Page:Polynesian Mythology by George Grey (polynesianmythol00greyuoft).djvu/355

art, they took care not to transgress those of nature, but judiciously to adopt, and as nearly as possible to define, with mathematical exactness, those intervals which the uncultured only approach by the irregular modulation of natural impulses; so their art was the schooling of nature by the more exact observance of her laws, and by training nature by perfect art, they made art like nature, and corrected nature by art, as the sculptor or painter gives the classic embodiment or personification, not the commonplace and often defective representation of an object.

This I opine to have been the real nature of the enharmonic scale of the Greeks; and hence I conceive the reason of the remnant of that scale being found among most of those nations who have been left to the impulses of a "nature-taught" song rather than been cramped by the trammels of a conventional system—the result of education and civilisation.

It may not be amiss, before going further into this analogy of nature, and of an art reciprocally reflecting back that nature, to endeavour to give the uninitiated an idea of what is meant by the "enharmonic genus" of the Greeks.

I must first remark that while we have, properly speaking, only one scale of musical notes and two genera, the Greeks had three scales and five genera. For we have only the diatonic scale, but by a certain introduction of one or more semitones, we make what is called the chromatic.

Whereas, the Greeks had three scales, comprising five genera, or, according to some, nine,^[1] all differing not only, as ours do, in the position of intervals, but in the intervals themselves; this difference of interval (rather than posi-