Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/582

 C. STUMPF, MUSIKPSYCHOLOGIE IN ENGLAND. 581 in truth England, though supplying but few great composers, has been growingly receptive and appreciative of new musical work. This fact, coupled with the proficiency of the country in psycholo- gical reflection, may serve to account for the prominence of musical speculation in its recent literature. The attraction of the subject for Englishmen is illustrated by the fact that the two most eminent representatives of evolutional psychology, Mr. Spencer and Mr. Darwin, have each devoted special labour to the problem of explaining the emotional effects of music. Neither of these writers apparently lays claim to a technical knowledge of the subject, and it would seem that in their case the attraction of the theme lies in its peculiar obscurity and in its intimate con- nexion with the more general problems which they are directly concerned to resolve. In the case of other writers, however, and notably Mr. Edmund Gurney, the impulse to account for the power of music may be seen to have sprung out of a long and close study of the laws of musical structure and the wide variety of effect obtainable from accepted forms of composition. And thus it has come about that in attempting a critical estimate of recent musical psychology Prof. Sturnpf finds himself apparently compelled to single out English writers for special notice. After a brief resume of earlier English writings on the subject, our author proceeds to expound and criticise the theory of Mr. Herbert Spencer as the first attempt to apply the new doctrine of evolution to the problems of music. The leading idea of this theory is that music is an idealised speech. This idea, w T e are told, is by no means original. Independently of the writings of antiquity and the Renaissance on the connexion between speech and music, the derivation of music from language was in vogue in France from tihe middle of the last century to the second decade of the present. A short sketch of such earlier forms of the theory greatly adds to the value of Prof. Stumpf's essay, though he seems to exaggerate the points of affinity between Mr. Spencer's doctrine and that of writers like Rousseau and Diderot. The one writer who, according to this historical resumk, really antici- pated Mr. Spencer was G. A. Viloteau, who in 1807 published two stout volumes on the analogies of music with the arts that have as their object the imitation of language. Of the correctness of this theory Prof. Stumpf takes much the same view as Mr. Gurney, whose strictures he here reproduces approvingly. Music and speech are, he tells us, sharply differentiated from one another by the circumstance that the intervals of the one are funda- mentally unlike the variations of tone of the other. In speaking, a slight shifting of pitch, say a quarter tone, makes no difference in the effect, whereas in rendering a musical composition such a change would instantly be felt to be fatal to the desired effect. A singing manner of speaking instead of being effective is com- monly pronounced disagreeable. Not only so, speech is accus- tomed to move through what seem to our ear continuous transi-