation of the lungs; so no performer is believed to live more than forty years! Others however, and these are the philosophers, maintain that the ancient music and the ancient methods of playing are lost, and the construction of the instrument after the ancient plan is a lost art. This one can well believe of an instrument belonging in its prime to so early a period of history. Of all the ancient music nothing remains but abstruse theories. Van Aalst says:—

I have possessed four of these little Sheng organs (pronounced “sung”) and it became to me a fascinating problem how the instrument originated. I compared one with the other, and where one was imperfect, the other possessed the notes to perfect the scale. At that time but little was known of the instrument, for we had only some flowery accounts given in Chinese history, and one description of it very fully set out in Père Amiot’s work on the Chinese, published in Paris, 1780, in six vols. The description is found in the sixth volume, but I soon discovered that the good father had but very imperfect means at his command, and that the scale he gave was not to be relied upon. For my own satisfaction I was led to make a closer examination of the instrument, and to glean whatever particulars I could for the better understanding of the organ and its place in history.

We are accustomed to regard the Chinese as a very conservative people, unchangeable in modes and customs, and indisposed to vary in routine after tradition has fixed it. Closer view of their history shows that this is a mistake, and we have been drawn into it because the range of their change has been limited; and in their inventions, numerous and important as they have been, they nevertheless seem not to have the aptitude to advance them to higher grade of utility. Their musical scales have been constantly fixed, and have been as constantly changing. Mr. A. J. Ellis has shown that at B.C. 1300 the scale had only five notes, that the invading Mongols introduced an additional scale, that Kublai Khan A.D. 1259 combined the two, that in the thirteenth century the Ming dynasty excluded all semitones, that the Tsing dynasty (which has existed from 1644), reverted to the former scale; and these are comparatively modern changes. And yet one may say that ages earlier changes began, and this Sheng has at various periods been subject to change; at one time it had nineteen pipes, at another twenty-four pipes, and now has settled down to the form, still very ancient, which is illustrated here with seventeen pipes, two of these being dummies—as some modern organ fronts are—and two are duplicates of others for convenience, leaving therefore eleven sounding pipes to represent the working scale of the instrument.

For the origin of the Sheng we must go back beyond these periods of change. Its history begins with a woman, as is proper in tradition, and the invention is attributed to a female sovereign in the mythical age known as Nu-wo. Eve is said to have brought “woe” into the world, but this lady evidently by her name was of later date, ancient though that date is. She succeeded the Emperor Fu Hsi, who reigned 4745 years ago, and who was the reputed father of music, for the Chinese are a people who naturally consider that there is no music of any account besides their own. Then Hwang Ti “the Yellow Emperor,” follows, and he takes credit for the invention, its a way men have: this was about one hundred and fifty years after the death of the lady aforesaid. Then the great Emperor Shun four centuries later, he lays some claim; but the probability is that these two emperors regulated the laws, which till then had not been formulated into fixed rule. Indeed each emperor had his own system, and did not agree with his predecessor’s systems. There can be no doubt that the Sheng is of great antiquity; it is often mentioned in the great poetical books of the Chinese, the She and the Shoo-king, and the commentators on ancient musical instruments invariably mention the great age of the Sheng, and seem to delight in speaking of it as evidence of the inventive genius and musical talent of the Chinese.

In my desire to place you abreast with the Chinese knowledge of the art of music, I give you this beautiful elucidation from the treatise of J. A. van Aalst:—

You will now be able thoroughly to understand something of the Chinese systems of music, and their rigidly scholastic basis; and should you think that the explanation that you have read requires to be supplemented by explication, I may say that the authorities at the British Museum have now shelved for public use in the King’s Library the five thousand and twenty volumes of the Chinese Encyclopædia, to which I refer you.

This is said to be the only complete copy known in Europe of a work commenced how many centuries ago I forget; and as the Chinese had at hand four hundred and eighty-two learned treatises on music, no doubt the subject is exhaustively drawn out, and will repay your search in the various sections and sub-sections. It is said that in 2277 B.C. there were twenty-two authors on dance and music, twenty-three on ancient music, twenty-four on the playing of the kin and the chi, twenty-four on solemn occasions, and twenty-six on scale construction. The sages alone comprehend the canons, and the mandarins of music are considered superior to those of mathematics. The College of Mandarins at Pekin is within the imperial palace. The head musician in China represents the five capital virtues,—humanity, justice, politeness, wisdom and rectitude. How very old these people are! Certainly, we have colleges—a few!—but for some reason or other we are not sufficiently advanced to have such a head musician; and, in consequence of lack of such representation, the profession may possibly be minus some of the virtues in these ways: which, as the saying goes, accounts for it.

You know that old Confucius wrote about the ancient music in the Shoo-king, and that was about 551 B.C., or about the time when Ezra was occupied in collecting the parchments of the laws of Moses. In the great destruction of books all copies of Confucius disappeared, but happily one complete copy was found secreted in the wall of the house that he dwelt in; and that was in 140 B.C., when the house was pulled down. But you must think of a time far back, far as the times of the Pharaohs who built the pyramids, a time when the Chinese were already writing learned works on the music and the instruments, the existence of which necessarily implied long periods of early civilization. The earliest Chinese book that we know of is “The Book of Changes,” 1150 B.C. Ah, and what changes since! All history is a record of changes.

CHAPTER XVI.
By the Yellow River.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SHENG.

The Sheng as the parent of organs, the original exemplar of free reeds, always greatly interested me, and I was desirous of obtaining a knowledge of its scale and methods; but I found such contradictory statements, such confusion of different systems of succeeding times, that the unravelling seemed hopeless. No doubt, as time went on, certain accommodations were made to conform to new orders and imperial decrees, and the pedants of the schools seem to have been chiefly concerned in the demonstration of doctrines of similitude, and contrasts, and affinities, and mystical comparisons with all things in heaven and earth, and abstruse relations with numbers; sometimes one set of teachings gaining prominence, only to be overturned in favour of the next set that forced its way into law or custom.

The curious principle of inspiring in order to obtain the action of the reed, and the still more peculiar characteristic of closing the aperture at the side before the sound could form itself in the tube, raised a multitude of questions of origin and purpose, and therefore I set about the investigation with the idea of working out the evolution of the Sheng from the evidence, so to speak, of its own skeleton that to-day is living.

I want to take you back in imagination ages beyond these dates, to find the man who made this little organ, this little Sheng that to-day can arrest our attention with absorbing interest. There was some first dreamer, inventor, originator; some one who played and toyed with the bamboos that grew beside his path, and thought out this little thing that was to descend from generation to generation, and become a household name in huts and palaces and temples. In the far east the bamboo is everywhere the resource of man for the supply of his daily needs. With it he hunts and fishes, and builds his house and ploughs his land; he is as much beholden to it now as in most primitive days of nomadic life.

There are whole forests of bamboo in China and immense quantities are floated down the great rivers to the towns and cities; the province of Shantung is celebrated for the small hard sort, which for certain uses has a preference. Just as in Greece we alluded to a kind specially sought for musical purposes. It would, we can understand, be natural for the early tribes to settle down beside the river; and, when a plot of land was selected, the house was built with bamboo, and furnished with domestic articles of bamboo, and the implements of husbandry and fishing were all made of this wonderful plant. With the river to give him fish, and the land to yield him crops of millet and rice, the man was happy. The custom obtains to the present day to devote some portion of land round the house on which to cultivate the bamboo. This portion is surrounded by a ditch filled with water supplied from the river by a tiny canal, and here these luxuriant grasses grow; for the bamboo is but a gigantic grass, and the domestic wants find this grove a perpetual storehouse of supply. Conceive such a picture: the man after his day’s toil sitting beside this grove, not in lazy ease, but intently engaged upon a heap of little bamboo sticks, measuring, cutting, comparing, and pondering over some problem, some scheme upon which his mind is fixed; only now and then looking upward and catching sight of the grey turtle doves and their little rose coloured feet clinging to the branch stems above him. No sound disturbing the great silence of the plain, only the doves mildly cooing as if in answer to the sounds that come from his lips in intervals of meditative musing; and the sounds of the bees in the flowers; and the softer sounds of the flowing of the broad river in the distance. As the sunshine lights up his good humoured face, what is the thought that makes it brighten with his smile, and tells of satisfied attainment? Well may he feel content. He has perfected an idea; he has laid the foundation of the Sheng. And a very simple process it is, as I shall show you; for although it occasioned him serious pondering, once the idea had risen in his mind, the working out of the scheme was assured.

Some tribes in remote places in the east still have a rude prototype of the instrument, consisting of a hollow lump of clay with four or five pipes irregularly stuck in, and beyond that they have not proceeded; and such may have been the stage at which our ideal man with an order loving brain set about thinking. Now, truth to tell, I imagined myself to be this Chinaman, and wondered how, in such a position as his, and with only his means and his purposes, I should evolve such an instrument. Curiously enough, as it turned out, I hit upon the right idea, or as near proof of rightness as imagination need come to. Until I had worked out the scheme on this primitive basis, the instrument had been a puzzle to me, and it did not seem to me that any writer rightly understood it; and even the descriptions by musical experts were obviously erroneous when examined without prepossessions of the scholastic kind. The first instrument that came into my hands was perfect in structure, but incomplete in reeds, not more than four or five metal tongues remaining. The pitch of these I ascertained, and the relations happened to be useful for comparative deductions. It had long been a creed with me that disease and death are our best teachers; they cause us to question natural mechanism, injury and disorder, and make us desire to know relation and purpose in artificial mechanism also. Thus my poor Sheng incited me to wish to know its structural meaning, to ask how it came to be what it is.

Music was a pastime ages before it became an art. Religion is earlier than priesthood. I go therefore to the man who first made this form of instrument; question why he made it, how he took his first step, how he came to take his second, how he by process of thinking formed an instrument for himself and for others to play. His ancestors, I consider, came from the south, and in the early period would have used reeds with tongues cut in them after the fashion of the Arghool; but this man is an artificer, has more civilised ways in communities of industry, and is influenced by the beginnings of commerce. China is rich in mines of iron and copper and zinc, and her people were a deft fingered race, expert in delicate working of metals, and, at this stage of advance in simple arts the tongues of reed would be superseded by tongues of metal, thin and elastic, and free from the disadvantages of swelling by moisture and of the need of frequent renewals. Hence, in cutting such substitutes by the minute chisels they are so clever in using, the tongue or reed would naturally, and without design, turn out to be a free reed. A discovery having far reaching consequences, albeit long limited to the land of this peculiar people, due to the special deftness they have in the fine working of copper; for these reed plates are of little more than paper thickness. Just three cuts of a thin chisel, and the tongue is formed in the little brass plate; and the plate is fixed in its place with beeswax.

Let us imagine our worker to live at this particular period of growth of a civilised community, when music was scarcely more than a chirping of birds, or the aimless sounds which arose as rhythmical ebullition in dancing; when musical art was personal, unformed and any system of musical sounds as yet unthought of. Such a time there must have been in the history of every early race. Always, as I imagine, that the instrument coming, before the system, originates that liking in the human sentiency which heredity and custom confirm. The peculiarity of Chinese music corroborates this notion of mine; for although, so far as we can tell, the structure of musical ears is the same—yet likings of the ear vary widely with the difference in race.

One of the first needs of men in relation to one another in communities is a standard of measure of length, such as a cubit, a foot, etc. The oldest standard with the Chinese is the thumb’s breadth, and ten thumbs’ breadths make one Chinese foot; and they had a measure of millet seed, as we have our three barley corns making one inch. Our worker then had his measure of the foot, for that is the standard he sets out with for his longest pipe, from which all the rest originate. It is 9-7/8in. of our measure; and by the same custom the longest pipe of the twelve lüs which are mythically attributed to the Yellow Emperor, is of like length. So the Chinese foot predetermined the standard both for the reed pipe of bamboo with a tongue of metal, and for the reed pipe blown across as the pandean pipe is blown across: which pipe from immemorial days has remained in the imperial archives, as the unalterable standard of pitch—unalterable because nature does not alter.

I had a metal organ-pipe made to the precise length and diameter of this imperial standard, and it proved to be what we call e flat; which, as I found out, has a significant relation, for our free reed pipe of this length gives a sound one fourth lower exactly—namely B flat. And this relation of the fourth dominates everything in the evolution of music. Our worker found this out; though knowing nothing of the interval of the fourth, he fixed it by natural evolution,—by measure, not by music: yet the measure afterwards made the music and the law of the music. I see him cut reeds as our country boys do from our grasses and spiers, and split a tongue on the side of one, as his ancestors had done centuries before, and make a piping-bird sound from it. He has some knowledge of the working of metals; is an adept at it; has by socialisation and its wants become an artificer in brass. The split reed becomes spoilt after frequent use, so he conceived the thought of making a substitute in metal.

Let us picture him first as taking a bamboo reed, cutting it a foot long in Chinese length (9-7/8in.), and from this obtaining a note; then cutting other reeds promiscuously, until at last he is attracted by one exactly half its length, giving a baby note exactly the same in seeming as the other, and blending into it. This is what we call the octave,—a civilized perceptivity not yet dawning on his mind; to him it is the man’s voice and then the woman’s voice. The higher repetition of the same sound. He has halved the length and obtained unwittingly the octave; why not halve the other half between? This he does, and from the three quarter length of pipe obtains a new sound, which, sounded with his prime gives a pleasing concord; thus, he begins to recognise the new fact,—the family relationship.

After this fashion of halving and quartering I imagined that the Sheng grew and became an instrument; and, placing myself in this mood of representative thought, I also try and work the thing as he would have worked it out, and see if I can get coinciding results. The half and the half again seem to me so natural; the repetition is so akin to the Chinese tendency. A two thirds is a more artificial notion, and comes of later discernment. How natural too, it is on finding more that two pipes inconvenient within the mouth, to seek the first substitute similar to the mouth in size, such as a little bowl, a half gourd, or perhaps the same calabash that served him for a drinking cup. Except the four or five reeds that spoke in my specimen, I did not know what the notes should be as the scale of the instrument; I only knew that the scheme as told me by the writers with authority was wrong, and was also misleading; for the comparative speaking length of the pipes was at variance with the assumed musical system, and I could not make head or tail of the instrument until I resorted to the question of primitive design. Then everything fell into proper place with unlooked-for significance. So I took a number of slips of wood (easier to cut than bamboo), and proceeded to transmigrate myself into a dweller in “far Cathay.”

Adopting the measure of the Chinese foot to start with, I cut a slip to that length, and then cut one to half of that, and then cut one between these at the half of the half, and so on by progressive steps halving and half halving and doubling, and obtained a connected series of thirteen slips to represent the speaking pipes of my most mysterious little Sheng. I argued with myself that in some such simple way our worker would have evolved the instrument; that it was by no means the outcome of a system of music, but was built up on a visible relation of proportions; that the eye made it and that the ear accepted it. Steadied by faith, I drew my bow at a venture, and, lo and behold!—my arrow went home true, and I was astonished as one who sees his prophecy fulfilled and wonders how it came to pass. For when I came to compare and to measure the actual pipe lengths, they corresponded length for length with the series I had evolved by my archaic process. I confess that the situation was bewildering as I gazed upon the evidence before me, for it seemed too good to be true, and one had a fleeting suspicion of magic or hallucination of some kind. But no; reason and time only increased the strength of my conviction that in this process the Sheng was constructively worked out; indeed, I do not see how by any other way the peculiar scale of the instrument could have originated.

Sequence of Evolution of the Pipes of the Sheng.