If this be too subtle an instance, there is another so striking that it is worth mentioning on the chance of the reader’s verifying it some day for himself. The Hungarian gypsies who form the national bands are chiefly occupied at entertainments in playing for the national dance--the _csárdás_--tunes which have now become familiar, some of them, through the transcriptions of Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The dance consists in a gradually increasing excitement, starting from a slow and grave beginning. The change is produced merely by increase of time in often repeating the same air,[45] and also in adorning it with flourishes, which are added _ad libitum_ and somewhat barbarously, by the members of the band according to their taste. The effect of this gradual hurrying and complicating of the same tune is inexpressibly affecting to the mind. It represents excitement, and often voluptuous excitement, to the highest degree. It would have thoroughly shocked Plato and his school. This simpler example, though less easily verifiable to the English reader, is really more to the point, for there can be no doubt that it is owing to the increase of complication, and the growth of the intellectual combinations in music, that we have lost sight of what the Greeks thought so vital--the direct moral effects of music. § 43. The question remains, What did the Greeks convey by this theory? Were they talking nonsense, or was their music so different from ours that their theories have no application in our day? We cannot adopt either of these solutions, though all our researches into Greek scales, and into the scanty examples of tunes still extant, are unable to show clearly what they meant. We cannot make out why tunes in the Doric scale--a scale varying slightly from our ordinary minor scale--should be thought manly and moral, while Lydian measures--a scale like our ordinary major scales--should be thought immoral.[46] We must give up the problem of finding out a solution from the Greek scales. But this we may fairly assert, that our music, being directly descended from the old Church scales, which again were derived from the Greek, cannot be so totally different from that of the old Greeks as to warrant the inference that theirs could be moral or the reverse, and ours indifferent to morals. We may depend upon it that they did not talk nonsense, and that the general consent of all their thinking men on this curious point is well worthy of our most serious attention.