LITMIR.BIZ

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(civil and military); ethnology; folk-lore of all nations; geology; horticulture; inferiority of Latin peoples (particularly the French); laces and embroideries; modern accounting; navigation (which he explained last night in detail to the Chief Officer, a silent person); psychology (all branches); Roman law; rugs (and textiles generally); Weltpolitik; wireless telegraphy; and, at all times and places, the glory of England and the superiority of English blood.

      This evening he was dismissing, with a torrent of apparently precise ethnological and historical data, the recent Japanese pretension to Aryan origin—doubtless for the benefit of that little Japanese commercial agent with bad teeth who sat in the corner opposite me working out problems on a go-board. The usual group of weak-minded persons were sitting about Sir Robert's table, listening with the usual awe.

      Now, I rather like that Japanese. Only this morning he was so kind as to sing several examples of the folk-song of his country into my phonograph. Five records he gave me, so that my work is begun even before we land. Excellent specimens, two of them, of the Oriental tone sense, with observably different intervals for the ascending and descending scales.

      He exhibited no sign that Sir Robert's talk annoyed him; quietly went on placing the little black and white shells on the board. (It is interesting to note, at this point, that the Japanese handle small objects with the first three fingers only, without employing the thumb as we do.) But I felt myself becoming angry. My forehead grew hot and flushed, as it always does when I am stirred. I tried to calm myself by constructing a house of dominoes; but the pitching of the ship overturned it.

      Still that throaty voice. “Thank God,” I thought, “in another day we shall be at Yokohama!”

      I tried to read a four-weeks-old copy of the Illustrated London News. No use; the voice held me.

      It occurred to me, as an exercise in self-control, to interest myself in speculating on the emotions and the characteristics back of the faces here in the smoking-room. I achieved some success at this exercise. Why, when you come to think of it, should each particular unit in this haphazard assemblage of men and women be journeying away off here to the other side of the earth? There are surely dramas in our little company. The two middle-aged ladies with the firm chins, for instance, who dress so quietly and speak so discreetly—it is whispered among the men that they are high and prosperous in a sad business on Soo-chow Road, Shanghai. And the young German adventurer with the scars across his nose, who borrowed fifteen dollars from me, to be repaid when we land at Yokohama—if he approaches me again I shall refuse him firmly. And the fat vaudeville manager from Cincinnati, who plays fan-tan every night with a heap of Chinese brass cash and a bowl borrowed from the ship's dining-room!

      As I mused, I felt the Port Watch gazing at me again over his siphon. I believe he would pour out his story, were I to permit it. But I do not choose to hear. After all, I am not a romancer, but a scientific man. My concern is not with the curious and personal tangle of human affairs, but with impersonal fact and sober deductions therefrom.

      Sir Robert was now defining culture as the touchstone of civilization—from the British point of view, of course. God, that voice! And then, without a thought in my head as to where the talk was leading—suddenly—he plumped squarely down on my subject. It was the first time in the twelve days of our voyage. Until this moment, the tribal god referred to in his national anthem had spared him. My subject! The one thing I know more about than any other human being. I had him.

      “The surest test of the culture of a people,” said he, ex cathedra, “is the music of that people. Primitive races invariably express their emotions in primitive music. They try to tell me that the Chinese are a civilized people. 'Very well,' I say then; 'let me hear their music.' No nation has progressed far along the great highroad of civilization without coming into an understanding of the diatonic system. The Chinese civilized? When their finest musical instrument is the little sheng, a crude collection of twelve pipes that are not even in tune? When they have failed to arrive at even a rudimentary perception of tonality and scale relationships? No; I tell you, the Chinese civilization is to the European as the little sheng is to the grand piano. The piano, on which all scales are related, all harmomes possible, is the supreme artistic achievement of the highest civilization.”

      This was enough. I got right up and went over to the round table. My forehead was burning; I must have been red as fire.

      “You do not know what you are talking about,” I cried out. I had to lean over the shoulder of one of the weak-minded in order to catch Sir Robert's eye. “It is the piano that has killed music in Europe! The piano is a lie from end to end of the keyboard. Bach confirmed that lie with his miserable triumph of the well-tempered clavichord. And in finally fastening his false scale upon us he destroyed in us the fine ear for true intervals that is to-day found only in your primitive peoples. The Chinese have it. The Javanese have it. The Siamese, most wonderful of all, have a true isotonic scale. But we of the cultured West (I put a wonderful sneering emphasis on that word) can not even hear true fluid music to-day, because our tone perception goes no farther than the barbarous mechanical compromise of the piano keyboard. You do not know what you are talking about. You are a fool!”

      When I am excited my voice rises and becomes shrill. I talked rapidly, so that no one could interrupt. And the weak-minded ones sank back in their chairs. They were actually afraid, I think now. In fact, when I paused the whole smoking-room was still as death.

      I swept my eye about—commandingly, I think. The fat vaudeville man—he sat behind Sir Robert—was grinning at me with delight in his eyes, and was softly clapping his hands behind the fan-tan bowl. The Port Watch with red face and suddenly twinkling eyes, had clapped his hand over his mouth as if to smother an outright laugh. Sir Robert was looking up at me, his left eyelid drooping, a sort of perplexed uncertainty on his face—his old face that was all lines and wrinkles.

      Now that I had the floor, it seemed worth while to make a thorough job of it, so I swept on:

      “You make the piano the test of civilization. Greece had a civilization—where were the pianos of Greece? Oh, I am tired of your talk. I have listened to you for twelve long days and nights. I have suspected your accuracy, but I could not be sure, for you luckily avoided my subject. But now I have you! And I know you for a fraud on all subjects! I see confusion in your face. You are groping for something to say about the music of Greece. Very well; I will say it for you. The Greeks had no piano, because they had no harmony. They did not know that harmony was possible. And if they had heard it, they would not have liked it.”

      “Ah,” cried Sir Robert, flushing under the parchment of his skin, and (I must say) taking up the gage of battle, “but Greece gave us our diatonic system. The root of our scale, the tetrachord, came to us from the Greeks.”

      I laughed him down. The intervals of that Greek tetrachord were not the same as ours. They used intervals that actually can not be written in our notation—three quarter tones, one and a quarter tones. Pythagoras states, 'The intervals in music are rather to be judged intellectually through numbers than sensibly through the ear.' For they followed the acoustic laws, like the Chinese! The fragments we have of the worship of Apollo are more nearly like the ancient Confucian hymn than like anything known in modern music. “Tell me, sir, did you know that? And tell me this—does not the quality you call 'culture' imply that we should seek sympathetically for the standpoint of other minds? Has it never occurred to you that when Oriental music sounds absurd and out of key to you, it is your own ear that is at fault—that the intervals are too fine and true for your false, piano-trained sense? For such is the fact.”

      I was shaking my finger under his nose, so closely that he had to lean back.

      “And I will tell you,” I added, standing right over him, “that the Chinese sheng has seventeen pipes, not twelve.”

      “Ah,” he broke in, “but the other pipes are mute.”

      “Two are mute,” I replied triumphantly. “And two are duplicates of others. The correct number of speaking pipes is fifteen.”

      His eyes were kindling now. “See here!”

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