Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even _before_ any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a _plastic for the ear_. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning:[284] but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichord. But, above all, the melody—like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian’s time—was treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables, their bodies and their _extent_, decided the rhythm. The few fragments that remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should cause us also to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and achieved by the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot experience the charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye. Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave.[285] Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is _march-music_. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soul, and, indeed, the impression that our entire Culture makes upon an alien humanity—the directional energy of our church-naves and our storeyed façades, the depth-perspectives of our pictures, the march of our tragedy and narrative, not to mention our technics and the whole course of our private and public life. We ourselves have _accent_ in our blood and therefore do not notice it. But when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that of an alien life, we find the discordance intolerable. Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have only observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as represented by Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even these we know only in so far as they have penetrated to the churches of the far West as antiphons, responsorial psalmody and Ambrosian chants.[286] But it is self-evident that not only the religious west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun-worship, the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but also those to the east (Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Irak and in due course the Nestorian Christians) must have possessed a sacred music of the same style; that side by side with this a gay secular music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and Sassanid chivalry[287]); and that both found their culmination in the Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.