Bells, Chimes and Gongs are held in high esteem by the Chinese, they are indispensable in their Ceremonies and Ritual, in their Festivities, national and social. So ancient is their use that the order of their coming into existence, or the date of origin are mythical, each kind of instrument seems equally old, still they had to be accounted for in Chinese logic of history.

One of the most curious traits in the character of the human animal is an unfeigned delight in super-exaggerated noise. Other animals are affrighted at noise, but the human animal makes a deliberate orgie of noise as a special means by arrangement for obtaining a sensual satisfaction of the ear. Amongst savage tribes and barbarous nations, and amongst nations emerged from barbarism well banded in social communities, everywhere we find that this sheer delight in noise, called music, is manifest and on record. Not merely called so, but dignified and accepted as music. ’Tis true that the Indian savage says his music is to frighten away devils and evil spirits, and the Chinaman tells us that his earsplitting distracting music is to make night horrible to the dragons threatening to devour the moon; but depend upon it, the devils and dragons are quite subsidiary to the main desire for indulgence in noise; and the excuse, we, perfectly well knowing the innate hypocrisy of the human animal, can complacently allow to pass. The love of noise belongs to us. Nature’s gift—like the love of art for art’s sake, is a love of noise for noise’ sake; it is only a change of phrase. We should not decry this, nor should we plume ourselves upon our civilization as freeing ourselves from this original taint of barbarism. I confess to thoroughly enjoying a thunderstorm, my nature is absorbed in an energy greater than the individual, and I revel in it. Man’s love of power is the basis of such satisfaction.

Into this mood of meditation I was drawn the other evening after listening to Wagner’s “Procession of the Gods.” How the music takes hold of you, dips you in a sea of noise, and makes you feel alive all over. For this reason Wagner’s grand music is grand,—is greater than you. Your whole frame is plunged into an elemental excitement to which every nerve fibre thrills, and you feel conscious that latent impulses native to your being are awakened into activity; the barbaric strain in us responds, and exalts us beyond our conventional state. Noise or music? Well, technically we make a distinction. Ask a casuist what is the difference between virtue and vice, and he will tell you it all depends,—one may be as bad as the other. So of noise and music, one may be as bad as the other; aye, even worse. By all accounts much music is; but that may be prejudice. I have heard that some people decry Wagner’s music as a saturnalia of hubbub and noise. But it has one redeeming folly,—it lives: hence the censors, being human, often live to pardon.

Our scientific definitions of noise and music serve the purpose of science, but the truth is that with nature noise and music are identical in origin. There is orderly noise and disorderly noise, and music is of the orderly kind,—that is all. Discording noise, undiscording noise. Milton understood this, writing of singing

and replying

I want to emphasize this teaching, want to impress you with the conviction that all the excitement we are seeking in our most modern style of music is but a reversion to our original instinctive desire for a dynamical excitement,—not an excitement merely Æsthetical and phychical, but actually moving, forceful, elemental; a true barbaric love of stir and thrill,—and rightly so. If you think, you will find in all our modern ways a tendency to this reversion to a belief in and a culture of our original instincts. The realism of the day is the expression of a desire to understand life as it is to the individual. The hideousness of a merely conglomerate community is making itself felt upon every plane of society, and the concurrent aspiration is to be more human.

Culture will one day exhaust the conventional, and in music the tendency is apparent. The vast volume of choral sound we listen to stirs us with contagious emotion. Our pleasure in grand organs with their roll of diapasons and arresting challenge of trumpets and tubas; our willing yielding up of ourselves to be swayed hither and thither for hours in the power of the massive orchestra, that wonderful machine of nerves and muscles,—what does it mean? It is all dynamical, all barbaric. It is not only the ear that is concerned in listening, the whole being is under strain and stress. Do I hence imply that it is wrong, is reprehensible so to employ music? By no means. The moral of it is that the strong innate tendencies of our nature are best recognized, and used; nay, that they will be, will force themselves to the surface, and that under culture we may train them to our advantage. For civilization must go forward, is not content to-day with that which contented it yesterday. The appetite grows by that it feeds on; more and more we ask for intensity of excitement.

A scientific writer of an earlier generation, I think it was Leslie, defined the ear as an organ of touch, which we now under the evolutionary investigation of development understand it to be; and this is what I would have you recognise, that sound is able to touch us, able to awaken a net-work of nerve organization, to make the lip tense, to cause the eyelids to quiver and the heart to throb; the breath to come and go in accord with the aËrial pulsations,—as a hand that is laid upon us to arrest or to exalt, to invigorate or to soothe. Hearing is an exalted feeling.

The Chinese, long before Englishmen existed, found delight in the dynamical influences of great sounds. Their largest and most potent sources of music were bells and chimes, gongs and drums. These supplied them with that excitement which is afforded us by the masses of sound from our large orchestras and grand organs. We say that their music is nothing more than deafening noise. They say that our music is no music; it is bad noise. So it is only matter of choice how you shall be stimulated. It’s all the same,—opium or whisky: purely a racial question.

Very early the Chinese attained great skill in the making of bells; and it may be that among these people the art of Bell Founding originated, and from the east extended over Europe. Bells are particularly associated with religious ceremonials in all countries, and have generally superstitious credentials. The Chinese frighten dragons with them; and the Christians exorcise devils with them. The Russians, who bridge the earth between Europe and China, are especially reverential to bells. The great bell at the Kremlin, Moscow—over 21ft. in height and 67ft. in circumference—is world famous, as we have known since we were boys.

The inevitable Ling Lun was ordered to cast twelve bells to correspond to the twelve lÜs. Metal, the Chinese say, is one of the five elements, and necessarily has its place in music. The bell metal is composed of six parts of copper and one of tin. When melting, the alloy appears to be of an impure dark colour, soon changing into a yellowish white, which gradually passes to a greenish white, and when this last has become green the metal is ready for pouring into the mould. There is in the South Kensington Museum a large and very handsome bell from a Japanese Buddhist temple, which is a fine example of the colour desired. The bells have not clappers, but are struck with wooden mallets.

Smaller bells, however, have clappers, and the little “FÊng-ling” or “wind-bells,” which hang at the eaves of houses and pagodas, are ingeniously contrived to secure effect, light silk ribbon streamers being attached to their clappers so that the softest breezes awakened the sweet sounds. The wind-bells were often hung in halls and corridors for sake of these effects.

Bells of all sizes, from those weighing fifty tons down to the small ones which swing on the eaves of pagodas, used to be found all over China. Some are ornamented with characters, some with designs and symbols; some are round, some are square; and all are mainly used for religious purposes. At the door of each Buddhist temple a bell is seen which the believers on entering strike “to call the attention of the sleeping gods.”

The most ancient Chinese bells were quadrate in form. Bells belonged originally to the Confucian religion, but the Buddhists also adopted their use, and they are commonly to be found in the temples of both. At the temple of Confucius is a great bell which the Chinese say is made to correspond with the very big drum; the one is not used without the other, for the drum had to give the signal to begin, and the bell had to announce the end of the hymn at the ceremonies. This bell is called the Yung Chung. There is another suspended upon a single frame, which has to give the note at the beginning of each verse in order “to manifest the sound” or give the pitch. This bell is called the Po Chung, and is here illustrated. The shape, as will be noticed, differs from that of modern bells.

All their bells are cast to produce a sound definite in pitch, and in their sets of smaller bells and gongs the primitive scale of sounds and its successive order was intended to be kept to so far as the means at command enabled them to secure accuracy, or as near as ceremonial usage required them to be—for with these people ceremonial is religion.

The next illustration is of the Yung-lo or “gong chimes,” composed of ten little gongs suspended upon a frame by silk cords. In making gongs the Chinese are marvellously expert, and specimens of the genuine ancient sort are highly prized here; the tone has a richness and endurance which moderns fail to equal. These little gongs are all of the same diameter, but differ in thickness. The Yung-lo is used at court, mainly on joyful occasions. The larger sized gongs—sometimes they are two feet in diameter—are remarkably fine, and are very generally in use in processions and at various social functions, as well as in temples to waken the gods. He must be a rare sleeper who would be deaf to such a call.