and puppetry disguised as life always bores or frightens us, both in life and in art. A bad tune is like a marionette imitating the sway and dance of real melody, and Mephistopheles, in his serenade in Berlioz's Faust, parodies this puppetry with diabolical art; he, like Iago, would persuade us that all passion is automatism because automatism so often invades life.

So we, being ourselves often subject to automatism, are apt to be intimidated by these Devil's advocates who preach what they practise, by the Iagos who, being themselves puppets, insist that there is nothing but puppetry and no possible intimacy between spirit and spirit. And we have a corresponding delight when our misgivings are swept away by an achieved intimacy, when we become aware, not of instincts working like separate mechanical forces, but of a real self in which all instincts are unified and subdued by character. This unification, this heightening of the separate and the mechanical into the human and the real, is beauty both in nature and in art.

We sometimes meet people who are as expressive as music; more often they are revealed to us in drama or fiction; and then we do not ask ourselves whether they are good or bad. They may do wrong or foolish things but they are our friends, and more than our friends; they are part of an enlarged self into which we enter with them, a universal in which individuality is not lost but heightened.

Art is but a way of entering into this enlarged self so that the experience of one mind becomes the experience of other minds. The musician does not make those concrete events happen to us which have happened to him, but he produces in us the effects of such events upon himself, communicating, not the raw material, but the state of mind that has mastered it, so that we become,

for the moment, him, as he, in the practice of his art, has become everyman, while at the same time intensifying his own character by this entry into the universal. But this universal can be entered, as Blake has insisted, only through minute particulars. There is nothing vague or generalized about it; it is not a kind of composite photograph of many characters and experiences, but the intensification of one character and its experience.

The automatic, in life and in art, is always generic; there is no character in mere instinct, and the more men are subject to it the more they are alike, while at the same time they are cut off from each other and shut into the prison of not-self by the tyranny of instinct. There is neither character nor intimacy in a crowd mastered by fear or rage; though all the members of it behave in the same way, they are a herd that will trample each other to death. And so there is neither character nor intimacy in art that is subject to instinct, in musical comedy or jingo songs or fashionable portraits. These things are like club conversation, preventing the very intimacy they profess to give; they are substitutes, like margarine; and it is possible to become so inured to them as to forget what real butter is like.

It is strange, indeed, that we can pass so much of our lives content to miss that intimacy which the real self in us so ardently desires. But the reason is, no doubt, that we achieve that real self only in intimacy and then fall back into an automatism which is not life and which but faintly remembers our moments of life. Only so can we explain our habitual forgetfulness, that literal absence of mind in which we are content to forgo what we most value and to function like machines that are making nothing. But then comes a moment of intimacy with some other human being for that moment

ture or a carved weapon. Is not music even in its beginning the first stammerings of a collective soul, and is it not in its glorious periods a valuable evidence of the whole psychology of generations smitten with the love of luxury and abandoning themselves sometimes with frenzy to all the pleasures of life?'

His opinions are perfectly correct, but the real reason for the silence of the scholars is to be found in one little fact, which is very simple but quite conclusive. There is no written Arab music. It therefore is impossible to discuss scores. The few theoretical works, ancient or modern, which are devoted to Arab music do not include a single written melody, and so the clearest and most convincing part of an analysis, discussions and comparisons, is always wanting.

This anomaly is one of the puzzles of musical history. How can a people so gifted in the arts, in letters, and in science have failed to invent a system of musical notation? We have learned works by Arab writers on music which treat of metrics and rhythm in an unheard-of abundance of detail, leaving no shadow upon any of the mathematical and physical problems of our art. The Kitab el' Mousiqa of Al-Farabi, 'the Arab Aristotle,' teaches the division of the octave into seventeen intervals, defines the five kinds of fourths, establishes the distinction between the modes according to the nature of their lower tetrachords and their high pentachords, and establishes a theory of the eighty-four circulations, which, by carrying each scale upon one of the seventeen degrees of the tonal ladder, creates one thousand four hundred and twenty-eight combinations of tones.

Native theorists have translated and commented upon Aristotle, Plato, and Aristoxenus of Tarentum. Special students have catalogued the works of

famous Arab musicians and have studied their compositions, their treatment of tone, the relation between music and poetry, the science of intervals, and tonal relation of modulations and combinations of sounds and rhythm. But they are unable to show us the music itself in support of their literary labors.

The puzzle is all the more disturbing because the Arabs were able to observe round about them numerous cases of musical notation, whether with their neighbors or among the peoples whom they had subdued. They could not fail to observe the system of the Persians and of the people living in the Yemen, a notation that is derived from the musical writing of the Greeks. They were acquainted with the system of the Hindus, with the systems of Alypius, of Pythagoras, of Plato, with the alphabetical solfeggio of Boece, with the neumes of the Mozarabs of Spain, with the notation used in Aquitaine, as well as with Byzantine or Armenian literature. Why did they despise all the hints thus offered them? Why did they fail to use one or another of these systems? Or why did they not at least draw on them to create a new system of their own?

Several explanations have been suggested for this remarkable fact, but none of them are very satisfactory. Music may have been considered in the beginning as the art of slaves and beggars, unworthy of so much trouble; but the importance which the Caliphs attached to music, the honors with which they surrounded musicians, and the respectful tone in which they are referred to by the ancient authors of whom we have knowledge, as well as the learned and laborious technical treatises on the subject, overthrow this theory.

Some have suggested religious scruples, and have held that the Arabs sought in this way to prevent any prof

anation of their art by the infidels. But such an argument does not apply to their secular music.

M. Jules Rouanet proposed an explanation at the congress of Orientalists and learned societies held at Algiers in 1905, which he modestly referred to as 'getting down to earth,' but which is certainly the least fantastic of them all: "The profession of singer and musician,' he said, 'was formerly very profitable and it carried with it rich privileges. In the great periods, the rulers and men of wealth vied with one another in their largess to artists in song or with the lute. Any one of these gentry might receive a fortune for three songs that hit the public fancy. Was not this generous treatment likely to lead composers to keep their musical repertory sedulously to themselves? This theory is all the more probable because even in the middle of the nineteenth century we saw most of the Arab singers of Egypt or Maghreb refuse to dictate their melodies and even play them with mistakes in order to throw off the track the curiosity of a foreigner or a competitor.'

Indifferent or positively hostile to the hints that neighboring peoples might give them with regard to systems of musical notation, the Arabs preserved the same disdainful conservatism in their vocal or instrumental technique. Arab music is to-day what it was in the time of Al-Farabi. Now, as then, it is purely homophonic, fundamentally rhythmic. As in earlier days, it relies on the use of small intervals and it still employs the same old instruments. Arab musicians refuse to learn counterpoint, harmony, or polyphony under its various forms. In their art they have an ardent distrust of the new, which is truly Platonic. Arab music is bent in upon itself and it has remained what it is for a thousand years.

Numberless religious or purely poetic legends among the Arabs explain the beginning of music. According to some, music was a divine gift brought by the archangel Harit, who, after his revolt was to become the shadowy Iblis. This Arab Lucifer taught human creatures how to sing in order to lead them into temptation, and when the Creator in an endeavor to check the disaster destroyed the fallen angel's memory for music, it was too late. Mankind had already become musicians, but they had received only partial instruction. They always remained in the early stages of the art, their lessons having been unfortunately interrupted.

According to others, the gift of music was revealed to all human souls at the same time, before they were inserted in the bodies wherein they were to dwell during the course of the centuries. With this audience of pure and unattached spirits Allah organized a kind of planetary symphony. As one starts a mechanical music-box going to-day, so the Creator set a number of the planetary bodies to moving, and the souls heard the indescribable harmony that the stars produce in their regular movements. Some were filled with enthusiasm, others remained indifferent, and from that moment their musical capacities were determined forever. That is why some of us are musicians and some are not, according to the chance distribution of souls among those who delighted in the movement of the planets and those who did not understand it.

Lamek, the inventor of the lute, founded a family of musicians. His son Tubal invented big drums, his daughter Dilal invented harps. Vocal music was discovered by accident. Among the Arabs the first rhythmic song was the hida. Modar, son of Nizar, while he was on a journey, fell off his camel and hurt his hand. He began to shriek:

'Ya ida! Ya ida!' (Oh, my hand! Oh, my hand!) The drivers noticed that the camels, affected by these lamentations, lifted their heads, quickened their pace, and speeded up the march. So the leaders of the caravans adopted the hida, or camel-driver's song, which became very valuable. Such was the origin of the measures which no doubt were actually developed by the native genius of the Bedouin, corresponding to the needs of his life and the conditions under which he carried on his monotonous existence, from which later on the theorists would deduce their laws.

Many charming stories show us with what intense delight the ancient Mussulman regarded music. So strong was this pleasure that it often seemed a sin to the virtuous sons of the Prophet. Abdullah, when he heard a chorus of women's voices, was greatly disturbed. 'I should never have believed,' he said, 'that art could go so far. These are truly seductive strains that stir the heart and trouble the senses. That is why some people condemn music.' The illustrious Souraydj, an incomparable singer, having been afflicted with painful attacks of rheumatism, believed that he was being punished by God for having devoted his life to music, and he gave himself up to religious rites of the most austere devotion.

The Caliph Walid showed his musical feelings in a highly original way. When a piece was finished the Caliph would hastily throw off his cloak and plunge into a pool of water or perfumed wine, sink into it, rise, emerge from the water, dress himself in new clothes, and begin some new melody that chanced to please him; and he presented to the singers who had entertained him the garments, made of precious cloth embroidered with gold, in which he dressed after each new bath, adding thereto a thousand pieces of gold.

The Arabs are passionately fond of song in which they distinguish and enjoy the most subtle gradations. They distinguish twenty-eight characteristic qualities of the voice and classify them by imperceptible degrees. The Arab singer is regarded as the faithful guardian of a precious tradition, as the priest of a cult threatened by the invading civilization of Europe.

Here is the portrait of a singer as he was conceived by the masters of the art: 'He is polite, he is agreeable, dressed in perfumed clothing of colors pleasing to the eye. Meeting with all the world he observes each audience and chooses from his repertoire the songs that best consort with the social position or the taste of his hearers. He drinks nothing before his song nor during its execution, in order that he may avoid the numerous inconveniences of drunkenness, for the singer is an ornament to society. Comfortably seated, neither bending forward nor leaning back, he twists neither his jaw nor his neck, stirs neither feet nor hands, is not aroused, does not grimace with his face, and makes no effort at all to be affected.

'He does not show that he is pleased with what he has sung, nor does he move from the place assigned to him, nor does he look with especial attention at any window or drapery behind which there may probably be ladies. He avoids tying a scarf about his neck frequently in order merely to show that he has a precious voice to care for, since very often with usage this voice may become no better than that of an ass. He is virtuous, discreet, he does not chatter. He asks for no pay in public, and he avoids correcting one of his accompanists before the audience. Finally, he is learned, able to converse on music, song, clothing, jewels, arms, horses, falcons, furniture, books, and sciences. Such is the perfect Arabian singer.'