Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/843

Rh Kidds and Red-Handed Rangers in music as in literature. Yet it is not the words, but the air or complexion of the piece, that forms the objectionable feature. The compositions of certain authors in a sad vein always make us mournful, while the productions of other artists have a melancholy spirit that brings heart-satisfying consolation in the greatest grief. One composer makes us laugh with childlike joy; another makes us weep. One brings out the divine in our nature; another brings out the fiend. Beethoven ennobles and Offenbach degrades. Though some airs are moral and others are immoral, the different effects of different music upon the mind can not be told in words, and therein consists its very danger; no explanation can be made, no warning given. "Home, Sweet Home," with its simple yet soul-stirring melody, frees men from their baser selves, and often turns them from intended crime, while the Mexican and Hungarian band music, which has become so popular of late, has exactly the opposite effect. The Gypsy bands, which at home are employed almost solely in playing for the National Dance, begin with a calm and grave measure, which, by gradually accelerated movements and flourishes, added to suit the players, at last reaches an intoxicating pitch of deliriously exciting complexities. Such music drives men to the beer gardens, not to the churches. Plato, the Grecian Moses, would have held up his hands in holy horror.

The Greek public put music under state control, as the Chinese of to-day are said to do. Though Chinese music may not be to our taste, it is at least simple and free from those eccentric ornamentations that mean danger to the youthful mind. Why should America proscribe obscene literature and exempt immoral and degrading music? The lyre was the principal instrument of school use. It was originally formed by stretching from seven to ten strings across the hollow tortoise shells which may be found ready for use in any of the Grecian rivers. It was used not only in song accompaniments, but was of special value in the reciting of the poets, giving rhythm and correct balance to the metre, and by its changing tones interpreting variations of feeling.

But the gymnasium, in our sense, is the one great respect in which Greek education for the boy differs most from ours. The Greeks, as no other nation of antiquity, believed in physical training and continuous and complete bodily development. They held that gymnastics not only meant health with its attendant happiness, but that the absence of them made the coward and the loafer. The running race was of value not only because the Greeks attacked the enemy on the run, but because the consciousness of bodily strength gives a boldness of spirit and a clearness of intellect that make hardships endurable and loyalty supreme. Sparta made physical excellence