Critical Historical Essays | Page 9

after song, it
will be noticed, is composed entirely of F, G, and even F alone or G
alone. Such songs are generally ancient ones, and have been
crystallized and held intact by religion, in much the same way that the
chanting heard in the Roman Catholic service has been preserved.
Let us assume then that the normal tone of the human voice in speaking
is F or G [F: f g] for men, and for women the octave higher. This tone

does very well for our everyday life; perhaps a pleasant impression may
raise it somewhat, ennui may depress it slightly; but the average tone of
our "commonplace" talk, if I may call it that, will be about F. But let
some sudden emotion come, and we find monotone speech abandoned
for impassioned speech, as it has been called. Instead of keeping the
voice evenly on one or two notes, we speak much higher or lower than
our normal pitch.
And these sounds may be measured and classified to a certain extent
according to the emotions which cause them, although it must be borne
in mind that we are looking at the matter collectively; that is to say,
without reckoning on individual idiosyncrasies of expression in speech.
Of course we know that joy is apt to make us raise the voice and
sadness to lower it. For instance, we have all heard gruesome stories,
and have noticed how naturally the voice sinks in the telling. A ghost
story told with an upward inflection might easily become humourous,
so instinctively do we associate the upward inflection with a
non-pessimistic trend of thought. Under stress of emotion we
emphasize words strongly, and with this emphasis we almost invariably
raise the voice a fifth or depress it a fifth; with yet stronger emotion the
interval of change will be an octave. We raise the voice almost to a
scream or drop it to a whisper. Strangely enough these primitive notes
of music correspond to the first two of those harmonics which are part
and parcel of every musical sound. Generally speaking, we may say
that the ascending inflection carries something of joy or hope with it,
while the downward inflection has something of the sinister and fearful.
To be sure, we raise our voices in anger and in pain, but even then the
inflection is almost always downward; in other words, we pitch our
voices higher and let them fall slightly. For instance, if we heard a
person cry "Ah/" we might doubt its being a cry of pain, but if it were
"Ah\" we should at once know that it was caused by pain, either mental
or physical.
The declamation at the end of Schubert's "Erlking" would have been
absolutely false if the penultimate note had ascended to the tonic
instead of descending a fifth. "The child lay dead."

How fatally hopeless would be the opening measures of "Tristan and
Isolde" without that upward inflection which comes like a sunbeam
through a rift in the cloud; with a downward inflection the effect would
be that of unrelieved gloom. In the Prelude to "Lohengrin," Wagner
pictures his angels in dazzling white. He uses the highest vibrating
sounds at his command. But for the dwarfs who live in the gloom of
Niebelheim he chooses deep shades of red, the lowest vibrating colour
of the solar spectrum. For it is in the nature of the spiritual part of
mankind to shrink from the earth, to aspire to something higher; a bird
soaring in the blue above us has something of the ethereal; we give
wings to our angels. On the other hand, a serpent impresses us as
something sinister. Trees, with their strange fight against all the laws of
gravity, striving upward unceasingly, bring us something of hope and
faith; the sight of them cheers us. A land without trees is depressing
and gloomy. As Ruskin says, "The sea wave, with all its beneficence, is
yet devouring and terrible; but the silent wave of the blue mountain is
lifted towards Heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy; and while the
one surges unfathomable in its darkness, the other is unshaken in its
faithfulness."
And yet so strange is human nature that that which we call civilization
strives unceasingly to nullify emotion. The almost childlike faith which
made our church spires point heavenward also gave us Gothic
architecture, that emblem of frail humanity striving towards the ideal. It
is a long leap from that childlike faith to the present day of skyscrapers.
For so is the world constituted. A great truth too often becomes
gradually a truism, then a merely tolerated and uninteresting theory;
gradually it becomes obsolete and sometimes even degenerates into a
symbol of sarcasm or a servant of utilitarianism. This we are
illustrating every