This Section
nextIt need scarcely be said that History gives us very little help in this respect. Its records are too obscure and confused. We may make a guess that the Kaffir's one-stringed banjo—perhaps first suggested by the thrumming of the hand on the bow-string—was merely the third and last addition to a musical equipment which had served the needs and fulfilled the aspirations of mankind for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Earlier still than this we may imagine man as just emerging from his state of savagery, but emerging with a new and wonderful craving for something more than mere rhythm, a craving which may have been first satisfied by means of a hard blade of grass held between his two thumbs.
Finally, we may suppose a time at the beginning of things when the naked savage squatted down on his native mud, his mind half entranced, passive and vacant to every influence of the wild, but still with a thirst in his nature which could only be quenched by the endless drum-drum-drum of his knuckles on the black earth. Beyond this we can imagine nothing but the animal.
These are, however, only guesses. The order in which we have placed them has been hotly contested, and we have nothing but probabilities on which to found our judgment. We should naturally suppose that musical art began with the least complex and most fundamental thing in human nature, the purely rhythmic. That seems fairly certain. The " percussive " is at the bottom of all things. But it is quite uncertain what we are to put next. It may be the seven oaten straws of the shepherd boy or the stretched string which found its final glory in the Apollo Citharoedus of Greece and the lovely plaything of Cremona.
Nor does it matter much. The array of instruments—ancient, mediaeval, and modern—is so bewildering in its variety that historical classification would be out of the question, except in a book specially devoted to that subject. A classification, however, is necessary, and this is only to be found by neglecting the unessential in the instrument. In other words, we must leave out of account its varied forms and the materials of which it is constructed. We must strip it of the complex mass of silver-smithery and brass-smithery in which it is nowadays often embedded. We must come down to essentials.